Society

Tuesday

David Begg

High-speed rail is an opportunity, not a waste

Having spoken to civic leaders in Leeds yesterday about the impact of high-speed rail investment, I cannot recognise the world lived in by Matt Sinclair and the campaign against HS2. In the Midlands and the North, high-speed rail represents opportunity. Opportunities for business people to reach new markets, quickly, cheaply and with minimal hassle. Opportunities for bread-winners to reach new employers. Yes, it’s a massive investment. But the potential for our national wealth is also massive At the “Yes to HS2, Yes to Jobs” action days in Manchester and Birmingham, you felt some of this excitement among the businesspeople, civic leaders and young people who came out to show their

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Bad hair day

It is henceforth illegal for schools to ban certain haircuts because they believe them to be evidence of gang membership. A High Court Judge, Justice Collins, has deemed it to be a form of indirect racial discrimination. A school in Harrow had banned the braided “cornrow” hairstyle because they feared it was worn as a sort of badge of gang membership. But Collins — who made his name by stopping the government deporting illegal immigrants and confiscating the assets of suspected terrorists and various other judicial procedures which have done so much to enhance all of our lives — has ruled that schools should allow the braids “if it is

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The myth of cuts

Last week, Ed Balls warned against the effect of George Osborne’s vicious, front-loaded cuts. Today, we have an update in the form of monthly state spending figures. In cash terms, a new record has been set in state largesse. The UK government’s current spending was £51.7 billion in May, up from £50.6 billion in May last year (the last month of Gordon Brown). George Osborne has so far outspent Gordon Brown every month that he’s been in the Treasury. Even adjusted for the runaway inflation, the Chancellor has on average outspent Brown during his first 12 months:     To fund this extra spending, the Chancellor borrowed £27.4 billion from

Matthew Sinclair

High-speed rail isn’t about North versus South — it’s about wasting taxpayers’ cash

Yesterday the campaign for high-speed rail, endorsed by the Government, made clear the way they want to frame the debate over the new line. They want to make it about Northerners vs. Southerners. Their adverts featuring a bowler-hatted caricature putting the integrity of his lawn above jobs in the North went up on buses in Manchester. By the evening, it was already clear that their strategy — which Tim Montgomerie has described as “backwards-looking” — was backfiring as the BBC went from house to house in Ruislip talking to locals who said, “I don’t wear a bowler hat, and I don’t imagine that many people around here do”.   Today the TPA

Monday

Daniel Korski

The trouble with Ban Ki-moon

In the little compound known as “Bantanamo,” located outside the UN headquarters in New York, a small sigh of relief was probably breathed last week. For, inside, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had just been told of the UN Security Council’s unanimous decision recommending that he be elected for a second term. Gabon’s UN ambassador Nelson Messone made the announcement to the press after the 15-nation council met behind closed doors. The UN General Assembly will probably vote this week, confirming that Ban will run the organisation until the end of 2016. Earlier David Cameron had told the press that he was “glad” to support Ban Ki-moon’s candidacy for a second

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The limits of stigma

As James says, it’s been a day of high passions here at The Spectator. He feels strongly that many of the problems in Britain are societal, and require a cultural shift. Maybe so. I disagree with James when he says a Prime Minister’s role is to “lead society”. I disagree. We pay him to run the government, not offer his advice (or, worse, condemnation) on how society is running itself. Sure, society is shaped by government incentives. Cameron can fix these. But shaping society by exhortation is not what we expect of limited government. Fundamentally, it confuses what I see as the natural pecking order. In Britain, the people pass

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hoban wobbles in the House

Mark Hoban has just turned in a remarkably unconvincing performance at the despatch box. Summoned to the Commons to answer an urgent question from Gisela Stuart, one of the best backbenchers in the House, on what contingency planning the government was doing for a Greek default, Hoban attempted to stonewall.   But Hoban’s stonewalling could only carry him so far. Strikingly, he declined several opportunities to confirm that the British government thinks that the euro will survive in its current form with all its current members.   By contrast, Jack Straw was quite happy to make predictions. He told the House that ‘the euro in its current form is going

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 20 June – 26 June

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

Peter Hoskin

Gove reaffirms his faith in free schools

Invigorating, that’s probably the best word for Policy Exchange’s event on free schools this morning. Right from Sir Michael Wilshaw’s opening address — which set out the reasons why he, as headteacher of Mossbourne Academy, is optimistic about education reform — to Michael Gove’s longer, more involved speech, this was all about celebrating and promoting the new freedoms that teachers are enjoying. There were some specifics about the schools that are opening, and the numbers of them, but very little of it was new. For the first time in a week, Gove wasn’t announcing policy, but instead referring back to it. Which isn’t to say that this was an ornamental

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

It’s not just about public sector pensions

The bustle around public sector pensions has obscured an equally significant, pensions-related story today: the Sunday Telegraph’s claim that George Osborne is considering sucking £7 billion from the pensions of higher earners. The way it would be achieved, reports Patrick Hennessey, would be to terminate the tax relief on pension contributions made by those in the 40 and 50 per cent income tax brackets. He adds that the Exchequer could spend the resulting funds on deficit reduction, or on notching up the basic state pension. At the moment, it sounds as though this is just one of those on-the-table type deals: an idea being passed around the Treasury, but not

