Society

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 1 November – 6 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

David Blackburn

All is not quiet of the welfare front

Welfare is fast becoming this parliament’s Ypres Salient – strategically critical, it is constantly contested. £20bn on social housing, £100bn on out of work benefits and £billions on universal benefits: welfare reform is where spending cuts are most conspicuous. A rhetorical confrontation is building and various tactical dispositions are being made. The Staggers’ George Eaton has an analysis that assumes that Labour’s current wedge-strategy (which I critiqued here) is not working because it is avowedly sectional, privileging those who might be caricatured as ‘undeserving’. Eaton argues that Labour must ‘launch a defence of the hard pressed majority’; those who work but still stand to lose, particularly families. Indeed, Westminster’s number-crunchers

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Labour’s Housing Benefit U-Turn

Hats off to Tom Harris for pointing out the obvious: comparing the coalition’s canges to housing benefit to Balkan ethnic cleansing or Auschwitz is neither big nor clever. Points too for reminding us that the Labour manifesto this year included this passage: Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state. Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford. How many “ordinary working families” (however they may be categorised) can afford to pay £25,000 in rent each year? Precious few, I submit. Granted, the coalition’s plans

David Blackburn

Confronting terror at home

As Julian Glover notes, Jack Straw let the cat out of the bag. ‘Never, ever, downplay the possible consequences,’ he says. The coverage of the recent bomb plot has largely ignored that it was foiled. That, by any definition, is a success, a vindication of our security services. Independent inspector Lord Carlile is right that improvements can be made to the bomb detection apparatus in airports and targeting security at the source of a threat – i.e. packages from the Yemen rather than package holidays. The previous government would have used this plot to introduce another wave of invasive legislation – never, ever, downplay the possible consequences to justify I.D.

Sunday

Martin Bright

The fault-line at the heart of Liberal Conservativism

Andrew Rawnsley has done well to identify the problems the coalition is having deciding its line on national security. His column today is a colourful evocation of the deadlock David Cameron and Nick Clegg face over  control orders and 28-day detention without charge. He calls it “alarmed semi-paralysis”, which is about right. Now they have seen the secret evidence and had the briefings from the intelligence services they somehow don’t feel so liberal any more. It is the sign of a mature democracy that it favours the liberty of its citizens over the control of them. But it also a lot easier to say you would be prepared to take risks

Sathnam Sanghera

MUSIC: Spotify Sunday – From Nina to Corinne

The Times’s Sathnam Sanghera is one of Britain’s most acclaimed columnists and the author of the wonderful volume of autobiography The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton – and we are thrilled to welcome him as the latest contributor to Spotify Sunday. You can follow Sathnam on Twitter here and visit his website here – Scott Jordan Harris I can’t make my mind up about Spotify. On the one hand, for someone who grew up making mix tapes by recording music from the radio – lying in wait for certain tracks to be broadcast like a detective on a stakeout, and producing compilations

Saturday

The Spectator

Barometer | 30 October 2010

Exit stage right A new far-right movement, the English Defence League, held protests in Leicester and London. Postwar British history is full of the corpses of failed far-right parties. — The League of Empire Loyalists was a neo-Nazi party which split in 1957 over whether to allow Jews to join. Why any would want to was a mystery. — The National Socialist Movement was founded in 1962 but split two years later after two of its leaders, Colin Jordan and John Tyndall, fought over the same woman. — The British Movement was formed from the remains of the National Socialist Movement in 1968. It won 2.5% of the vote in

The Spectator

Letters | 30 October 2010

God and taxes Sir: I was surprised that we won the advance vote in the Spectator debate over faith schools (‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’, 13 October). Ten years ago we would have lost it resoundingly, and it demonstrates the massive change in attitude over the last decade. I suspect this is partly because of the Bradford riots and the subsequent report on how the school system was one factor exacerbating the ‘parallel lives’ many there were leading. This was reinforced by the 7/7 London bombings; and even though none of the terrorists attended a faith school, the attack highlighted the dangers of religious extremism and sparked concern

Miriam Gross

Diary – 30 October 2010

The other day my husband and I went to Winter’s Bone, the much praised (overpraised, we thought) film set in Missouri. Both of us have normal hearing but neither of us caught more than about half of the dialogue. Naturally, we didn’t fully grasp what was going on. It was a familiar experience. In many films now, as well as in much television drama, the sound is muffled and the actors seem to mumble and slur their words. No doubt this is in the interest of authenticity. But what about comprehensibility? Plots today, particularly of thrillers, are hard enough to follow; not being able to hear properly makes it almost

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 30 October 2010

John Hutton, before he settled down to the blameless task of reporting on public-sector pensions, was accused of writing poetry. He did not deny the practice but did reject the authorship of a verse about Gordon Brown, when he was still prime minister: ‘At Downing Street/ Upon the stair/ I met a man who wasn’t Blair./ He wasn’t Blair again today./ Oh how I wish he’d go away.’ Mr Hutton said: ‘I would write better poetry.’ But I have not had the pleasure of seeing any of his since. One politician who has published poetry recently is Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian who is President of the European Council. In

