Society

Friday

David Blackburn

Seriously damaging your wealth

The news that gas and electricity bills will rise by 18 and 16 per cent respectively will have many reaching for a bottle of scotch just to keep warm. At an immediate level, this is another act in the ongoing drama about rising living costs; but it runs deeper too. British Gas says that the price rises are concurrent with inflated wholesale prices. Wholesale prices began to grow last July, a result of Qatari liquefied natural gas being less readily available and the increasingly unreliable connection from Norway. Global economic recovery has also affected prices where supply is weak. But might the gas companies still be being rapacious? Ofgem is

Martin Bright

Where does volunteering stop and exploitation begin?

There’s always something satisfying about appearing in a new publication and I made my debut in the Stage, the publication of the theatre industry this week. I was horrified to see that Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic had been advertising for unpaid interns. Oddly, this is something that liberal Britain seems happy with. (Sometimes the right understands better that you need to pay people for an honest day’s work — I was delighted to see that centre-right think tank Policy Exchange was advertising for a paid intern this week). The Old Vic’s John Richardson responds here. The Old Vic has even made a video celebrating the way they use unpaid labour

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Shock as James Murdoch announces closure of The News of the World

The news that The News of the World is to shut down is a complete shock. No one would have predicted this when this story first started going and it is a sign that no one can be confident of where or how this story will end. The expectation now is that The Sun will move to a seven day operation, something that was under consideration before this whole fire storm broke out but only in a long-term planning kind of way. As a journalist, it is always a very sad business when a newspaper shut down. There is in, some ways, a huge unfairness here too as the incidents

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A toast to the first Spectator (and to CoffeeHousers)

It’s The Spectator’s summer party today, and in a rather important year. It was exactly 300 years ago that Joseph Addison & Richard Steele first published the earliest incarnation The Spectator. This blog is named for the coffee houses that had sprung up all over London at that time — the original destinations for The Spectator. It had gossip, opinion, character assassinations, literary review (it hyped up Paradise Lost), theatre and the arts. It was a huge success, without about one in ten Londoners reading it at the time. Were Addison alive now, there are a few characteristics he’d recognise in this virtual coffee house. He wrote using a pseudonym,

Peter Hoskin

What the papers won’t say

Remember Operation Motorman? You may not, because little was made it at the time — and nothing like the current phone hacking furore. Yet many of the themes are identical. In 2003, a private investigator called Steve Whittamore was busted. His job was to simply to snoop out information for various newspaper groups, often using illegal methods. They’d pay him, he’d hand over the information. It really was that simple. Until, that is, the Information Commissioner got its hands on his records, which included details of some of the transactions made between him and his client journalists. By 2006, it had emerged how many journalists had been caught paying Whittamore

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron needs to move fast to regain the initiative

Westminster is rife this afternoon with rumours that there’ll soon be a high-profile arrest in the phone hacking case. For David Cameron, this issue is going to remain incredibly difficult as long as the focus remains narrowly on News International. But Cameron has one tool he can use to try and broaden out the issue, the inquiries he mentioned yesterday at PMQs. If Cameron were to move quickly on setting up judge-led public inquiries into the police and into journalistic abuses, he would regain some of the initiative. These inquiries are really the only tool he has, given that the government is hemmed in on the takeover of BSkyB as

Peter Hoskin

The stakes rise for Rupert Murdoch

The business pages have more electricity to them than usual today, and all because of their overlap with the phone hacking scandal. In many ways, yesterday marked a turning point in the whole affair, in that it is now hitting Rupert Murdoch in the pocketbook. News Corporation shares — which had held up for a day or two — finally fell by 3.6 per cent, leaving its chairman and CEO some £120 million worse off. And, as we reported on the new Spectator Business Blog, shares in BSkyB took a similar course; due, no doubt, to prevailing concerns that Murdoch’s takeover might be posponed indefinitely. Ofcom are just one of

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Schooling the judges

The judges are judging the judges, or at least judging by the cover of this morning’s Times (£) they are. “Radical reform of the selection of judges,” some leading figures tell the paper, “is needed to break the stranglehold of white Oxbridge males at the top of the judiciary.” The story continues inside the paper, with a tranche of statistics on just how white, Oxbridge and male the judiciary actually is (i.e. very). It all reminded me of a table we put together for Coffee House some months ago, and which I thought I’d excavate this morning. Here it is, with judges sitting firmly at the bottom: Of course, some

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rebekah Brooks: I Am Not A Witch, I’m You

An exclusive look at a strategy memo prepared for Rebekah Brooks this afternoon: Rebekah,  The Boss has sent word: this phone situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage. He’s asked us to formulate a strategy for you. It’s balls-out time. This is a go large or don’t go at all moment. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalalalalala is not enough anymore. Even the payroll vote at Westminster is getting restless. Soon they’ll be wandering off the reservation whimpering that Something Must Be Done. We all know how that ends: something gets done even if it’s a stupid something. This is how we roll in Wapping too

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rebekah Brooks: Don’t Blame Me, I’m A Victim Too!

