Society

Saturday

Philip Delves-Broughton

Bubble 2.0

There is nothing more maddening to an old-school investor than a bubble. And especially a bubble in which young people are getting outrageously rich. But here we are, 11 years after the last technology bubble popped, in the midst of another of those exuberant moments. Facebook valued at $75 billion. Groupon, a three year old coupon business, at $25 billion. College dropouts with a knack for programming and a devilish knowledge of our online behaviours are suddenly worth more than a roomful of Goldman Sachs partners. The valuations are crazy, the value investors splutter. There are real businesses with real earnings worth nothing like these shooting stars. It’s immoral! Well,

Robert Gorelangton

The face of space

Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshow Fifty years ago, on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin, a tractor-driver’s son from Smolensk, climbed aboard a capsule about the size of a Morris Minor, perched on top of a massive rocket. He followed into space a mongrel bitch called Laika, but unlike the poor mutt he survived. He completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes flat and parachuted safely back on to Russian soil. The first human in space, he instantly became the most famous man on earth. Within weeks of touchdown, the 27-year-old Gagarin arrived in Manchester, home of a new TV soap called Coronation

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

‘The global warming concern is over. Time for a return to sanity’: a Spectator debate

Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, proposed the motion by addressing various myths promoted by the ‘relics’ of the opposition. The average temperature rise since fossil fuels were first used had been barely one degree Celsius, he said, and no warming had been observed this century. The cost of ‘decarbonising’ the economy, he added, would be catastrophic. Oil was not about to run out and ‘winnable gas’ was available in ever greater abundance. Yet schoolchildren were being deliberately scared to death about global warming by their teachers. ‘This is not just outrageous but wicked.’ Simon Singh, opposing, said that he was more willing to credit the 97 per cent of scientists

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

You don’t have to be nice to be right – but it would certainly help

But what was Oliver Letwin on about, anyway? Why doesn’t he want more people from Sheffield taking holidays? And why tell Boris Johnson this? ‘We don’t want to see more families in Sheffield being able to afford cheap holidays,’ he apparently told Boris, who told the world. But what was Oliver Letwin on about, anyway? Why doesn’t he want more people from Sheffield taking holidays? And why tell Boris Johnson this? ‘We don’t want to see more families in Sheffield being able to afford cheap holidays,’ he apparently told Boris, who told the world. But why? The only thing they can possibly have been discussing was airports in the south-east.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 9 April 2011

Sunny spells, icy showers and an inflationary wind blowing from America Daffodils everywhere and the FTSE is back around 6,000. Builders are busy after the frozen winter, it’s ‘business as usual’ again in financial services, and although manufacturing lost momentum in March — exports remained strong, but nervous consumers depressed domestic demand — industry is generally perky. The British Chambers of Commerce expect first-quarter growth of 0.6 per cent or better, reversing the previous 0.5 per fall — and although recovery could be sluggish for the rest of the year, the trend will be in the right direction. So there’s room for optimism, of a cautious kind. Like April’s weather,

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction

Henning Mankell bestrides the landscape of Scandavian crime fiction like a despondent colossus. Last year’s The Man from Beijing, was a disappointing stand-alone thriller with too much polemical baggage. His new novel, The Troubled Man (Harvill Secker, £17.99), brings the return of his series hero, Inspector Kurt Wallender. The title says it all: now that he’s 60, Wallender’s trademark gloom is darkened still further by the creeping fear that his memory is no longer what it used to be, and that this is the first symptom of a far more serious condition. In the first few chapters, he also faces disciplinary action, breaks his wrist and gets mugged. So it

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 8 April 2011

Here is a selection of posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the last week. Fraser Nelson calls for the schools revolution to be reinforced. James Forsyth lists the runners and riders in a possible reshuffle, and wonders why Clegg didn’t complain about Lansley’s reforms earlier. Peter Hoskin reveals who has won and who has lost, and considers the fallout from Portugal. David Blackburn explains how the government plans to rescue its NHS reforms, and reveals how Labour is fighting back in Pickles’ war on ‘propaganda’. Jonathan Jones says that Grammar schools aren’t a solution to the social mobility problem. Rod Liddle could be leader of the British Tea Party, apparently. Alex

David Blackburn

How might the MoD get round its spending settlement?