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 30 October 2010

Sometimes certain words become morally compulsory. Current examples include ‘sustainable’ and ‘transparent’. A new phrase coming up the track is ‘energy security’. It is stated that we risk the energy security of the United Kingdom by being so dependent on foreign oil, gas or nuclear-generated energy. How much better, it is also stated, to have our own sources of energy like wind-power and tide-power. I wonder if this is right, even if — which is highly improbable — such alternative sources could suffice. It is true, in principle, that suppliers can decide to cut off their customers, but the natural tendency of an international energy market is the opposite. It

Robin Oakley

The turf: Man with the Midas touch

Nobody communicates his pleasure in winning with a more all-embracing bonhomie than professional gambler Harry Findlay. Labrador puppies presented with a dog treat are a model of restraint by comparison. Even so, the degree of Harry’s enthusiasm as I presented him with the trophy earned by his Inler in the Barry Hills Biography Stakes at Doncaster on Saturday came as a surprise. It turned out that his joy in accepting the capacious ice bucket, the £7,546 he will share with the Sangster family and a free copy of Frankincense and More was just a little supplemented by learning that he held eight of the 14 winning tickets in that day’s

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 October 2010

Only one thing is worse than noisy neighbours and that is neighbours who are almost noisy. Loud music and uproarious parties are covered by the law. Someone walking about all night in the room over your head is not. I have been unlucky in this arena. The owner of the flat above me moved to Australia a couple of years ago and since then her property has been rented out to a succession of what I suppose the letting agent tells her are young professionals — students in their early 20s who attend the viewing claiming they are two City workers, then cram in as many friends as possible to

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 30 October 2010

I’ve two convictions for drink-driving and I might have had a third a couple of years ago when I hit a bus. Fortunately, I was injured and taken unconscious to hospital so there was no opportunity for me to blow in the bag. The rule back then was that a person had to be awake enough to give his or consent to having a sample of blood removed for analysis at the police laboratory. This rule has since been changed, I believe, and a police doctor can help himself to a syringe of blood from your inert, unconscious body. I must have been out for several hours because when I

Taki

High life | 30 October 2010

Throughout his life my friend Porfirio Rubirosa made about $5 to 10 million out of women, and he married three of the richest in the world. Flor de Oro Trujillo, only daughter of the Dominican strongman; Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress; and Barbara Hutton, the original poor little rich girl. Rubi spent the money he earned in the bedroom on the good things in life, mostly other women, strings of polo ponies, and two very nice houses in France. He died in the early hours of 6 July 1965, when he hit a tree driving home from a nightclub in his Ferrari. We had been celebrating a polo victory together

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Teen Streets

It was around midnight last Friday night that I first became aware something was going on in the street outside my house. I could hear shouting and screaming, but it was the noise of over-exuberant teenagers rather than an escalating argument. I pressed my face up against the patterned glass panel by my front door and, sure enough, I could make out about a dozen teens horsing around on the other side of the road. Most of them were clutching bottles of beer. Like most middle-aged men in this situation, I was torn between a certain amount of sympathy and wanting to call the police. I’m not such an old

David Blackburn

Cameron’s euro battle is just beginning

David Cameron sold himself a hospital pass in Europe this week. His failure to secure a budget freeze has revealed that Britain’s clout has been wildly exaggerated. The likely 2.9 percent budget increase is mildly inconvenient for Cameron politically, but it is immaterial in the grand scheme of the next round of budget discussions and the mounting wrangle about the Lisbon treaty. He will have to compromise, as he did this week. He made some ground, finding allies to resist an untrammelled treaty change – the Irish, the Dutch, the Danes, the Czechs and the Poles. The biggest prize will be Sarkozy, whose antipathy towards Merkel is arch – the

Martin Bright

The unofficial parliamentary sketch writer of the year award

For the second year running, my politics class at City University has voted for Ann Treneman as the best parliamentary sketch writer (Quentin Letts won in 2008). I like to have an early session on the parliamentary sketch writer’s art. This is especially useful for foreign students, to whom the concept of the sketch is alien. Indeed, one of my students this year got quite angry. “I just don’t understand this,” she said. “It’s not funny, it’s not clever. I don’t like it.” She could be forgiven for being mystified by Simon Hoggart’s sketch on Transport Questions this week, which was based on children’s classic, The Railway Children, “with twinkle-eyed stationmaster

David Blackburn

Housing benefit reform is a Good Thing

Dressed with his effortless prose, Matthew Parris has a point (£) that proves why he is the leading commentator of the last two decades. Housing benefit reform is his subject and he urges his readers reject the legends that have accrued around the issue – not Boris, not Polly Toynbee, not shrill councils, not rapacious landlords and definitely not the government. No one, he says, has the numbers but there are several certainties: ‘The outcomes may not prove nearly as brutal as this week’s predictions. What (as I asked above) can we know? We know that comparisons with Paris are ludicrous. All of our big cities are speckled with very

Mary Killen

Dear mary

Q. I was staying recently with a very old girlfriend and her mother at her mother’s house in the country in England and was given my old girlfriend’s bedroom for the weekend on the upper attic floor. I suspect that the room had not been used for a long time. The house is not centrally heated and is rather musty. I came away from a wonderful weekend very badly bitten by bedbugs and the bites are still causing me discomfort three weeks later. What should I do? Should I tell her so she can throw away the old mattress and fumigate the room and prevent any other guests from suffering