Society

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Law Enforcement

Via Johnson, a remarkable statute in Victoria which criminalises: Any person who in or near a public place or within the view or hearing of any person being or passing therein or thereon- sings an obscene song or ballad; writes or draws exhibits or displays an indecent or obscene word figure or representation; uses profane indecent or obscene language or threatening abusive or insulting words; or behaves in a riotous indecent offensive or insulting manner- shall be guilty of an offence. Penalty: 10 penalty units or imprisonment for two months; For a second offence-15 penalty units or imprisonment for three months; For a third or subsequent offence-25 penalty units or

Matt Oakley

Moving towards more efficient public sector pay

Data issued yesterday by the Incomes Data Services indicated that average pay settlements over the first quarter of 2011 in the public sector were close to 0 per cent. However, pay settlements in the private sector were closer to 3 per cent. Does this mean that Policy Exchange were wrong in a recent report to conclude that public sector workers are overpaid compared to their private sector counterparts? The basic answer is no. We highlighted that on a range of measures, workers in the public sector were overpaid compared to their comparators in the private sector. Even on our most conservative measure, which accounted for compositional differences in terms of

David Blackburn

A show trial with a difference

It’s a sleepy morning in Westminster. Fleet Street is exercised by the arrival of a new strain of e-coli in Britain and there’s also the promise of a sweltering day’s Test cricket at Lords. The Hague, by contrast, woke to the prospect of seeing Ratko Mladic, the Butcher of Belgrade, arraigned before the international court. Mladic was in hospital over night, being treated for his cancer. In view of Mladic’s ailing health, the chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, shortened the list of charges to ensure that the trial is shortened. In other words, those charges that might not easily stick are to be dropped so that sentence can be passed quickly. The same

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Anatomy of A Collapse

Three days on and Sri Lanka’s collapse to 82 all out on the final day at Sophia Gardens remains astonishing. What should have been a routine voyage ended in disaster. One minute the Lankans were supposed to ease their way to a comfortable, even dull, draw, the next they were holed below the waterline and then, within minutes, broken-backed and disappearing into the murky oblivion of the deep. Such is life and such is cricket and test cricket still enthralls. The old dame still has some songs in her pipes. It’s not uncommon in other sports – golf, snooker, tennis – for a competitor playing poorly to drag his opponent

Jonathan Jones

Whether she runs or not, Palin won’t be President

Mitt Romney may be announcing his candidacy today, but the real buzz still surrounds Sarah Palin. Will she run for the Presidency or not? She’s certainly keeping us guessing. Alex has already written about the crazy media circus surrounding Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour, which she launched on Sunday. But looking at the polls, she is unlikely to win the nomination — let alone the election — however much hype she can muster. First up, here’s the state of the race, according to the national polls conducted in the last fortnight: As you can see, Palin is currently running a clear second, trailing Mitt Romney by around 3 to 4

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Controlling NHS Costs Will Be A Radical Achievement

I don’t care to delve too deeply into the clump of giant hogweed that is health policy but if Andrew Lasley succeeds in freezing health spending in real terms then he will have been one of the more successful cabinet ministers even if his ambitious reforms go nowhere or achieve nothing. It is annoying, as Pete says, that this will have to be a secret triumph since it has become an article of faith, apparently, that spending more money on the NHS is always the virtuous thing to do. Nevertheless, a secret triumph that cannot be proclaimed is better than failure. Every developed country must confront the horror of sharply-increasing

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Lucifer Effect

Today’s papers are full of comment on the brilliant Panorama exposé of care home abuse. But none have mentioned what jumped out at me: the parallels between this and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The way that the tattooed Wayne treated his mentally ill patients is sickening — but, to me, this is not just a story about human evil. It’s a story about how institutionalisation brings out the evil in people, and that this evil is far closer to the surface than we like to admit. Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford, randomly divided 25 volunteers to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a poorly-regulated, mock prison.

Peter Hoskin

Lansley’s inflated sense of his own department’s spending

The listening is over, now for the legislating. But if you’re keen to find out how Andrew Lansley’s health reforms will look in the end, then don’t expect many clues in his article for the Telegraph today. Aside from some sustained hints about involving “town halls” and “nurses” in the process, this is really just another explanation of why the NHS needs to change — not how it will change. Lansley’s central justification is one that he has deployed with greater frequency over the last few weeks: that, without change, the NHS will become too cumbersome and costly a beast. Thanks to the pressures of an ageing population, more expensive

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Problem of the Supreme Court

Readers in England and other less-fortunate lands may not have been following the latest stushie in Scotia new and braw. This time it’s the law that’s the problem. Or rather, the UK Supreme Court’s ability to rule on Scottish appeals on Human Rights and other EU-related business. Last week this led to the conviction of Nat Fraser, imprisoned for the murder of his wife Arlene, being quashed on the not unreasonable grounds that the Crown had failed to disclose vital evidence that cast some doubt on the most important part of the case against Mr Fraser. Kenneth Roy, sage of Kilmarnock, has an excellent summary of the affair. Cue much

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Where next on social care?

