Society

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Does Davis have a point about grammar schools?

David Davis has been relatively quiet for the past couple of months, perhaps nursing a hangover after this. But he’s back making a seismic racket today, with an article on the coalition’s social mobility report for PoliticsHome. He dwells on the education side of things, and his argument amounts to this: that the government’s school reforms — from free schools to the pupil premium — will not do much to improve social mobility, and may actually make the situation worse. Michael Gove may be praised as “intelligent, dedicated and wholly admirable,” but there is enough gelignite elsewhere in the piece to ruffle some coalition feathers. I thought CoffeeHousers may have

Peter Hoskin

Your five-point guide to the coalition’s social mobility report

The government’s new report into social mobility is, it tells us, all about “opening doors” and “breaking barriers” — but it’s probably taxing attention spans too. 89 pages of text and graphs, offset by the same pea soup shade of green that’s used for all these coalition documents. To save you from wading through it all, here’s our quick five-point summary: 1) The same story… Much of the report, as James suggested earlier, is familiar territory. After all, the coalition’s two most developed policy areas — welfare and education — are precisely designed to improve opportunities for the least well-off; so here they are again, restated and slightly reframed. The

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Poor Bloody Infantry Faces More Friendly Fire?

In opposition Liam Fox boasted he could cut the Ministry of Defence by 25% without there being any impact on “frontline” troops. The confirmation that there will be 17,000 fewer men and women in uniform by this parliament’s end mocks that promise. To govern is to choose, for sure, but the scale of these cuts leads one to wonder, again, what kind of capability will be left once they are completed. For now, the Gurkhas excepted, the infantry has been spared. But there are already indications that its luck, if you can call it that after all the reorganisations of recent years, will run out when the next “tranche” of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Short term solutions to Britain’s long-term education problem

The most important planks of the coalition’s social mobility strategy are its education and welfare reforms. Raising the standards of state education in this country will give far more children a chance to get on in life. While reducing the number of children brought up in workless households will, hopefully, halt the development of a hereditary non-working, benefit-dependent class.   But these measures will take time to work. Which raises the question of what should be done in the meantime?   One thing would be allowing academics to use discretion in admissions. We don’t expect the England cricket selectors to pick the side based solely on county averages and we

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s Guantanamo Failure

The decision, announced yesterday, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will not stand trial in New York or any other corner of the United States hardly came as a surprise. He will be tried before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay instead. The Obama administration gave up fighting for its own policy a long time ago. Sometimes retreats are sensible. Sometimes it’s necessary to acknowledge blunders or superior firepower. But even allowing for those considerations – and a Congress* more than happy to demagogue the issue – there’s a tinge of shame to this retreat. Power need not corrupt but it always changes those who hold it. Obama’s approach to terrorism and

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Explaining the Coalition’s NHS Reforms in Two Sentences.

I’m sure James is right and that the government’s NHS problems – a political difficulty that may also be a policy conundrum – ensure that the NHS will be “rewarded” with more money and the coalition will use increased funding as a defence against criticisms of its reforms. It matters little that this accepts Labour’s eternal argument that spending=investment=love=ponies-for-all. The NHS is not to be subjected to the usual rules of either policy or politics. Meanwhile, in his Mail on Sunday column James had this: Lansley’s main problem is that hardly anyone understands what he is trying to do. As one colleague laments: ‘Andrew knows everything but can’t explain it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lansley faces the music alone

A weary-looking Andrew Lansley has just finished answering MPs’ questions following his statement announcing a delay to the coalition’s NHS reforms. The statement left us none the wiser as to what is up for review in the listening exercise the coalition is about to undertake. What it did demonstrate was both Lansley’s encyclopedic knowledge of the NHS: he seemed to know the GP who was leading the consortium in the area of every MP who questioned him: and his inability to clearly explain the purpose of his reforms. Indeed, if it had not been for a question from John Redwood the point that these reforms are meant to free up

David Blackburn

17,000 servicemen to go

The MoD has released its plan for redundancies. The numbers and plan were leaked at the weekend, but here are some details: 1) There will be 17,000 redundancies – 7,000 from the army and 5,000 each from navy and RAF. The first tranche will be notified by commanding officers in September 2011. 2) Some of the reductions are expected to be achieved through not filling vacancies and slowing recruitment, but it is estimated that 11,000 jobs will be lost by April 2015. 3) This is a compulsory programme, but the MoD hopes that the majority of losses can be met through volunteers. Volunteers will serve a 6-month notice period, non-volunteers

Simon Reich

Goodbye hegemony?

President Obama’s speech on the intervention in Libya served to highlight a trend in US foreign policy: America no longer leads; it selectively sponsors. He avoided the idea that the US initiated the intervention in Libya. This was not accidental. Obama was rebuffed in his efforts to push prescriptions on environmental policy in Copenhagen, share the military burden in Afghanistan and deliver economic coordination at successive G20 meetings. He has discovered that America finds it easier to play a crucial supportive role in sponsoring global initiatives rather than set the agenda. The American public, and many of its politicians, are blithely unaware that American legitimacy has nose-dived around the world,

