Society

A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly learning”, “career pathing”, “energy management” and — my absolute favourite — “impact residue”, which is what you leave behind when you have met someone: what the uninitiated would call a lasting impression. I was encouraged to “flex my styles” and identify “meta-objectives”. In short, I am a new man.’ In other words, he’s learned management-speak.

Balls is back. The author of Gordon Brown’s economic policies for 15 years. The man who bears more responsibility for anyone else – other than Brown – for the asset bubble and the consequent crash. But I suspect that, right now, Theresa May is doing cartwheels and George Osborne cursing. Balls, for all his many drawbacks, is the most ferocious attack dog there is. His brilliance (and I hate using that word) at using numbers as weapons far surprassed anything the Tories could manage in Opposition. His policies are reckless: to borrow, and to hell with the consequences. His modus operandi is to launch around-the-clock attacks. He has powerful media

One of the reasons I don’t run a bed and breakfast establishment is that I cannot imagine approving of any of the sort of people who would stay in it. I would sit downstairs in the kitchen seething knowing that upstairs fundamentalist Christians, or homosexuals, or cabinet ministers and their secretaries, estate agents or people from Manchester, were besmirching my pink bri-nylon sheets with their rank and ghostly effusions. I can see absolutely that this disqualifies me from offering a bed and breakfast service to the public, even if I don’t dignify my distaste for other people with the title “religious faith”. We are surely past the point when B&Bs

How big does inflation have to get before our politicians admit that it’s a problem? Once again, it has “surprised” on the upside – the CPI index stood at 3.7 percent for December, against a supposed target of 2.0 percent. And the RPI index, which the nation called “inflation” until Gordon Brown asked the media to use CPI instead, is running at 4.8 percent – almost twice its former target of 2.5 percent. That is the painfully high figure to which George Osborne has just added a juicy VAT increase, which is bound to take CPI above 4 percent. Inflation has been above target for three of the last four

Mary Ann Sieghart has a great piece in the Independent today about how, inadvertently, we have designed a system that almost encourages young people to drink irresponsibly. As she argues, a lot of problems have come, oddly, from making it harder for people to drink under age in pubs.  As Sieghart puts it, ‘And because we were under 18, we knew we had to remain inconspicuous. The landlord would tolerate our presence as long as we didn’t embarrass ourselves or him. We didn’t dare get smashed or he wouldn’t allow us back. And because we tended to meet the same group of friends in the same pub, being banned was