Society

Saturday

Kevin Spacey

Design for giving

The question I’m most often asked is this. How did I end up living and working in south London instead of doing what most reasonably successful movie actors tend to do — sitting around a kidney-shaped swimming pool in Beverly Hills, sipping cocktails and collecting cheques? The question I most often ask myself is a little different. How did a kid from South Orange, New Jersey, end up being artistic director at the Old Vic in London? The answers to the two questions are interrelated. I work at the Old Vic because I believe passionately that theatre can help society. And the reason I believe that so strongly is that

Interconnect

Competition: Take two

In Competition No. 2669 you were invited to take one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and recast it in the style of the author of your choice. This was an exceptionally strong field, with winners enough to fill several columns. Honourable mentions to G.M. Davis, Mary Holtby, Laura Garratt and Margaret Howell, and £30 each to those printed below. Catherine Tufariello bags the extra fiver. Miss Juliet Capulet, you are the sun, With that sheen on your skin and your braids half     undone! I’m a fool on a cliff, and you give me a shove— Is it any surprise that I’ve fallen in love?   Your daddy looked daggers all night

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 23 October 2010

Bangkok ‘Any Thai man who is not married is gay,’ said a Thai woman to me. ‘You could say that about many places,’ I observed. ‘Yes, but 80 per cent of Thai men are also effeminate,’ said a second Thai woman in the room. We were waiting to see a top politician. There were no local men present. I’ve never heard people complain like this about their males, except perhaps in Britain. These were Thais, not British women. I was delighted. I felt a wave of empowerment. I am no Greek god. But nor am I a ladyboy. Out on the streets of Bangkok, though, the pressure is pretty intense.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Your Problems Solved

Q. I recently spent three hours in the hairdresser undergoing an expensive hair straightening technique (£200) so that my hair now looks sleek, like Jennifer Aniston’s, rather than frizzy. I was delighted with the result, which is expected to last for three months — but as I walked into a party, on the first outing for this new look, an old family friend greeted me with the words, ‘What on earth have you done to your hair? For heaven’s sake see someone and do something about it! You can afford it.’ I was very hurt and just whimpered, but what should I have replied? This man is not a nasty

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Spectator Debate: ‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools

Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Proposing the motion ‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’, the Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin said that the child of a friend had been denounced as ‘satanic’ at his Christian school for wearing Ninja-branded pyjamas. Religious schools, she went on, led to ghettoisation and contempt for the host culture. Three Islamic schools in the UK require girls to wear the full veil, and they boast that they ‘oppose the lifestyle of the West’. Cristina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald, trumpeted the success of faith schools. A newspaper survey

George Bridges

Whose side are they on?

The Conservatives have proved unafraid of making enemies with their cuts. It’s less clear that they know who their friends are With all the spending review figures published, one question still hangs in the air: whose side is the coalition on? Families with teenagers? No, they’ll be hit by higher university fees. Families where the single earner brings home more than £45,000? No, they’ll lose child benefit. High earners? There’s the new 50p tax for them. The public sector? With all those job cuts, that’s a sick joke. The armed forces? Unlikely, after the hatchet job on the defence budget. Commuters? No, it’s higher fares for them. If Ed Miliband

Daniel W-Drezner

A world of ignorance

America’s politicians are hopeless at understanding other countries – but they’re not alone in that Ever since the United States rose to great power status, it has displayed bouts of appalling ignorance about the politics and cultures of the rest of the world. Pick a region, any region, and one can find quotations and policies that demonstrate a breathtaking ability to think that other countries were just like the United States. During the Cold War, US policymakers continually misread the Pacific Rim. In the 1940s, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska vowed that ‘with God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City’. It turned out

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 23 October 2010

If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I think I’ll bury myself in the garden. If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I think I’ll bury myself in the garden. But the grit, faith and, most of all, mutual support of the Chilean 33 have given us a new role model and it would be churlish to deny their political leaders — who just happened to be there at the time — a global curtain call.

Friday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Parental guidance for Rod ‘Seacole’ Liddle’s blog

I just wondered if, henceforth, there should be a parental advisory label at the top of this blog, so that incredibly angry and maybe homicidal Welsh people whose names are almost devoid of vowels can follow it only if they have their parents with them to help. Or better, maybe, I could underscore stuff which is not necessarily meant as a literal truth but is just satire, or irony, or taking the mickey, or a joke, or a confection. Like the people who believed I’d actually killed a cat because I said I’d hanged it from a gibbet in the garden while a bunch of woodmice cheered from a seat,

The Spectator

The week that was | 22 October 2010

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson ‘reveals’ that 1.5 million jobs will be created during the cuts, and sets out 10 points about the CSR. James Forsyth says the cuts were not as deep as expected, and terms the MoD ‘not fit for purpose’. Peter Hoskin brings back the meat from the IFS’ briefing, and finds the chart that may cause the coalition trouble. David Blackburn notes that Andrew Mitchell has received an important visitor, and watches Ed Balls fire his first salvo at Theresa May. Martin Bright urges the Cabinet to show its Big Society credentials. Susan Hill bumps into

