Society

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Karma

Yes, it might well, nay would, have changed the momentum of the game*. No, video technology is not needed (not least because it hasn’t improved any game in which it has been introduced). And anyway, to adapt Wodehouse, what you gain on the roundabouts of 1966 you lose on the swings of 2010. Consider this, then, an open thread to moan about the World Cup:   *I didn’t actually see it since I was playing cricket. Against Langholm. We won. I took, rather astonishingly, two wickets. It should have been three. Or even four. But that would be greedy and massively above and beyond expectations.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A vindication?

The Telegraph ran a piece which virtually repeated my blog about young black men and crime figures in London. Here it is. I’ll be writing more about this later in the week, when I’ve tied down a few more details about the original complaint, supposedly from a “private individual” to the PCC about my blog. One quick point – if you read the Telegraph story – is their statement that while I was generally right about most of the stuff, I may have been wrong about knife crime and sexual assault. Well, the figures for knife crime (not quoted by the Telegraph) are 49 per cent, which is not quite

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Robert Byrd, 1917-2010

Robert Byrd, the longest serving Senator in American history, has died aged 92. Byrd will be remembered not only for the length of his service but also for the fierceness with which he guarded the prerogatives of the Senate. Byrd used his position and seniority in the Senate to funnel huge amounts of money back to the state he represented, West Virginia one of the poorest states in the Union. Travel through West Virginia and you rarely go more than a few miles without passing the Robert C. Byrd something or other. As the Washington joke had it, Byrd didn’t bring home the bacon, he brought back the whole damn

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 28 June – 4 July

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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The blame game | 28 June 2010

The general public seems split in two over who to blame for England’s latest abject failure at the world cup and our consequent exit. People who support one of the big six or seven teams in the Premier League blame the England manager, Fabio Capello. The rest of us blame the players. The division reinforces my opinion that the Premier League fans are as deluded as the players. That being said, Capello was tactically outwitted with great ease by the sinister looking Joachim Loew. James Milner and Glen Johnson were crowded out, so no crosses came in. We surrendered both flanks to the Germans. And there is something terribly McLarenish

Peter Hoskin

Osborne turns his attention to welfare

George Osborne suggested as much in his Today interview last week, but now we know for sure: the government will look to cut the welfare bill even further in October’s spending review, and incapacity benefit will come in for special attention from the axemen. It was, you sense, ever going to be thus. With unprotected departments facing cuts of over 25 percent unless more action is taken elsewhere, the £12bn IB budget was always going to be a tempting target for extra cuts. Particularly as so much of it goes to claimants who could be in work. The questions now are how? and how fast?  The first answer seems clear

Sunday

David Blackburn

Smashing the welfare ghettos

There’s nothing quiet about Iain Duncan Smith this morning. Echoing Norman Tebbitt’s infamous ‘On yer Bike’ comments of 1981, Duncan Smith has vowed to obliterate ‘welfare ghettos’. For once I agree with Ed Balls: Duncan Smith is going further than Tebbitt, much further. The government is planning to move the long-term unemployed out of sink estates and into other areas, possibly hundreds of miles away, where unemployment is negative. Incentives for work and promises of low regional taxes in Northern England, Wales and Scotland were included in the Budget to this effect. This may be manna from Heaven for Balls – the traditional candidate in the Labour leadership contest can evoke the

Daniel Korski

No more Turkish delight?

I’m sitting at the Ciragan Palace’s glass-filled halls on the banks of the Bosporus. I have joined the UN Security Council’s annual retreat, organised by the Turkish government, to give my view on what the UN did right and wrong in the Balkans from the break-up of Yugoslavia. The retreat is meant to continue the Council’s discussion on the overlap between peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace-building. No immediate action will follow the retreat, but the discussion may lead into a more concrete phase during Turkey’s presidency in September. Being here in Istanbul, however, has given me a chance to find an answer to the debate that has sprung up about Turkish government: is

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 26 June 2010

Q. Last year we were invited by dear friends to country house opera, which was wonderful except that we discovered afterwards that we were expected to pay for our tickets — over £100 each! I gather this is fairly normal practice. But we dread being re-invited this year. How can I decline without having to admit that the price is too high? Figaro, Home Counties A. Most people are now happily admitting that they can’t afford things. We are all in this together. The trouble is that such an admission may result in the host insisting on paying for one. To pre-empt this, you should decline such invitations immediately. There

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 26 June 2010

That nice Tristram Hunt, the meteorologist’s son turned MP, was on Newsnight Review and used the word mitigate. That nice Tristram Hunt, the meteorologist’s son turned MP, was on Newsnight Review and used the word mitigate. ‘You mean militate,’ cut in Germaine Greer. And he did. We all commit malapropisms. The brain fumbles for a ready-made phrase and picks up the wrong one. On the same programme the clever Phillip Blond kept using phenomena as a singular, and I thought, with a little surprise, that he must know no better. But later on, after Dr Greer’s schoolmarmish intervention, he managed a phenomenon or two without strain. I am not familiar

