Society

Tuesday

David Blackburn

A Royal Holiday

Kate Middleton and Prince William will marry on Friday 29th April at Westminster Abbey. I can scarcely contain my indifference, even at this early stage; but congratulations to them all the same. Number 10 has confirmed that the occasion will be marked by a public holiday. There is, you see, nothing like a right Royal bash and the darling buds of May to dispel the privations of austerity ahead of awkward elections and a referendum on 5th May. Then again, an Arctic breeze and intermittent hail will have the opposite effect.  

David Blackburn

Coulson to stay

The indefatigable Paul Waugh reports that Andy Coulson plans to break Tom Watson’s delicate heart: the government’s communications director is not going to resign for whatever it is that he is alleged to have done. Pity poor Tom. Coulson may be an anonymous figure, certainly by comparison with Alistair Campbell, and the government may have problems articulating a growth strategy. But Coulson’s survival will warm the cockles of Tory MPs, who rely on him to uphold those issues the leadership ignores. Witness Coulson’s savage reprimand for Crispin Blunt over the prisoners’ entertainment plans. As Paul notes, Labour does not have a guru to match him at present, and it is

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The End of the Party?

Following this post on Fianna Fail, a Dublin correspondent cautions against underestimating the stubbornness of their hold upon the people: Fianna Fail will rise again. For two reasons: i) Fine Gael and Labour may need the support of lots of other parties to get anything done. The scope for internal disagreement is immense. It is likely that they will lose popular support very quickly if they preside over savage cuts, which they will have to do; ii) For those of us old enough to remember, Fianna Fail acted like thugs in opposition. They opposed everything (including the Anglo-Irish Agreement) and whipped up popular hysteria against the government over the smallest

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Monarchy is Better Than Republicanism, Part CXVI

Meanwhile, elsewhere in whimsy the nice folks at Foreign Policy asked me to write a piece about Prince William’s engagement. Somehow this ended up with another modest proposal: the United States should ditch the Presidency, join the Commonwealth and become a parliamentary democracy. You know, like Canada. They have the trappings of royalty already, but none of the benefits: Last year, Peggy Noonan, the American conservative commentator and former presidential speechwriter, complained that President Barack Obama lacked some of the presence that a good head of state requires. She imagines “a good president as sitting at the big desk and reaching out with his long arms and holding on to

The Spectator

Introducing Nick Cohen

The Spectator is delighted to welcome Nick Cohen as our new guest blogger. You can read Nick’s first post here and his blog can be found at new.spectator.co.uk/nickcohen. He needs no introduction, but Cohen is a columnist of both the Observer and Standpoint magazine. He has also written numerous books, including What’s Left?, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2008. It’s a pleasure to have him on board.

David Blackburn

Cowen will seek a dissolution next year

There has been much consternation and intrigue swirling around both Dublin and Westminster this afternoon about the near-collapse of the governing coalition in Ireland. The Greens, who support Brian Cowen’s Fianna Fáil-led government, pulled out; seeking a dissolution in the hope that it might save their skins from the fate that is likely (though not certain) to befall Fianna Fáil. If the government had collapsed, then IMF would have postponed the bailout. At least now Cowen can formulate a monetary plan, hopefully under the oversight of Ireland’s international creditors, to free the country from its current extremis.   

Simon Less

Carbon omissions

With the latest round of international climate change negotiations at Cancun less than a week away, Policy Exchange has published research showing that the UK’s and EU’s performance in reducing carbon emissions is not quite what it seems.   According to the official measure, used to determine performance against the Kyoto agreement, the UK’s emissions have fallen.  The UK is set to exceed its Kyoto target of 12.5 percent reduction from 1990 levels.  But, in our new report Carbon Omissions, Policy Exchange has estimated that total UK carbon consumption emissions in fact rose by 30 percent between 1990 and 2006.   The reason is that we import and consume a

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 22 November – 28 November 

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

David Blackburn

Gove dilutes schools funding pledge

Last week, the FT revealed that Michael Gove was planning to introduce direct funding of schools, a move that weaken local authorities’ grip on education funding. Theoretically, it is a central component of Gove’s plan to free schools from local authorities’ bureaucratic control in a bid to improve standards by creating a quasi-market. It was, as Gove’s aides have been at pains to express, ‘exciting’. But Gove denied the story on Andrew Marr this morning: the legislation will contain no such clause. The FT responded this afternoon, proving that Gove has diluted the legislation. The original White Paper contained this emphatic sentence: ‘Local authorities will pass the national funding formula

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How to prevent schools from being hijacked by extremists

The coalition plan to let parents, teachers and voluntary groups set up schools and be paid by the state for every pupil they educate has the potential to transform education for the better in this country. But this policy also requires the government to prevent these freedoms from being abused by extremist groups who want to teach hate. The revelations on tomorrow night’s Panorama about weekend schools that use Saudi textbooks that ask pupils to list the “reprehensible”  qualities of Jews and teach the Protocols of Zion as fact are  a reminder of how serious this threat is. A new report from Policy Exchange, a think tank that has done

