Society

Friday

David Blackburn

Crispin Blunt comes out

As Iain Dale says, I doubt anyone saw this coming: “Crispin Blunt wishes to make it known that he has separated from his wife Victoria. He decided to come to terms with his homosexuality and explained the position to his family. The consequence is this separation. There is no third party involvement, but this is difficult for his immediate and wider family and he hopes for understanding and support for them. The family do not wish to make any further public comment and hope that their privacy will be respected as they deal with these difficult private issues.” The media will lacerate him if the clause about third party involvement

Thursday

Andrew Haldenby

What you need know ahead of the Spending Review – Civil Service

This is the fifth of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first four posts were on health, education, the first hundred days and welfare.   What is the budget? The Civil Service accounts for 527,000 out of the total 6.1 million people employed in the public sector (as at March 2010).  The total annual cost of employing these civil servants is approximately £13 billion.   Where does the money go? Mostly on people. The Civil Service headcount has grown by nearly 5 per cent in the last decade from 504,000 in 1999.  Nearly three quarters of all civil servants are employed by four departments: the

Tom Clougherty

Tipping the scales against legal aid

Britain’s legal aid system continues to fail, and should be abolished for virtually all compensation claims. Reformed Conditional Fee Agreements (CFAs for short) should take its place. Those are the headline recommendations of the Adam Smith Institute’s latest report, written by legal expert Anthony Barton.   It’s not difficult to point to problems with legal aid, but the main one is that it encourages risk-free, speculative litigation, and fuels a costly compensation culture. The fact that claimants receiving legal aid are not responsible for defendants’ costs if their case is unsuccessful essentially puts them in a no-lose situation. Defendants, on the other hand, just can’t win – they’re going to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Revealed: the secret school wars

Britain’s state school system is a national disgrace. Not because we don’t have excellent schools: we do. But only for those who can afford to move to the good catchment areas. The comprehensive system gives the best service to the rich, and the worst to the poor. It is a system which harbours bad teachers – only 18 have been struck off for incompetence in 40 years. Compare this to the USA where 252 bad teachers were sacked in one day last week. Our world-class private schools show that England can be a world leader in education. But we have one of the biggest gaps in the world between attainment

Wednesday

Patrick Nolan

What do you need to know ahead of the Spending Review – Welfare

This is the fourth of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first three posts were on health, education, and the first hundred days. What is the budget? The welfare budget must be at the heart of the debate on how to restore the public finances. The Government spends more on welfare than anything else. In 2009 the bill for social protection was around £199 billion. This has almost doubled in real terms over the last 20 years from £104 billion in 1989. Social protection now represents 32.5 percent of all government expenditure or 14.2 per cent of GDP. Some welfare spending varies with economic conditions,

David Blackburn

A ‘regressive’ budget?

The IFS has given the coalition’s opponents powder for their muskets, only it’s a little damp. The IFS’ analysis is drawn exclusively from straight tax and spend figures; it does not account for the future financial benefits brought by structural public service reform – so Gove’s and IDS’ reforms, both of which aim to alleviate poverty, have not been evaluated.  Matthew Sinclair explains why this means the IFS has exaggerated the severity of Osborne’s Budget: ‘Suppose you invented a policy, some kind of economic miracle, which doubled the incomes of the poorest ten per cent of families without the Government spending a pound.  That would reduce benefit spending.  It would

Tuesday

Eamonn Butler

The family is the best agent of welfare

Conservatives have long been strong on family. They believe that families are the glue that sticks us together, and that traditional nuclear families therefore plays an important role in sticking the whole nation together. As a libertarian, I believe that people should live as they choose. Too many young people of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were forced into marriages that were or became deeply unhappy – but divorce was thought scandalous. So people – particularly women, who rarely had independent means or income enough to escape – endured that misery. Many, too, were humiliated, or prosecuted, for conducting relationships that we would happily accept today. But even as a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Everything is Relative…

From today’s Telegraph letters page: Comparatively ungallant nickname for a military hero SIR – Those with experience of the old Stock Exchange floor will readily recall some of the nicknames (Letters, August 22) bestowed upon its habitués. Among them were two brothers, both with highly distinguished military careers and both winners of the Military Cross, one with bar and one without. The latter acquired the sobriquet of “The Coward”. Quentin Smith, Dunley, Hampshire [Many thanks to AH for the tip.]

David Blackburn

Stage 2 in the penal revolution

The government’s position is that prison does not work. It aims to reduce prison numbers and now Ken Clarke has announced that further savings will be made to the criminal justice budget. The Times reports (£) that Clarke will continue Labour’s policy of closing courts; 103 magistrates courts and 54 county courts will shut up shop. The Tories campaigned against court-closures at the fag-end of the last government; and there is whispered concern around Whitehall and Westminster that the concrete apparatus of justice is already over-stretched. But, savings must be made. Clarke’s closures will save a paltry £15.3 million from the annual £1.1bn budget; the bulk of cuts will come

