Society

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

A tradition of fine writing is on the way out – and that may not be a bad thing

I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. So I will not pretend that receiving the Best Columnist award at the Society of Editors Press Awards dinner at the Savoy last week was anything less than heavenly. But there are other things

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 16 April 2011

Vickers’s half-time score: not half as badas bankers feared or bashers hoped ‘Not half as bad as it might have been,’ was the reaction of the first banker I spoke to on Monday about the interim report of Sir John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking. ‘And forcing Lloyds to sell off a few more branches won’t do a damned thing to promote competition.’ ‘Not half as bad’ for bankers seems to imply not half as good as it might have been for customers. The increased and ring-fenced capital requirements for retail banking mean borrowers could be charged more for loans, and are unlikely to be offered greater choice. On the

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Transatlantic Deficits

I don’t know if the Obama administration is as enthused by the idea of deficit reduction as James suggests, not least since the American left has looked at George Osborne’s approach and judged it a failure. Kevin Drum, for instance, says Osborne’s plans are “not likely to work” and Britain “is probably going to be paying the price for this folly for many years to come”. Matt Yglesias agrees, writing that “Austerity’s failure in the United Kingdom should inform the American policy debate.” This is all occasioned by a gloomy New York Times article with the headline British Deficit Defies Advocates of Austerity. But if the economy remains weak, inflation

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Balls in fiscal isolation

Ed Balls has long said that America is the right comparison for Britain when it comes to how to deal with the deficit, contrasting the Obama administration’s fiscally loose policies with Osborne’s plan for fiscal tightening. This comparison has always been flawed; the dollar is the world’s reverse currency which gives Washington far more fiscal flexibility than HMG. But, even leaving that aside, the Obama administration is now — albeit under Congressional pressure — about to start cutting.   By 2015, Obama’s plan will have reduced the US deficit by 8 percent of GDP. Osborne’s plan sees Britain reduces its deficit by 8.4 percent by 2015. Indeed, from next year

The Spectator

The week that was | 15 April 2011

Here is a selection of posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the last week. CoffeeHousers reveal their choice for Gordon Brown’s greatest mistake. Fraser Nelson urges policy makers to blame the schools system, not Oxford. James Forsyth says that Cameron needs to tread with care, and explains why the Vickers review won’t harm London’s global competitiveness. Peter Hoskin says there is nothing new but plenty to ponder in Cameron’s immigration speech, and argues that the inflation figures are not all that they seem. David Blackburn sees that two flagship coalition reforms clashing in Brent, and examines Europe’s growing immigration problem. Rod Liddle remembers Sidney Lumet, and not unthinkingly. Alex Massie ponders

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How the banks were framed

A week that started with the Vickers review on banking has closed without another national explosion of banker-bashing. Thank God. Beating up on the banks has lasted almost three years now, and it’s blinding us to the real causes of the financial crisis. The banks are the perfect alibi: blaming them gets everyone off the hook. How, asks Gordon Brown, was a mere Prime Minister to know that banks were doing such fiendishly complicated things? How, asks George Osborne, was an opposition expected to detect what the government could not? How, asks Mervyn King, was the Bank of England governor supposed to know that these bankers had been so wicked?

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

A word for Mitch

In the magazine’s cover piece this week (read it here or subscribe from just £1/issue), Richard Littlejohn described the rather feeble assortment of Republican contenders for next year’s presidential elections. But he left out Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana, who seems to be emerging as a favourite among American conservatives.   Daniels hasn’t yet declared his candidacy, and at first glance he comes across as a dweeb. But it would be foolish to underrate him. In 2008, against a tide of Obama-mania, Daniels won the Indiana governorship with ease. He got more votes, in fact, than any candidate in the state’s history. The secret of Daniels’s success is his

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight

There’s a moment in Moonlight, Harold Pinter’s last full-length play, when Andy, a petty patriarch on a drab deathbed, accuses his wife of monopolising the love of his estranged sons. ‘They always loved their loving mother’, he rails, Lear-like. ‘They helped her with the washing-up!’

 Uttered with poisonous invective here by David Bradley, it’s a reminder of Pinter’s knack for locating fraught family dynamics in the most ordinary of domestic details, then presenting them with biting, bitter comedy. But although Bijan Sheibani’s production is peppered with such great moments, there’s plenty of stodge to sit through between them. 

Moonlight has always been an elliptical text. It is a play about

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The battle over universal benefits continues on the local front

Here’s a question for you: should free school meals (FSM) be given to all pupils, regardless of their parents’ income? I ask because this is precisely what the Labour-led council of Southwark is proposing for its primary schools. As the Evening Standard reports, the councilmen’s thinking is that by giving “healthy” FSMs to every pupil, every day, they might help “reduce childhood obesity.” Oh, and the measure will cost some £4 million a year. Even if we put aside the question of whether the local praetorians should — or even could — tackle obesity on behalf of middle-class parents, this is still needling stuff. Southwark council has to find savings

Daniel Korski

Hague’s return

William Hague has had a good war. He began poorly, as the FCO struggled to evacuate Britons from Libya. But since then, the Foreign Secretary has showed deft diplomatic skill and leadership. The FCO has been focused on Libya and every able-bodied person has been drafted into duty, with diplomats now running the operation in No 10, and the Cabinet Office. On the Today programme, the Foreign Secretary batted away the idea, much loved by realists and pessimists, that because Britain did not know, with forensic detail, how exactly the intervention would end, it should not have become involved. There are many mountains still to climb. European governments need to

