Society

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Milburn on Lansley’s health reforms

Andrew Lansley’s health reforms have never been in the rosiest of health; but, as Pete observed yesterday, the current malaise may leave permanent damage. Paul Waugh has been speaking to Alan Milburn and the modernising former Health Secretary’s words speak volumes about Lansley’s trails: “I’m amazed they allowed themselves to get into talk about privatisation and cuts. Having originally said this was a revolution they’re now saying it’s just evolution of Labour’s reforms. Politically, it doesn’t make sense. “Look, a managed form of competition is fine. The problem is that the lynchpin of the reforms was GP commissioning. “It’s a good idea to get family doctors to be aware of

Peter Hoskin

David Cameron’s dreams and nightmares are written into today’s employment figures

It is almost a cliche to describe jobs figures as a “mixed picture” — and yet that’s exactly what today’s are. Beneath the headline finding that the number of unemployed people has risen above 2.5 million, are numbers that will fuel not only David Cameron’s happiest dreams, but also his most paranoid nightmares. Let’s start with the nicer stuff first. The graph above shows the cumulative change in employment levels since the recession started to take hold in 2008. What it shows is something that often goes ignored: that is was the private sector, not the public sector, that took the greatest hit from the crunch. At the depth of

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

UN Security Council Resolution proposing a no fly zone over Libya is tabled

Britain, France and Lebanon’s decision to table a UN Security Council resolution proposing a no fly zone and a bar on flights in and out of Gaddafi’s Libya is an honourable effort to push the international community to move before the window for action closes entirely. Yet as the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe acknowledged yesterday,  “If we had used military force last week to neutralize some airstrips and the several dozen planes that they have, perhaps the reversal taking place to the detriment of the opposition wouldn’t have happened,” Juppe told Europe-1 radio. “But that’s the past.” “What is happening today shows us that we may have let slip

David Blackburn

A 6 point guide to Hutton’s proposals

The future of the public sector has become a tale of two Huttons. Last week, John Hutton disclosed his pension plans and today Will Hutton’s submitted his final recommendations on pay. He makes six substantial points. 1). He has resisted calls to link senior public sector pay with the Prime Minister’s. He told broadcasters this morning: “I think the Prime Minister’s is a completely arbitrary salary. He took a pay cut in the first place and there’s no shortage of people coming forward to be Prime Minister. There’s no problem of recruiting and retaining a Prime Minister. If you’re trying to hire someone to do child protection services in Haringey…

Peter Hoskin

Another hurdle for Lansley’s health reforms

And so it came to pass. After sniping at Andrew Lansley’s health reforms from the day they were announced — at one point describing them as a “slash and burn approach” — the British Medical Association has today voted to call on the Health Secretary to withdraw his Bill entirely. The speech that the BMA Council Chairman, Hamish Meldrum delivered this morning captures the tenor of their opposition: “…what we have is an often contradictory set of proposals, driven by ideology rather than evidence, enshrined in ill-thought-through legislation and implemented in a rush during a major economic downturn.” So what to make of it all? Normally, another “union opposes coalition”

Peter Hoskin

The pace of the schools revolution

What a difference a year makes. When Michael Gove spoke at a Spectator conference on schools reform twelve months ago, his policy ideas were just that: ideas, to be deployed should the Tories reach government. Today, at a follow-up conference, they are being put into practice in the fiery crucible of state — and doing quite well, at that. As tweeted by Andrew Neil, Gove has announced that the number of academies — existing state schools that have seized on the independence being offered to them — now stands at 465. That’s some way up on the 203 academies there were last year. And it’s even a significant rise on

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

A plea for help

I am writing a book about threats to freedom of speech – real threats that is – and wonder if I should include a chapter on political correctness. I find it a hard question. In many ways, political correctness has improved British manners. That people no longer screech about the niggers and the pakis and the yids, strikes me as all to the good. It is reasonable for a university, say, to suspend a lecturer who keeps making sexist jokes to women. His attitudes directly affect his ability to teach women students. Such speech codes are not a form McCarthyism. The organisers of the anti-communist purge in 1950s American got

Monday

David Blackburn

A model council

Councils from Liverpool to Bromley have cut voluntary sector funding; but Reading Borough Council is defying the trend. It will increase its voluntary sector funding by more than £200,000 in 2011-12. This will be achieved by transferring £956,000 in loose grants to strict revenue contracts, which deliver greater value for money. This is part of a wider administrative rationalisation that raised an extra £181,000 for local groups, which will now apply for cash on a clearly specified basis to ensure that frugality survives the current efficiency drive. An efficiency drive was certainly needed. The detailed appendices to Reading’s Budget Grants (here for commissioning intentions and here for information on grants,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What am I to do?

Any suggestions as to what I can do about my mother-in-law? She’s an “End-Time” Christian and with the advent of 24 hour news and social networking sites telling us stuff we would never have heard about before or not got too worked up about – shoals of dead fish in Alabama, frogs raining from the skies in Cambodia, Japanese nuclear reactors blowing up and so on – insists that all of this “has been written” and that Christ will soon come to take her up to her rightful place while the rest of us are consumed in an inferno. You try telling her that there were always earthquakes, that frogs

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Execution of Admiral Byng

It took place, as James Kirkup reminds us, on this day in 1757. As James puts it: To this day, his family argue – with considerable justification — that he was wrongly treated and should be pardoned. Every year on the anniversary of his death, bells sound in Southill, Bedfordshire, where his descendents still live. Voltaire immortalised Byng’s death in Candide with a scathing summary of the British attitude to its military commanders: il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. Sadly, those days are gone. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not arguing that it was right to kill Byng, or that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Are two Eds better than one?