There is, as Paul Goodman notes, a grim tide of stories about the vulnerable — and their maltreatment — in the papers today. Perhaps the most disgraceful is the case highlighted by last night’s Panorama, of the abuse suffered by adults with learning disabilities at a specialist hospital in Bristol, which has led to four arrests. But there is also the slow financial collapse of Southern Cross, the country’s largest care home operator. The FT’s Jim Pickard has a useful summary of the situation here. But the basic point is that if Southern Cross shatters, then over 30,000 elderly people will be relying on other groups, landlords and councils to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Euro’s uncertain future

Martin Wolf’s column on the eurozone today does a superb job of summing up its troubles. As Wolf says, “The Eurozone, as designed, has failed.” Keeping its current arrangements is simply not an option for the eurozone. Wolf concludes that: “The eurozone confronts a choice between two intolerable options: either default and partial dissolution or open-ended official support. The existence of this choice proves that an enduring union will at the very least need deeper financial integration and greater fiscal support than was originally envisaged.” The question now is essentially whether Germany and other prosperous eurozone countries are prepared to embark on further integration and a programme of fiscal transfers

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Clarke’s crimes

One of the Conservative leadership’s worries at the moment is that the party is losing its reputation for being tough on crime. So it won’t welcome today’s Daily Mail splash about how a prisoner was granted permission by Ken Clarke to father a child by artificial insemination.   Now, we don’t know the precise details of the case, meaning that it is hard to come to a firm judgement. But I understand that when he was justice secretary Jack Straw rejected these kind of applications. He was, one familiar with the issue tells me, of the view that prisoners should not be allowed to benefit from non-medically necessary NHS services.

Peter Hoskin

The inflation battle heats up

He left with a warning. “I think that there is a big risk emerging to the credibility of the Bank,” said Andrew Sentance last night, on his final day as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee. And he continued, “If inflation does not come down in the way that the Bank is suggesting — and I think there is a big risk that is the case — then that is going to have a big knock on effect on the credibility of the bank’s commitment to its inflation target.” Sentance’s views are unsurprising. He has, after all, been pushing for an interest rate hike for some time, and for

Tuesday

James Plunkett

The growing need for a policy response to the ‘new inflation’

There’s been much debate on these pages about the political implications of higher inflation. Ironically, this morning’s news of record food prices could relieve the pressure on the Bank of England Governor. His argument for caution when it comes to a rate rise is based on the claim that UK inflation is now being driven by events beyond the MPC’s control. Today’s figures reinforce that case, showing that global commodity prices remain a key driver of the rising cost of living in Britain’s households. The same argument doesn’t really work for the Chancellor, whose remit isn’t just to keep headline inflation down, but also to help households cope with the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Trouble on the tracks

I took the Caledonian sleeper train from London Euston to Glasgow on Sunday night. This is what the train did: it left Euston at 2330 and made its way to just south of Watford Junction, where it waited for twenty minutes. Then it went back south, on a different line, to just north of Kings Cross station. In all it took 94 minutes to take us, effectively, 300 yards from where we had started out. The reason for this was that the West Coast mainline was closed for engineering works, so the train needed to be diverted via the east coast mainline. The only way to get from Euston to

Peter Hoskin

Britain’s other, bigger debt problem

And what about the other sort of debt? We spend so much time harrumphing about the national debt that an important point is obscured: personal debt, the amount owed by individuals, is even higher. I wrote an article on the subject for a recent issue of The Spectator, as well as the Thunderer column (£) for last Saturday’s Times. But, really, a piece in the latest Spectator (subscribers here) by Helen Wood — the former prostitute who transacted with Wayne Rooney, as well as with a “married actor” who has slapped her with a superinjunction — puts voice to the problem in blunter fashion. “My mistake,” she writes, “was to

Peter Hoskin

Clegg’s ermine troubles

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, that much we know. But thanks to the wonders of modern science, we can now poll them on it. Today’s Times carries a survey of the 789 peers who are entitled to sit in the Lords — of whom, 310 responded. It’s not a huge sample size, but the results, you assume, are representative. 80 per cent oppose a wholly or mainly elected second chamber, including 46 per cent of Lib Dem peers. 81 per cent believe that the Lords works well as it is. And 74 per cent believe that it wouldn’t be “constitutionally correct” for the Commons to force through a cull of

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 30 May – 5 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

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Egypt’s revolution – six months on

I’m back in Cairo to find out where the revolution of 25 January has got to. Nearly six months after Hosni Mubarak’s downfall, the transition from authoritarianism is well under way. There is one immediate difference from my last visit: the absence of army check-points. Police officers in new white suits stand on street corners but the heavy military presence from before has gone. The Cairo police, who were absent after the revolution, have returned in new white uniforms. However, the military – or SCAF, as it styles itself – is very much still in charge, dictating how the democratic process will continue. I remain of the view I articulated

David Blackburn

Testing the health of the coalition

Listening is seriously damaging the coalition’s health. The Sunday Mirror carries a report that chimes with a week of rumours in Westminster: the NHS reforms are going to be significantly diluted to appease warring Liberal Democrats. The Mirror adds that Lansley is likely to quit in protest. Matt d’Ancona argues, in his essential column this morning, that this is not a listening exercise but a ‘full blown carefully orchestrated retreat’. It is, if you will, a political version of the battle of Arnhem: the NHS reforms were a reform too far in this parliament, so tactical withdrawal is now imperative. Clegg and Cameron’s signatures are on the original White Paper.