Ian Rankin

MUSIC: Spotify Sunday – North of the Border

Ian Rankin is quite rightly renowned as one of Britain’s leading novelists – but, as anyone who follows his Twitter feed will know, he deserves equal fame as one of our leading music obsessives. We are thrilled and honoured to publish his Spotify Sunday selection of the best Scottish albums of 2010. – Scott Jordan Harris It’s that time again: emails from newspapers and magazines asking me to contribute to their Books of the Year round-ups.  Sadly, I’m seldom asked about my favourite albums of the past year, yet I spend a lot of time pondering this annual list.  And this year, the majority of music I’ve really liked has

Saturday

The Spectator

Barometer | 20 November 2010

Trouble with stags In addition to next year’s royal wedding, Prince William will have to organise the royal stag party. William got into trouble in 2008 for flying a Chinook helicopter from Lincolnshire to his cousin Peter Phillips’s stag party on the Isle of Wight — at a cost of £8,716 to the public purse. In 1981 Prince Charles announced that he would hold a fireworks party in Hyde Park in lieu of a stag do — but he slipped off to meet friends at White’s. Prince Andrew was less successful at setting a decoy for his stag party in 1986: the press tracked him down, thwarting a plan by

The Spectator

Letters | 20 November 2010

Reasons to stay Sir: While I agree with much of Fraser Nelson’s analysis on the impact of higher taxes on total tax revenue (‘Osborne’s tax exiles’, 13 November), he misses one key aspect of the Chancellor’s tax reforms: the extension of entrepreneurs’ relief on capital gains tax from £1 million to £5 million. In September 2008, having worked for the Saatchi brothers for 21 years, I left my comfortable, well-paid and secure job to create a virtual global agency via the internet. Given the nature of my business model I could locate in Bahrain and pay no income tax. But the opportunity to build capital value from my new business

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 November 2010

‘Please, please, do not touch the Sky cables.’ That was my unequivocal instruction to the builder as he set about repainting my living room. My furniture was piled in the centre of the floor covered with dustsheets. But poking out from the dust sheets were the wires coming from the TV, still connected to the Sky box, from which a long line of white cable wended its way to the wall. ‘But you can reconnect them,’ he tried to reason with me. ‘You can pull the wires out and put them back in.’ I told him to get a grip of himself. This was crazy talk. Once you mess with

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 November 2010

Last week I had a nibble. A woman on the dating website sent an email saying she thought I looked nice and what did I think of her photo? Cow Girl’s headshot was blurred and I think she might have been wearing a wig. She was looking over her shoulder at the camera and looking saucy. The wig, if a wig it was, was very black and full and lustrous, like a Halloween party wig. I said I thought she looked very nice too. Sexy. Then I read her profile, at the end of which was a categorical statement, amounting almost to a warning, that she was looking for a

Taki

High life | 20 November 2010

Tony Judt was a very clever and learned Brit who taught in the Big Bagel and who died last August of that dreaded Lou Gehrig disease. He was extremely brave until the end, writing and lecturing from his wheelchair, and so convincing was he that some nice guys managed to ban him from speaking just before the end because of his opposition to Israeli policies. (They called him an anti-Semite, although Judt was Jewish, which is par for the course.) Judt wrote an essay about ‘My endless New York’, which was a gem. At times I think only foreigners can catch the city’s pulse, New York, of course, not being

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: The dark side of Freedom of Information

As a journalist, I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Freedom of Information Act. It seemed like a powerful tool for holding our political masters to account. However, now that I’m trying to set up a free school the boot is on the other foot. By common consent, the point at which the school becomes real is when the funding agreement is signed. This is the contract between the Secretary of State for Education and the charitable trust that owns and controls the school. Until earlier this year, such trusts were exempt from the scope of the FOI Act but that was changed by an amendment to the Academies Bill

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 20 November 2010

Q. When we lived in the country we had a close friend virtually next door. We always dropped in and out of each other’s houses without ringing first; one is always ‘ready’ for visitors in the country in a way one is not in London. The problem is that this man, who we absolutely adore, now drops in on us in London, still without ringing first. I don’t like to put pressure on him but even a few moments’ notice would be good. How should I tackle this, Mary? — A.L., London NW3 A. Next time you let him in cry ‘Thank goodness it’s you! We’ve got a terrible problem

The Spectator

A sacred bond

The royal family has a gift for laying on a wedding just when the nation’s spirits most need lifting. The Queen’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947 helped to rejuvenate a nation exhausted by war and demoralised by rationing. The wedding of Princess Anne to Mark Phillips in 1973 aroused extraordinary excitement in a Britain disfigured by vicious industrial disputes (and polyester flares). The marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981 distracted the public’s attention from street riots and shocking unemployment figures; indeed, with hindsight, the near hysteria it provoked was an ill omen. Had Prince William popped the question to Kate Middleton during the boom years, their

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 November 2010

Home The engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton was announced. The Prince proposed last month in Kenya and gave his fiancée the engagement ring belonging to his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. The wedding is to take place next year. Britain must ‘sort out’ its economy if it wants to ‘carry weight in the world’, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. Mr Cameron decided after all against employing a personal photographer at public expense. Legal aid will no longer be available in divorce, welfare benefit and school exclusion appeals, Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, announced, in plans to save £350