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: The birth of the NHS

File this double shot from the Spectator archives in the folder marked ‘For historical interest’. Our leading article on the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, and an essay by Lord Moran from one week after: Health and security, The Spectator, 2 July, 1948 July 5th, 1948, will be a notable date in British social history, marking as it does the entry into operation of the National Health Service and the National Insurance Acts. The latter removes from the whole of the population the fear of want, even though many will still be left in circumstances so straitened that the National Assistance Board, created to meet special cases

Thursday

Sam Bowman

International aid should be abolished

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse. Over

The Spectator

WEB EXCLUSIVE: The Spectator defence debate

With the strategic defence review hot off the presses, The Spectator asked Allan Mallinson, Robert Fox, Con Coughlin, Adam Holloway MP and Richard Dannatt to discuss if the time has come for the army, navy and air force to be combined into a massive British Marine Corps. For the benefit of CoffeeHousers, here is Lloyd Evans’ parade ground review.

Peter Hoskin

The ‘progressive’ debate re-opens

Busy times indeed for the numbercrunchers and policy wonks. I’m at what is, in effect, the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ third post-Budget briefing of the year: one for Darling’s final Budget, one for the Emergency Budget and one, now, for the Spending Review. We’re half-way through, but we’ve already been served a hefty chunk of meat: the IFS’s analysis of what yesterday’s Spending Review meant for public spending and for welfare. So far, there are mixed tidings for the coalition. The IFS’s acting director Carl Emmerson – who is filling in now that Robert Chote has departed for the OBR – set the tone with his opening remarks. “By 2015,”

David Blackburn

Balls fires a warning shot at May

It has taken Ed Balls 24 hours to steam into action. He says: “The government’s deep cuts of twenty per cent to policing could mean up to 20,000 fewer police officers, according to the Police Federation. And I’m particularly worried that specialist policing units, such as those to tackle organised crime, domestic violence or child abuse which the government no longer considers to be part of the frontline, could be the first to be cut.” This comes as the latest crime figures suggest that crime has fallen, thanks in part to the last government’s massive recruitment drive in policing and its increase of the prison population. Deep budget cuts to

David Blackburn

To the victor the spoils

The government must be doing something right with its aid policy: several NGOs absolutely hate it. Talking to the Guardian, Patrick Watt, Director of Save the Children and sleeping disciple of the Moral Compass of Kirkcaldy, has criticised the government’s decision to direct aid funding to conflict resolution. He says: ‘What is the real driver of aid allocation? Is it poverty, is it need and the ability to use money effectively or is it the agenda of the National Security Council? We do need to have a balanced approach to aid allocation that reflects the principles of the 2002 International Development Act which stipulates that all aid should be for

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Nice to know our money is being well-spent

I hope you are as delighted as me at the fact that our financial commitment to overseas aid will increase by more than 30 percent over the next few years. I suspect they’re all leaping up and down with delight in Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Stoke, Cardiff and so on, too, as the dole queues grow longer. I know we don’t have hypothecated taxes, but I like to think that the money I pay will go straight towards the Indian space programme. I’m very interested in space exploration and, as we can’t afford a space programme of our own, it cheers me up to know that we’re helping to fund someone else’s.

David Blackburn

The morning after the day before

The last time the doomsayers were proved so wrong was when the Hadron Collider didn’t blow us all up. Osborne’s cuts have come and life, the universe and everything continue insouciantly. In fact, the cuts were nowhere near as deep as many expected. As the graphic above proves (courtesy of ConHome), the press reaction is cordial, which was the best the Osborne could hope for. The Times (£) and the Guardian express concern about fairness, based on decile graphs that suggest the poor will receive less direct income from the state; and the Telegraph grumbles about the ‘squeezed middle’. But the criticism is mild, certainly compared to yesterday’s horror stories;

Wednesday

Patrick Nolan

Doing things right, but in the wrong way

In today’s spending review, George Osborne was absolutely right to hold the line on eliminating the structural deficit within one parliamentary term. In the Emergency Budget released earlier this year the coalition won fiscal credibility (and breathing space from international financial markets) by setting that goal. Failing to follow through on this goal at the first sign of difficulty would have damaged the government’s credibility and reputation in the eyes of international markets.   The Chancellor was also absolutely right to highlight the need for public service reform and to look to the welfare budget to provide some large and early savings. The government spends more on welfare than on

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Not as deep as expected

The cuts are not as bad as expected because the government has managed to make AME, annually managed expenditure, take much of the strain. The coalition is finding another £7bn from welfare to go with the £10bn of savings announced in the Budget. There is also another £3.5bn coming out of other bits of AME, more than half of which comes from the planned changes to public sector pensions. The child benefit change is also raising significantly more revenue than originally announced. This is because at the time of the announcement at Tory conference the coalition was planning to end child benefit at 16. This is now not happening. I