Society

Tuesday

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

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 11 April – 17 April

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

Beyond the frontline

Labour’s cartography department has been hard at work all weekend to produce this. It is, lest you haven’t heard Yvette Cooper today, an “interactive web-map” of the job losses announced by police forces so far, all across the country. You can interact with it in ways that include clicking to view a larger version. So far as web campaigning goes, this is probably fertile ground for the Opposition. No one likes the idea of more crime — and “more crime” is often conflated with “fewer bobbies” in the public debate. Yet Labour’s point is diluted, somewhat, by one simple fact: that their former Home Secretary refused to guarantee that police

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Meanwhile, in America…

We really oughtn’t let the weekend pass without some mention of political events across the Atlantic. As you’ve probably heard, a US government shutdown was avoided on Friday evening, and all thanks to a budget compromise which saw Barack Obama slash a cool $38 billion from his spending plans. Although the debate over who has credited or discredited themselves is still ongoing, it’s striking that the Republicans — urged on by the Tea Party corps — achieved around two-thirds of the cuts that they demanded. Yet disaster, or at least the prospect of it, has still not been averted. The Tea Party has already claimed several fiscal scalps along the

Peter Hoskin

Lamb volunteers for the slaughter

We’ll try to get the video later, but, for now, a transcript of Norman Lamb’s appearance on the Politics Show will have to do (UPDATE: video added above). Here we had a very unusual political moment: an assistant whip, and adviser to Nick Clegg, not only calling for changes to government policy, but also threatening to resign should they not happen. His main argument was that the NHS reforms should be dealt with more slowly: “I think it would be a crying shame if that really important principle [giving GPs more power and responsibility] was lost because we rushed the reform process and got it wrong. My real concern is

Will Mount

Spotify Sunday: The Stones in the Sixties

The Rolling Stones have a credibility problem. It’s nothing to do with their longevity or their wealth. It’s to do with their lead singer. Granted, he is a great frontman with a distinctive voice — but his strutting persona and his dancing-by-numbers gives the impression of a politician going through the gears in a speech to the party conference.   According to no less an authority than Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair was so star-struck by Mick Jagger at their first  meeting that he blurted out, ‘I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me’. That Tony Blair now looks like he could be Mick Jagger’s dad doesn’t change the

Peter Hoskin

Lansley fights back, sorta

Pause, listen, engage and … push back. That just about sums up Andrew Lansley’s article for the Sunday Express today, as well as the government’s general effort to reconstruct and repackage its shaky NHS reforms. Which is to say, the Health Secretary makes sure to mix reassurance (“There is no more important institution in this country than the NHS”) with resolve (“The NHS is not some kind of museum”) for his Sunday sermon. He dwells on the failures of the Labour years, particularly the proliferation of bureaucrats ahead of doctors and nurses. And he even suggests — although one should always be wary of this sort of numerical soothsaying —

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Even Goons Should Be Allowed to Burn Books

As a general rule if you’re minded to burn books you’re probably trotting along the road towards losing whatever argument you may be having. You also look a fool. That was true of the nutters who burned The Satanic Verses and it’s true of Terry Jones and true of this chap too: A senior member of the BNP who burned a copy of the Qur’an in his garden has been arrested following an investigation by the Observer. Footage of the burning shows Sion Owens, 40, from south Wales and a candidate for the forthcoming Welsh Assembly elections, soaking the Qur’an in kerosene and setting fire to it. A video clip

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Working-Class People Can Like Opera Too, You Know

Brother Korski is right to draw attention to Rachel Sylvester’s interview (£) with Unite’s Len McCluskey and right too to note that his defence of Castro’s island gulag* is indefensible. But there’s more that’s wrong with it than that and not all of that is McCluskey’s fault. Consider these lines: He would choose tea and scones at Fortnum and Mason over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled room. He is a fan of the romantic poets — “I love Byron, Keats and Shelley, I’m a romantic at heart” — and takes a feminist interpretation of Christina Rossetti. He is a theatre aficionado — “I do like Shakespeare, I’ve probably seen

Saturday

Charlotte Metcalf

Heavenly simplicity

Borgo Egnazia in Puglia opened last year and immediately gained a reputation as one of Europe’s most spectacular holiday resorts, not least thanks to its cookery school under the tutelage of the resort’s executive chef, Mario Musoni. Until recently Musoni had his own Michelin-starred restaurant outside Milan. When I asked why he didn’t seem unhappy to be uprooted from his hometown relatively late in life, he grinned and replied: ‘This is where the best food is. Milan’s vegetables come from down here. Puglia is the garden of Italy.’ Indeed, Borgo Egnazia is surrounded by orchards, olive groves and vegetables thrusting up from rich soil. There is also a daily supply

The Spectator

Letters | 9 April 2011

Expensive manners Sir: Ivor Roberts says that Oxford University is ‘taking the very best, whatever their background’ — and is not to blame if state schools no longer produce the very best (‘Oxford under siege’, 2 April). And yet studies have found that state-school pupils perform better at Oxford than their privately educated peers, relative to GCSE results. When his university is admitting as many state-school duds as private ones, we’ll know that its admissions tutors are no longer swayed by expensive manners at interview. For now, that remains open to doubt. Benjamin Rockbird London SE15 Cuts tactics Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 2 April) quotes the late, great Auberon Waugh

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 9 April 2011

Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to  President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not only by Muslims abroad but also by people at home to whom it was self-evident that crusades were bad things. How quickly fashions in language change. Until recently a crusade was self-evidently good. Harold Wilson, bound for Downing Street, told the Labour party conference in 1962: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 9 April 2011

Q. We normally drive guests departing our house in France to our nearest station for trains connecting them to Eurostar. One departing guest, an attractive divorcee, had half an hour to kill, so I suggested a croissant and coffee, which meant lugging her very heavy case over to the café and back again to the station where, as I sank exhaustedly onto the bench with the case between us, my elbow activated a battery-driven item in the suitcase. Toothbrush? — I wondered — or something of a more intimate nature? Was it polite to ignore the buzzing, and feign deafness? Or should I have mentioned it, risking some embarrassed scrabbling

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Reading between the lines

On Tuesday I received an invitation from the Women’s Institute asking me if I’d be prepared to participate in a debate at their annual general meeting in Liverpool on 8 June. They want me to speak ‘in opposition to a motion urging central government to maintain support for local libraries’. You have to take your hat off to the Labour party spin machine. It has successfully propagated the myth that the government is directly responsible for the closure of local libraries. In my reply to the WI, I said I’d be delighted to speak in its debate but pointed out it was a bit nonsensical to urge the government to

Melissa Kite

Real life | 9 April 2011

Nothing makes me want to move to Cobham more than a letter from Lambeth Council that begins like this: ‘Dear householder: We have made changes to our recycling and refuse services. These changes are the result of a waste strategy that we have been developing over the last two years with your help.’ I hadn’t realised that I had been helping Lambeth Council with anything, least of all a waste strategy. In fact, I would go so far as to say I had been under the impression that I had been very deliberately trying not to help Lambeth Council with anything, especially its waste strategy. But apparently this is not

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 April 2011

After Cow Girl abruptly terminated our relationship, there was a long radio silence between us, during which time I was fairly demoralised. I’d thought I was lovable. If anyone could be bothered to look hard enough, or dig deep enough, I’d always thought, they’d find gold. But Cow Girl had struck no pay dirt, knew with an old sixty-niner’s instinct that it wasn’t worth looking any further, and she had got out with an almost indecent haste. The characters in Sex and the City had a handy mathematical formula for calculating how long it takes to recover from a broken relationship. Work out how long the relationship lasted, they said,