The Ministry of Defence is Whitehall’s last monolith. Charged with the nation’s defence, it is powerful enough to challenge the Treasury. As Pete notes, there are signs that it’s trying to defer (if not avoid) the cuts laid out the punishing strategic defence and security review. It has many ways of doing this. Obviously it can use political pressure because troops are deployed in Afghanistan and Libya. But there’s also a neat accounting step that allows the MoD can transfer costs directly to the Treasury. You may recall that the Budget contained a £700m increase for ‘single use military expenditure’ (SUME) in 2011-2012. SUME does not appear as capital spending

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How about reintroducing conscription?

The American academic and foreign policy realist Stephen Walt has put an interesting idea on his blog: would re-introducing the draft make America less interventionist? Perhaps it would, and perhaps there’s a good case to be made for doing the same in Britain. Calling for a return to conscription might sound like a silly right-wing trope, but it makes sense from an anti-war perspective: we might be less eager to send our soldiers to fight and die in distant conflicts if there were the slightest possibility that we might have to go, too. I’m not sure I agree, though. It’s not as if national service prevented war in the past.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Wisden’s Cop-Out

I’ve not been hugely impressed by Scyld Berry’s tenure* as editor of Wisden and his decision to name just four rather than the customary five Cricketers of the Year this season merely confirms that. It’s either a cop-out or a dishonourable play for extra publicity. Neither explanation reflects well upon the venerable Almanack. For the record the four players chosen are Jonathan Trott, Eoin Morgan, Tamim Iqbal and Chris Read. Morgan, in my view, scarcely deserves his place but none of the players chosen deserve to have their honour eclipsed by the controversy over Mohammad Amir’s exclusion. Berry has done the four cricketers he did deign to name a grave

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Dreadful MP of the Week: Glenda Jackson

I’m most grateful to Selena Gray for publicising Glenda Jackson’s response to the notion that volunteers might run a library that Brent council has threatened to close. I don’t think, however, Selena goes nearly far enough. Firstly, it cannot be pointed out too often that any library closures are the responsibility of councils, not central government. The latter may not send as much money to the former as it did in previous years but the decisions on what to spend the money councils do have are entirely a matter for the councils themselves. If your local library or swimming pool closes it’s because your local council has decided to spend

Thursday

Selena Gray

An obstacle to the Big Society

Toby Young’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator magazine captures one of the problems facing the Big Society. It’s not that people don’t want to donate their time to fill in the cracks left by the cuts – it’s that they’re often blocked from doing so. Toby highlights the case of Kensal Rise Library, which a local group of volunteers had hoped to save from the axe. But local council chiefs have hardly greeted their plan for running the library with enthusiasm. As Toby puts it: “On Monday, the council produced its considered response in the form of a 178-page ‘supplement’ to … well, it doesn’t say. In

Peter Hoskin

The Portuguese fallout

How much are we in for? That is the question that springs most readily to mind after Portugal’s request for fiscal aid from the EU. And, sadly, the answer is difficult to work out. The figures being spread around range from £3 billion to £6 billion, with valuations in between. But, really, it depends on how much of the €80 billion package is agreed to by European finance ministers, and which lending mechanisms are used. The European Stability Fund, the EU’s emergency fund and the IMF’s pot of gold all have differing levels of UK involvement. If our country does end up making a significant contribution to any bailout package,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Reinforcing the schools revolution