Saturday

Ed Rex

Sound – It’s rocket science

With 3D images astounding half the population and leaving the other half feeling distinctly seasick, it was only a matter of time before another of our senses got the same treatment. Sure enough, 3D sound reproduction is finally with us; but while you might expect Professor Edgar Choueiri, its inventor, to be an audio engineer of some sort, he in fact spends most of his time as professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University. Let the ‘3D sound? It’s not rocket science’ gags commence. Born in Lebanon and schooled in France, Choueiri now works on spacecraft propulsion in the US, funded by Nasa. But in 2003 a lifelong

The Spectator

Letters | 18 June 2011

Missions impossible Sir: I hesitate to challenge Sherard Cowper-Coles’s concerns about our military chiefs (‘Who’s in command?’, 11 June), but it seems to me that they have a good reason for overplaying their hand with the politicians. The reality is that our armed forces are at best a third of the size they need to be to do the things that the politicians ask of them, and they have been criminally underfunded for well over 30 years. Sir Sherard no doubt has a point, but his efforts would be better directed towards exposing the gross political failure and cowardice that puts otherwise honourable men in such a completely impossible position

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 18 June 2011

The footballers Rooney and Giggsy are doing a Donald Trump and spending thousands of pounds on their bald patches. Poor darlings! But they are not alone. The topic was of such interest in Rome that the emperor Domitian even wrote a treatise on it. So too did Cleopatra. The doctor Galen (c. ad 129-216) quotes from Cleopatra’s book on ‘Adornment’ as follows: ‘For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a foam of nitre, and it worked well.’ But you can

The Spectator

Barometer | 18 June 2011

Council housing Ed Miliband proposed that a Labour government under his leadership would send people in employment to the top of the council house waiting list. Mr Miliband risks criticism by his own party, which has already attacked similar plans by the Tory-controlled Westminster Council. How would Mr Miliband’s policy have gone down with the architect of Labour’s post-war housing policy, Nye Bevan? —Bevan always intended council housing to be a choice of the middle classes as well as the working classes, saying he wanted to create a ‘living tapestry’ where ‘the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the labourer all lived on the same street’. He said nothing about

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 18 June 2011

Q. I am a man of modest means but every year my cousin allows me to use his country house to host a cricket match against the village close to the family seat in the West Country. I invite members of the itinerant London-based team for which I play, and their families, to stay for the weekend, and provide food and drink at my own expense. The point of difficulty is that my cousin’s staff expect to be tipped and my guests, unfamiliar with conventions of country houses, do not, in the main, oblige. As a consequence I have to make up the difference. I have thought of approaching our

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: When life gives you lemons …

When my son Ludo first suggested selling lemonade outside our house in Acton as a way of earning some extra pocket money, I was a bit dubious. Don’t you need a licence from the European Union before you can set up a stall in your driveway? And what about ’elf and safety? I could picture some busybody from the council, armed with a testing kit, reprimanding my six-year-old for not using organic lemons. Then I thought, ‘Sod it.’ If he wanted to earn some money instead of depending on handouts from his parents, then good luck to him. He set up his stand at the end of our driveway at

Alan Judd

Motoring: The pick of pick-ups

Cliveden House, that great architectural confection above the Thames in Berkshire, is best known as the seat of the Astors and for the start of the Profumo scandal in the 1960s. The Astors were a political and financial dynasty who colonised Cliveden in the middle of the 19th century and by early in the 20th had made it an epicentre of high society. When told it was to be turned into a hotel, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan remarked, ‘It always has been.’ I was there last week, though not, alas, as an ornament of high society or target of seduction. It may seem an unlikely location for the last of

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 18 June 2011

After I’d migrated from Essex to Devon during the last recession but one to look for casual work, the first woman I ‘went out’ with in any formal sense was my boy’s mother. She lived at her mother and father’s tied cottage and for a while I more or less lived there as well. Her father was a cowman, and the sweet, lovely smell of liquid cow manure permeated the house when he was there. The mother was, in her words, a ‘scrubber’ and she scrubbed for a Mrs P and a Mrs R to the point of total exhaustion. My boy’s mother was then still at school. The family

Taki

High life | 18 June 2011

On board S/Y Bushido I am writing this under extreme torture. I have been vomiting for hours due to food poisoning, am totally dehydrated, but even one gulp of water brings on more violent up-chucks. ‘You’ll just have to wait it out,’ says a doctor over the telephone. Easier said than done. And to think I was worried about girls and other such bagatelles. Without health no woman is worth a nickel. I suppose I overdid things in London, and then in the south of France. London was fun, what with Asprey’s throwing a bash for me, and then my own thank-you dinner at Bellamy’s following. People like Fraser Nelson

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 18 June 2011

Mr Brown’s writing In those secret documents in the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair wrote ‘Do not copy’ on one page, to limit dangers of a leak. Gordon Brown needed no such precaution, because of his secret weapon: illegibility. I am not making fun of Mr Brown, who has only one eye that works, and that not very well. But his thick marker-pen marginalia have a rare indecipherability. Like Linear A, some may never be cracked. It is not only that his letters are ill-formed, though they are — so that two scribbled words look like long termum. The U, however, turns out to be I and S, both with much