David Blackburn

IDS versus Osborne: there can only be one winner

The Quiet Man is an odd moniker for Iain Duncan Smith. There was nothing quiet about his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty and he turned up the volume when he told the Tories to ‘unite or die’. Matthew d’Ancona observes that IDS is a noisy maverick again. IDS has threatened to resign if his welfare reforms are obstructed. Principles are one thing and tactics another. As d’Ancona notes: ‘Such talk is fine if a minister means he will quit if he himself fails. But in IDS’s case it has sounded more like a threat: if the leaders of the coalition do not give him what he wants, he will resign

Peter Hoskin

The double dip predictions

Hark, there seems to be a lot of noise about a double dip recession at the moment – added to, yesterday, by Dr Martin Weale of the Bank of England. So I thought I’d collect some of the more recent, more prominent warnings and predictions for posterity’s sake. Do let me know (either in the comments or on phoskin @ spectator.co.uk) if there are any that are worth adding: Sir Alan Budd, 16 August Sir Alan was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether he believed Britain would avoid slipping back into negative growth. “I’m not confident of it,” he said. “Our fan charts show that it is a

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 23 August – 29 August

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

Seconds out…IDS versus Osborne

Infamously, George Canning and Viscount Castlereagh fought a duel over a policy disagreement; Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne will follow suit at this rate. I had thought they’d resolved their differences over the upfront costs of IDS’ welfare reform; but the Mail on Sunday reports otherwise, glorying in the glares, savage bon mots and expletives. This is the conundrum: if IDS doesn’t find £10bn in savings, he will not get the £3bn needed to enact his reforms to make work pay. There is something quite heart-warming about IDS’ fight against the institutionally overbearing Treasury, but George Osborne is right: it is unacceptable to give one department, however well intentioned,

Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

Rubbish advice

Cursing myself, I rushed out of the house in my pyjamas. I’d forgotten to put out the brown recycling bin for the fortnightly collection. I lifted the lid on next door’s bin and peeped in. Empty. I must have missed the truck by minutes. Now I was in trouble. Putting the recycling bin out on Wednesday morning was my one and only duty while she was away and I’d fluffed it. She’ll do star jumps in the hall when she comes home and finds out. Hoping there might be something I could do to salvage the situation, I rang the council office. The woman dealing with refuse collection enquiries sounded

Taki

Strained relationships

Gstaad An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over 40 years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 when he was well into his nineties. We met in 1956 on an aeroplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in the days when few people skied. He was a heterosexual dress designer who designed very ugly clothes for women and even worse ones for men. Women, however, had made Oleg famous in an age when people were celebrated for proper reasons. He first married Gene Tierney, the beautiful sloe-eyed star

Robin Oakley

Ladies in demand

Life is all about perspective. I used to believe that rugby was invented by William Webb Ellis, the schoolboy who picked up and ran with a football. But only until I heard an ex-England international explain that it wasn’t Webb Ellis at all who deserved the credit but Dalrymple, the guy who ran after him, wrestled him to the ground and said, ‘Give us our effing ball back.’ I used to think, too, that if a racetrack put on first-class races with decent prizes, top trainers would send good jockeys along with talented mounts and we would all enjoy good sport. That is no longer enough. Faced with increasing competition

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 August 2010

Q. The forthcoming Chatsworth attic sale has inspired me to stage a similar, though much smaller event. The problem is opposition from my 85-year-old mother, who resists any kind of change and does not like to see things going out which she imagines could be put to use at some stage in the future. Our attics and farm buildings are bursting with things which will not see active service again — monogrammed unwieldy suitcases, meat domes, rusty scythes, etc… but they are things which would do well in a so-called country house sale because of their ‘provenance’. How should I tackle my mother, Mary? Name and address withheld A. The

Toby Young Toby Young

This summer, Sasha has given us a masterclass in Machiavellian power politics

One of the advantages of being brought up in large families, supposedly, is that you learn the art of politics at an early age. The idea is that if you’re surrounded by lots of siblings you become skilled at forging alliances, isolating your enemies, and so forth. I didn’t give much credence to this theory until recently, but a change in the dynamic between three of my own children has persuaded me there may be something in it. The top dog among my brood is seven-year-old Sasha. Not only is she better at fighting than her three younger brothers, having been raised on a diet of ultra-violent martial arts cartoons,

The Spectator

Letters | 21 August 2010

What the PCC is for Sir: While I really do not wish to react humourlessly to Douglas Murray’s thoughtful piece on society’s collective sense of humour failure (‘Why can’t anyone take a joke any more?’, 14 August), I would like to clear up a couple of his points about the Press Complaints Commission. He says that we encourage people to ‘claim an offence’ if they do not like something they read. Not quite true. The PCC deliberately makes no judgment on taste or decency, and actively discourages people from complaining on the grounds simply that they have been offended. We encourage people to complain about accuracy and intrusion and the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 21 August 2010

I found myself in a fine pickle trying to give my email address on the telephone in Spanish. It was bad enough with W, an uncommon letter in Spanish. They have their own version of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie (or Able, Baker, Charlie for older readers), but I didn’t know it. Whisky for W seemed to work, but I dried up when it came to the @ sign. The newly useful @ sign is called apestaartje, ‘little monkey’s tail’ in Dutch, and Germans follow suit. It is chiocciola, ‘snail’ in Italian, and a snail is also apparently what Koreans name it after. The Danes and Swedes liken it to an elephant’s