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

You Cannot Hope to Bribe, or Twist, the British Journalist…

Hugh Grant’s account of a (secretly-taped!) conversation he had with a former News of the World hack-turned-whistleblower is most entertaining. Credit to our friends at the New Statesman for commissioning* it. There’s plenty to enjoy, including this fine exposition of the mentality of our upstanding truth-seekers in the popular prints: Me Well, I suppose the fact that they’re dragging their feet while investigating a mass of phone-hacking – which is a crime – some people would think is a bit depressing about the police. Him But then – should it be a crime? I mean, scanning never used to be a crime. Why should it be? You’re transmitting your thoughts

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: 50 years of human spaceflight

Here at Coffee House, we normally exhume a piece from The Spectator archives on Fridays. But we thought we’d make an exception, today, for the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s ascent into space. The piece below is actually the only one that the magazine ran at the time, and is by the politician/journalist/author Desmond Donnelly. If you can get past the dubious generalities about “less sophisticated peoples” and “magic carpets” — which themselves say something about the shift in what public figures may and may not commit to print — there are some thought-provoking and quite prescient points to be found within it:   The Magic Carpet, Desmond Donnelly MP,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Raising the Income Tax Threshold is an Important Symbol, Not a Sop

The most obvious or high-profile Liberal Democrat contribution to the coalition’s programme for government is the commitment to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 over the course of this parliament. John Rentoul is not impressed by it. He says it is a “sop” that “sounds great” but fails to survive “contact with the reality-based community”. He explains his argument thus: Raising the income-tax threshold is the only policy that can definitely be attributed to the Lib Dems, and it’s an inefficient way to make the tax system fairer. Raising the threshold benefits higher-rate taxpayers more than the rest, which means that other taxes on the rich have to go up

Peter Hoskin

Panic over? Perhaps not…

Is the inflation panic over? After rising for five consecutive months, CPI inflation went down by a 0.4 percentage points in March, to 4.0 per cent, taking the City by surprise. RPI inflation also went down, by 0.2 percentage points. The numbercrunchers at the Office for National Statistics put it down, largely, to a fall in food and drink prices. The cost of fruit is 2.7 per cent down on last March. The cost of bread and cereals, 2.6 per cent. Yet we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. While this will certainly reduce the short-term pressure on the Bank to increase rates — as well as on the nation’s pocketbooks

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Russian Red-Headed League?

The Daily Mail reports: The plot of a Sherlock Holmes story was behind a jewellery raid in Russia, police believe. Thieves paid a 74-year-old woman in St Petersburg to stay out of their flat – and broke through her walls to get in to a jeweller’s shop next door. Although a burglar alarm went off twice security guards thought it was a false alarm because the doors were locked and the windows remained intact. […] The bizarre theft mirrors almost exactly the outlandish heist in the 120-year-old short story The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the story, shop owner Jabez Wilson is kept away from his premises

Alex Massie Alex Massie

This internet thing is never going to catch on.

A classic, via Norm, from Sir Simon Jenkins. Apparently, “The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of lesser media“. Also: So great is the commercial hyperbole surrounding the Internet that common sense is obliterated by dazzle. It has proved a boon for pornographers and lawyers and for the sort of up market pen pals who used to rave about Citizens’ Band radio. For companies and interest groups, the “interment” is a more efficient version of the fax. E-mail has done wonders for the ancient art of letter-writing. I can see that being able to download the entire British Library on

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the Vickers Review won’t harm the City’s global competitiveness

The headline measure in the Vickers Review—the need for a ring fence between retail and investment banking—should not harm the City’s global competitiveness as it only applies to banks with a UK retail operation. For everyone else, Vickers would leave London as a relatively good place to do business: far more certain than Hong Kong and less restrictive than New York once the new Dodd-Frank regulations are in place. In Conservatives circles tonight, there is a quiet confidence that the government will be able to accept the Vickers Review in full when it reports in the autumn. Given that the bill to scrap the disastrous tripartite regulatory system is currently

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Blame the schools system, not Oxford

The most extraordinary row has broken out after the Prime Minister appeared to suggest that Oxford University has a racist admissions policy. He today said that, “I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful.” But the university has since hit back, pointing out that, “the figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading — it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds.” Laura Kuenssberg tweets that No10 is nevertheless sticking to

Peter Hoskin

What was Brown’s biggest mistake?

“I have to accept my responsibility.” Who would have thought that Gordon Brown would ever breathe those words, let alone breathe them to a conference in America over the weekend? Our former PM has, it’s true, suggested that his regulatory system was inadequate to the financial crash before now. But here he was much more explicit: “We set up the Financial Services Authority believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake. We didn’t understand just how entangled things were.” And that’s event before he got onto the “responsibility” bit. I’ll repeat it, just in case it didn’t sink in the first

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes it to the councils

Ignore what your council is telling you. So says no less a personage than the Prime Minister of our country, speaking at one of his freewheelin’ roadshow events this afternoon. Cameron may have been referring specifically to the red tape being wrapped around Royal Wedding street parties, but it’s still a pretty pugnacious point for a PM to make. Here’s the full quotation, courtesy of the superb PoliticsHome: “I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don’t listen to people who say ‘it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you