Toby Young Toby Young

Budget Britain, and the Tale of the Tent

I haven’t yet calculated how much worse off I’ll be as a result of the budget but it’s time to start belt-tightening. My first austerity measure has been to buy a tent. I’ve been invited to speak at a literary festival in Cornwall but the organiser doesn’t consider me important enough to offer me a room in his house. One of his retainers suggested I hire a yurt, apparently unaware that the cost of doing so is over £800. In the end I decided to buy a family tent from Halfords for £89.99. Pretty reasonable, particularly as the price included two air beds, four sleeping bags and a couple of

Melissa Kite

Rat attack

I can’t help it. When I look through my front window and see two super-cool-looking young black guys dressed from head to foot in Nike screaming obscenities, it quickens my pulse. I can’t help it. When I look through my front window and see two super-cool- looking young black guys dressed from head to foot in Nike screaming obscenities, it quickens my pulse. I’m sorry, it just does. No doubt I will be taken to the Equality and Human Rights Commission just for admitting that I find such a sight interesting and exciting. Maybe I need to get out more. In any case, on this occasion, I came out of

Jeremy Clarke

Celestial drama

The lintel across the kitchen doorway comes up to my collarbone so I need to duck as I go through. A grinning toy duckling suspended by its neck from the lintel by a piece of cotton attached to a drawing pin is there to remind me. Usually I stoop just low enough to feel his little feet dance across my hair as I pass. But on this occasion I was looking down at my phone, and, presuming that my head was low enough, going full steam ahead into the kitchen. The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back on the living-room rug and the top of

Taki

Summer sports

During my book party one month ago — rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well — I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdy recognised the name immediately. ‘You brought cheer to the plains of India,’ he told Naresh Kumar, quoting a headline of more than 50 years ago. Mount then went on to quote from one of his own dispatches: ‘As the shadows lengthened in the Centre Court of Wimbledon, the soft touch and tricky lobs of Kumar–Krishnan tied their opponents in knots,’ or words to that effect. Naresh Kumar was one of the most popular players on the tennis

Robin Oakley

Speed kings

Gutsy stayers can thrill with their courage, canny jockeys with well-executed tactical plans. But in any sport there is nothing like the exhilaration of sheer face-whipping, wind-in-the-hair speed. Ask those fans in South Africa who had to sit through the leaden fumbling of the so-called England football team against Slovenia. Not just overhyped, overpaid and over there but painfully slow both in mind and limb. It was a vintage Royal Ascot. Who could not be thrilled by the sheer class of Goldikova in winning the Queen Anne Stakes, the joyful pouncing of Richard Hughes to take the St James’s Palace Stakes on Canford Cliffs, the clock-in-the-head riding of Seb Sanders

The Spectator

Letters | 26 June 2010

Time to rehabilitate Sir: The issue of whether or not ‘Prison works’ is confused in your leading article (19 June) with the broader arguments about reducing the National Offender Management Service’s £5 billion budget. Even if the £2 billion of annual public expenditure on prisons was left largely intact, there is scope for savings and other benefits in localising the punishment and aftercare of offenders with much more input from voluntary and community groups. Such a localisation policy could result in better and less costly services in this part of the criminal justice system, provided sentencing reform was part of the package. To give one example: NOMS could hardly be

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 26 June 2010

People have often said that George Osborne is ‘very political’ and have not meant it as a compliment. People have often said that George Osborne is ‘very political’ and have not meant it as a compliment. But it is, in principle, a good thing that politicians should be political (see what happens when they’re not). To understand the Cameron/Osborne political success, you need to see how quickly they have changed. A year ago, think-tanks like my own dear Policy Exchange were saying that the deficit should be cut, over the parliament now begun, by £100 billion in real terms. This was considered intolerable in polite society. In the same week,

Miriam Gross

Diary – 26 June 2010

‘New is not generally a word to use in politics. It is exhausted before it even begins: it generally means that the user of it has no ideas of any depth, and runs out of steam early on.’ I came across this observation in Norman Stone’s wonderfully unorthodox ‘personal history of the cold war’, The Atlantic and its Enemies, published last month. Not that it is in itself a very ‘new’ insight — more a case of ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ (Alexander Pope). I have certainly oft thought — and so I’m sure has nearly everyone else — that our new politicians’ relentless use of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 26 June 2010

In the Budget, Mr George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the balance of cuts to tax rises would be 77 per cent to 23 per cent. Whitehall departments would have to cut spending by 25 per cent. Borrowing would fall from £149 billion this year to £20 billion in 2015-16. Debt would be 67 per cent of GDP by 2015-16, compared with the 75 per cent planned by Labour in its budget in March. Current expenditure of £637 billion this year would rise to £711 billion in 2015-16, to meet debt interest. Mr Osborne raised VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent, from 4 January

Daniel Korski

Britain’s foreign aid should empower women

Here is a question. Which politician said the following: “We’ve seen too that when women are empowered economically they are more likely to have a voice in the community and to be advocates for other women.” Or “Britain will be placing women at the heart of the whole of our agenda for international development”. Clare Short? No. Hillary Clinton? Nope. Harriet Harman? Wrong. It is former Army officer and International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell speaking yesterday to the think-tank Carnegie Endowment in Washington DC.   To some, his comments will illustrate how the Conservative Party has moved to far away from its roots. But in fact it is both a