David Blackburn

Losing control | 4 April 2011

The future of the Health and Social Care Bill is a test of Craig Oliver. For months there has been a steady drip of quiet critiques of the bill; but some Liberal Democrat grandees have suddenly broken cover and burst into open dissent. David Owen and Shirley Williams have called for the bill’s implementation to be slowed and for consultation to re-open. Both are especially concerned that private sector involvement will expose the NHS to competition law, which they believe would be detrimental to the NHS. As Williams put it: “If it looks as if it’s simply part of what’s becoming a private market we’ll be slap-bang in the middle

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hardly a model of good government

What is going on with the government’s health reforms is highly unusual. Normally, once a bill has gone through second reading and committee stage in the Commons there are very few changes made to it. But the coalition is considering some fairly significant changes to the Health and Social Care Bill in a bid to make it more politically palatable. It is hardly a model of good government.   This state of affairs provides ample opportunity for Ed Miliband to land some blows on the coalition, as he did in this morning’s speech delivered — symbolically — at the RSA, the new home of Blair’s former policy chief Matthew Taylor.

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 4 April – 10 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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Parlour games

Here’s a game I often play on a Sunday afternoon. Look through the weekend’s papers and pick out people you would never ever want to meet, under any circumstances. The “Weekenders” slot in The Guardian is usually good for this. But there are plenty of gems hidden away elsewhere, such as this, from the Sunday Times property section, about the Newman family who have bought two derelict railway cottages on the Kent coast. Richard is a “film-maker” and Sarah is an “interior designer”. Here’s the sentence I liked best: “The couple, both 39, set about creating a second home for themselves and their children, Calypso, 6, and Emerson, 3.” The

David Blackburn

Rescuing Lansley’s reforms

The fate of Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms is attracting apocalyptic headlines. A report in the Times (£) declares that a ‘last-ditch’ salvage is underway; the FT carries an editorial in similar tone, and the Guardian devotes its front page to David Cameron’s attempt to save face. Over at Conservative Home, Jonathan Isaby relates how the strategy will unfold. The principles of the bill will remain intact, but it will be delayed using the ‘natural pause’ in parliamentary procedure. During this time, the details of the bill be scrutinised and the government will also use this time to reiterate its view that these reforms are necessary for the NHS to manage

Sunday

Martin Bright

Why the Single Work Programme is not the Big Society

So finally the media is waking up to the reality of the government’s new welfare to work scheme. The Single Work Programme (SWP), it turns out, is a top-down contractual model dreamed up in Whitehall and imposed with no consultation with any of the people who will be providing or receiving the services. It is designed to replace the plethora of little-understood New Labour work creation schemes and aims to simplify the process. Payment by results means that the companies who have won the contracts will only be paid once they have proved they can find people sustainable jobs. Patrick Butler’s Cuts Blog in the Guardian has a brilliant dissection

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coalition is in a mess of its own making over the NHS

The NHS is, as Nigel Lawson once remarked, the new national religion of this country. This makes it difficult to discuss the subject in a rational matter and any attempt to reform it is likely to run into its own Pilgrimage of Grace as Andrew Lansley and the coalition are discovering. The government’s problem is that it can’t do a simple u-turn. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, Cameron can’t shelve this scheme without bringing his own judgement into question. Once Cameron and Clegg signed the introduction to the white paper setting out these reforms, they crossed the Rubicon. So instead the coalition is left trying to tinker and

Ian Rankin

50 Years of The Rolling Stones

This year marks 50 years since the formation of The Rolling Stones and, to begin a short series of posts in their honour, we are pleased to welcome renowned novelist – and almost equally renowned Stones fan – Ian Rankin  back to The Spectator Arts Blog. When I first heard the Rolling Stones, I hated them. The album was Let It Bleed. It belonged to my sister’s boyfriend. He had paid one pound-nineteen-and-eleven for it at a record shop in Kirkcaldy. It came with a poster, and the sleeve was interesting.  I’d no idea who Delia Smith was, but she’d done a good job of that cake. I was a

David Blackburn

Trouble with the big society

A gaggle of academics have written to the Observer to condemn the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for accepting £100m from the government. The AHRC is conducting research into the big society, and the allegation is that the settlement was conditional, an allegation which is denied.  Doubtless the 69 signatories are dons of the tweedily conservative variety, but their objections perhaps explain why Cameron’s flagship policy is so mistrusted. They write: ‘When academic research is used to promote party political ideologies its quality and value decline. It also threatens democracy and the constitution. While academic work may be partly paid for out of public funds, this ought not to

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 2 April 2011

Let Libya split Sir: Back in the days of Good King Idris, I did archaeological fieldwork in Cyrenaica in which I traced the main water supply of ancient Ptolemais from its source to the city’s cisterns. I came to know my patch pretty well and I feel that Peter Jones (‘The two Libyas’, 26 March) has got it right. The most sensible course would be to return to the original frontier between Cyrenaica and the rest of the country, as the present state of Libya was a botched affair thrown together in the wake of the Italian defeat in the second world war. The immediate problem as we all know

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The art of giving | 2 April 2011

The investor Jonathan Ruffer reveals why he is spending £15 million to buy 12 great paintings from the C of E – and give them back ‘It’s the pearl of great price,’ says Jonathan Ruffer. Like the merchant in the Gospel, he is selling all that he hath. With the proceeds, he is buying the 12 Zurbaran paintings of Jacob and his Brothers at Auckland Castle, the palace of the Bishop of Durham. And when he has bought them from the Church of England, he will give them back, keeping them in the castle, thus bestowing them upon the people of the north-east in perpetuity. The price is £15 million.