That, I think, is what we are supposed to take away from the ridiculous statement News International’s Chief Executive has issued today. Surely the editor of the News of the World asks the occasional question about the provenance of the stories she chooses to publish? Apparently not. This being so a reasonable person might just be tempted to ask if Ms Brooks is a) telling the truth or b) any good at her job? It’s surely one or the other but her defence appears to be, “It wasn’t me; I was just the clueless, hapless, innocent editor”. I am not sure how many parsnips this butters. There are a couple

David Blackburn

Unpicking Bombardier’s job losses

The news that 1,400 jobs are to be shorn from Bombardier’s train manufacturing plant in Derby has sent the worlds of business and politics into collision. Ostensibly, these job losses are the result of the Department of Transport’s decision to award the Thameslink renewal contract to German company Siemens. And unions warn that the 12,000 jobs that depend on supplying Bombardier are now threatened. This has led some on the left to criticise the government’s “incoherent plan for growth”. Elsewhere, both right and left blame European competition law, and there is consensus that the government should intervene to preserve British jobs. Philip Hammond has written to Vince Cable insisting that

Peter Hoskin

Rebekah Brooks statement on phone hacking

Released in the last hour or so: Dear All, When I wrote to you last week updating you on a number of business issues I did not anticipate having to do so again so soon. However, I wanted to address the company as a matter of urgency in light of the new claims against the News of the World. We were all appalled and shocked when we heard about these allegations yesterday. I have to tell you that I am sickened that these events are alleged to have happened. Not just because I was editor of the News of the World at the time, but if the accusations are true,

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Pimping the press

Why, I hear you ask, did the editors of the New Statesman and Independent do nothing about Johann Hari? Private Eye and many others had been raising killer questions about his journalism for years before the scandal broke, and yet they stood aside and let him be. Why, to raise the obvious follow up question after the grotesque allegations about Milly Dowler, did Rupert Murdoch and successive editors of the News of the World not stop stories that could only have come from illegal surveillance? Because the managers of the British media have a pimp’s morality. If a broadsheet columnist produces “facts” that thrill the clients, they pat him on

Peter Hoskin

The Afghan conflict creates other conflicts for Cameron

Another day, yesterday, to remind us of the precariousness of everything in Afghanistan. With David Cameron in the country, it was announced, first, that a British soldier had gone missing from his base; and, then, that the same soldier had been found dead with gunshot wounds. “His exact cause of death is still to be established,” said a spokesman, “and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance and death are currently under investigation.” His is the 375th British military death in the country since operations began. And, of course, the politics quiver on in the background. There had been reports at the weekend (£) that up to 800 more British troops could

Monday

Peter Hoskin

A shameful episode | 4 July 2011

Even by the standards of what has been a particularly shameful episode in British media history, the latest phone-hacking revelations are disgraceful stuff. According to the Guardian, private investigators hired by the News of the World targeted the phones of the then-missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family, in 2002, to listen into their voicemails. And, worse, the paper is said to have deleted voicemails from Milly Dowler’s phone to make room for more — an act which it thought to have given the police, and her parents, hope that she was still alive. There is much more detail here, including news that the Dowlers are now pursuing a damages

Peter Hoskin

Greece is haemorrhaging its sovereignty

One of the upshots of the euro was always a certain loss of self-determination. Even on a basic level, its member states had relinquished control of their monetary policy and handed it over, wholesale, to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. But — as James suggested last week — it’s only now that we’re seeing the dismal endpoint of that equation. The conditions attached to the bailout packages mean that Greece’s fiscal policy is ever more decided in Brussels, and decreasingly in Athens. Which is why Jean-Claude Junker’s comments from over the weekend are worth returning to now, as an example of this unforgiving process. “The sovereignty of Greece will

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A New Tabloid Low

Even by the debased standards of the tabloid press this Guardian account of how the News of the World intercepted and deleted messages left on Milly Dowler’s mobile phone days after the 13 year-old’s disappearance in 2002 must represent a new low. That’s assuming the Guardian story is accurate, of course, but there seems little reason, at present, to doubt it. It may be one thing to spy on movie stars and pop sensations; quite another, most people will think, to use the same “techniques” in the matter of a missing – and subsequently murdered – teenage girl. As Nick Davies and Amelia Hill report: [W]ith the help of its

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 4 July – 10 July

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

Colleen Graffy

Stand up for freedom and freedom will stand up for you (eventually)

It was hard to be a supporter of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Western Europe. As a student living in West Germany at the time, I remember well the commonly held view of him: B-rate actor who read cue cards, a nuclear-weapons-obsessed warmonger, and not very bright to boot. Never mind that he had also been a popular two-term governor of the most populous state in the U.S. (California), because that did not fit with the bumbling cowboy narrative. When he called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” the chattering classes saw it as simplistic, unsophisticated and cringe-worthy. Not so the people caught behind the Iron Curtain who silently cheered

Peter Hoskin

The trouble with today’s social care report

Uncertainty reigns. Or at least when it comes to today’s Dilnot Report into social care it does. We largely know what measures will be contained within its pages: a higher threshhold for council-funded care, but a cap (of around £35,000) on how much individuals ought to be liable for. What’s less clear is how the government will respond. Far from welcoming the report wholeheartedly – as has been the recent form with these things – there are signs that the government is set to resist some of its recommendations. Andrew Lansley spoke cagily of it yesterday, hinting that the cap was proving particularly difficult in Coalition Land. George Osborne is