There is extraordinary news today, suggesting that the Academies revolution is continuing apace. What was a trickle under the Labour years is turning into a flood. This time last year just 1 in 16 state secondaries had ‘Academy’ status: that is, operationally independent within the state sector. Now, it is 1 in 6. By Christmas, it should be 1 in 3. And by the next election, the majority of state secondary schools in Britain — about 1,600 — should have turned into Academies. Had Gove suggested such an expansion before the election, he would have been laughed at. The last time the Conservatives sought to give state schools independence was

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Goldstone recants

Judge Richard Goldstone has changed his mind. Writing in the Washington Post, he admits that his “fact-finding mission had no evidence” for key allegations made in the UN report into the Gaza war that bears his name, including the claim that Israel intentionally targeted civilians “as a matter of policy.” Wow! That’s the only possible reaction. The Goldstone report, released on September 15, 2009, concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes by intentionally targeting civilians. The committee did not receive information from Israel that would have contradicted these conclusions because the Israeli government refused to cooperate with members of the fact-finding mission. Now the South African jurist

Jonathan Jones

Grammar schools aren’t an answer to the social mobility problem

With all the talk about social mobility, it was inevitable that those who believe grammar schools were the doorway to opportunity would wade into the debate. The most prominent of these interventions came yesterday from David Davis, who said: “The hard data shows that the post-war improvement in social mobility, and its subsequent decline, coincided exactly with the arrival, and then the destruction, of the grammar school system. This is the clearest example of the unintended consequence of a purportedly egalitarian policy we have seen in modern times.” The “hard data” Davis refers to is this 2005 study by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin for the LSE and the Sutton Trust.

Peter Hoskin

Whither the NHS Bill?

Reassurance — that’s what the happy trio of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Andrew Lansley sought to emit during their NHS event earlier. And reassurance not just about where the coalition is taking the health service (although there was plenty of that), but also about the “listening exercise” they are engaging in now. Although all three men suggested that the broad scope of the NHS reforms would remain — decentralisation, greater responsibilities for GPs, and all that — they also hinted that “substantive” changes will be made to the Bill as it stands. As for what those changes will look like, there were few specifics. Yet it did sound as

David Blackburn

Burying the dead

Lockerbie is back in vogue. The Telegraph reports that Mi5 has ‘conclusive evidence’ that Moussa Koussa was ‘directing operational and intelligence gathering activities against Libyan dissidents’ and organising support for terror groups. Koussa is expected to meet with Scottish prosecutors later this week to discuss the Lockerbie bombing. Also, the Libyan rebels have pledged to assist British security services investigate Gaddafi’s sponsorship of terrorism, particularly the IRA. Anything that brings Gaddafi and his most murderous henchmen to justice will give solace to victims. But no amount of water can wash away the grubby circumstances of al-Megrahi’s release. The subtle influence of the government on the Scottish authorities has been covered

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Get ready for the Cameron, Clegg and Lansley NHS show

Get your guide to body language out for tomorrow morning Cameron, Clegg and Lansley will be doing a joint event on NHS reforms. The three men all have subtly different messages to get across and there are concerns in Tory circle that Clegg will use the occasion to present himself as the defender of the NHS against these Tory reforms. Cameron will be walking a tightrope at tomorrow’s event. He will have to show that he is listening, that this whole exercise is not a sham, but without abandoning the principles on which the reforms are based. Expect Cameron, who will only have arrived back in the country hours before

Selena Gray

The pros and cons of internships

For the last fortnight, I’ve been doing an internship at The Spectator. And having seen the furore over Nick Clegg’s announcement today, I thought I’d give CoffeeHousers my take. Until I was 22, I’d never heard of internships: no one at my school (Aylwin Girls’ School in Bermondsey) went on them. Most of us left school at sixteen, and the jobs we were aiming for were admin, hairdressing, childcare — or, in some cases, motherhood (and welfare). The idea of pupils spending summers doing internships to beef up their CVs was alien to me. If you wanted to work at the head office of a high street bank — which