This was the question raised by today’s joint Balls Miliband press conference. The two Eds are very different in both body language and temperament. Balls is the far more pugilistic politician, always looking to dispute the premises of a question and happy to use aggressive language. While Miliband is far more of a conciliator, looking to find consensus and using only gentle humour. They even stand at the lectern in different ways: Balls hunched over his, leaning into the fight. Miliband hanging back from his, and taking a gentle step towards it when answering a question. The danger for Miliband is that Balls appears to be the alpha male, the

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 14 March – 20 March

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

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Barry’s Nightmare School 

It sometimes feels as if there has never been as much despair over the state of our education system as there is today. Despite the capacity of the Royal Wedding to awaken our heaviest-breathing collective fantasies of a return to serfdom, as we all excitedly queue up to shake the hand and curtsey to a sweet, nice girl lucky enough to marry a sweet, nice man lucky enough to emerge from a womb lucky enough to live in Kensington Palace, our governments repeatedly make the claim that Britain is, at its best, a meritocracy. It sometimes feels as if there has never been as much despair over the state of

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The case for a Libyan No-Fly Zone is, at least in part, based on aesthetics.

I don’t know what we – that is Britain/NATO/the West/Whoever – should do about Libya. But while I think Brothers Korski and Nelson make many valid points I’m not sure that the case for any kind of military action has yet been made persuasively. That doesn’t mean one must be happy to see Gaddafi blitzing the Libyan rebels, merely that the calls to do something or anything seem long on justified emotion but desperately short on practical application. Andrew Rawnsley, for instance, asks “Are we content to let Colonel Gaddafi win?” But this is a false question. No, we are not content to let Gaddafi win but few, if any,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Fired for Telling the Truth, That’s the Washington Way

Of course PJ Crowley, the State Department spokesman, had to go for his gaffe. That’s what happens when you tell an obvious truth in circumstances that embarrass and even shame your bosses: P.J. Crowley abruptly resigned Sunday as State Department spokesman over controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case. Sources close to the matter the resignation, first reported by CNN, came under pressure from the White House, where officials were furious about his suggestion that the Obama administration is mistreating Manning, the Army private who is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia, under suspicion that he leaked highly classified State Department cables to the website Wikileaks.

Daniel Korski

The coming war with Libya

If the West is not ready to intervene decisively against Colonel Ghadaffi, it needs to get ready for a post-revolutionary Libya, where the dictator and his bloodthirsty family seek revenge on pro-democracy activists and countries like Britain. Think of Ghadaffi’s previous record: the Lockerbie bombing, targeted assassinations like in the 1970s, and attacks on US soldiers in Germany. Libya could in future represent a threat to Britain akin to al Qaeda. So, the British government needs to think how it will deal with Ghadaffi MK II. Its policy should draw on past examples of containment and isolation. Libya’s neighbours will have to be incentivised to bolster European – and especially Italian

Adrian Hilton

Everything but the inspiration

Whenever the BBC broadcast a major national celebration or royal event, they wheel out a Dimbleby to maintain the hereditary principle. If they want a probing political interview, they sacrifice the victim to the snarls of Paxman or the claws of Humphries. If they want election night gravitas, up pops the psephologically effervescent Peter Snow. They are all Auntie’s heavy hitters; sans pareil when it comes to pomp, circumstance, inquisition and exposition. The Corporation has never really nurtured a broadcasting aristocracy for the arts and culture. So perhaps it comes as no surprise that they poached Baron Bragg of Wigton (aka Melvyn) from ITV to present their flagship documentary to

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 12 March 2011

Funny idea of fairness Sir: Congratulations to Ed Howker and The Spectator (‘The alternative story’, 26 February) for lifting the lid on the Electoral Reform Society, an organisation that appears to thrive from a conflict of interests. It was our misfortune to encounter the ERS during a controversial campaign at the Royal Geographical Society in 2009, when the organisation was supposed to ensure fair conduct ahead of and during a special general meeting called to discuss the future of exploration. The RGS decided to include comments from the then president, Sir Gordon Conway, telling fellows how to vote on the back of the ballot paper. As Stanley Johnson reported in

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 March 2011

‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘Imagination. Imagination is the highest kite that can fly, according to Lauren Bacall. It says so in the new Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations,’ he said, waving at me the book I had intended to look at after doing the washing-up. There may be much in what Miss Bacall says. The words

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 12 March 2011

As the governor of the Bank of England wades into the fray, it does not seem too much to ask of bankers to make it clear they are spending a portion of their bonuses on the Big Society. Those who already are must overcome their modesty and let us know about it. Euergesia — ‘benefaction, philanthropy’ — was a virtue of the well-born Greek. Many inscriptions and statues, erected by the euergetist to himself or by a grateful people, attest the practice. The culture spread to Rome. Over 11 years, Pliny the Younger spent two million sesterces on his home town in benefactions. Discussion about the theory of giving was