Society

Saturday

David Blackburn

Lansley wants ‘no win, no fee’ medicine

Last week, Andrew Lansley spent the weekend reassuring sceptics about his NHS commissioning reforms. He’s at it again this weekend in an interview with the Times (£). Hoping to calm Claire Rayner’s restless ghost, Lansley emphasises that his reforms will improve patient care and give the patient-come-taxpayer value for money. Medicine and treatment are Lansley’s primary target. On the day that Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish Health Secretary, has protected free prescriptions in Scotland, Lansley proposes this radical solution to regulating and affording expensive treatments: ‘“NICE will be able to give advice about what is the best treatment but it won’t be about saying ‘You must have this’ or even less

Will Tanner

What you need to know ahead of the Spending Review: Crime

This is the latest in our series of posts on the Spending Review with Reform. A list of previous posts can be found here. What is the budget? The UK has one of the most expensive criminal justice systems in the world, spending a higher proportion of GDP than any other country in the OECD. Total spending on crime amounted to £23 billion for 2009-10. However, recent research suggests that total government spending on public order and safety amounts to more than £31 billion overall. Aside from central government funding, police authorities receive funding from the police, raised locally through council tax. In 2009-10 this amounted to just under a

David Blackburn

Labour to propose raising the top rate of income tax?

Peter Hain is wizened counsellor to young king Ed, or gives that impression at least. The two are close, which makes Hain’s recent comments on tax noteworthy. Hain describes universal benefit as ‘non-negotiable’, adding: “If you start driving a coach and horses through universality you’re effectively saying to middle Britain, ‘you’ve got no stake in the welfare state.’ I think the Tories and Liberals are making a very big mistake on child benefit. There’s an answer to people on higher incomes and that’s they pay higher taxes. And that is the answer to squaring that circle.” Miliband is determined to defend universal benefit regardless of cost and he also favours a

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Review of Spectator Faith Schools Debate

‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’ Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at the Spectator debate. The motion ‘Taxpayers’ Money Should Not Fund Faith Schools’ was proposed by Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin. She evoked the green cartoon reptiles as proof that faith schools are discriminatory and irrational. The child of a friend had been denounced as ‘satanic’ at his Christian school for wearing Ninja-branded pyjamas. Religious schools, she went on, are not only divisive, they lead to ghettoisation and contempt for the host culture. Three Islamic schools in the UK require girls to wear the full veil, and they boast openly that they ‘oppose the lifestyle of the

Interconnect

November Mini-Bar Offer

The late Alan Watkins, in whose ­memory we enjoyed a commemorative lunch at the Garrick Club the other day, was for a spell the wine correspondent of the Observer. He wrote almost exclusively about French wines. I used to chide him gently, pointing out that there were marvellous wines from the New World. He would shake his head, and say that, yes, some were all very well, even quite good. But you couldn’t drink them every day. And in the case of some, you couldn’t drink more than a single glass at a time. French wines, he implied, had a finesse, a degree of class, a touch of steel. To

Dan Jones

Gym junkie

A trip to the local bodybuilders’ gym under the influence of muscle drugs If you want to get ahead in sports, there’s nothing better than a nice big helping of performance-enhancing drugs. Just ask the guys on the Tour de France. At the end of last month the Spanish cyclist and three-times Tour winner Alberto Contador was banned from cycling after testing positive for the illegal anabolic agent Clenbuterol. He says that he accidentally ate it in a steak his mate brought him from Spain. You have to agree it’s a great excuse. I have a feeling I wheeled out that line, or a very similar one, to my appalled

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: A great weekend without football

Roger Alton reviews the week in Sport How depressing, and poignant, to hear Danny Cipriani talking at the weekend about his imminent departure to join his new rugby team Down Under, the Melbourne Rebels — one of the country’s most gifted fly-halfs is heading away just when England is really short of quality at No 10. And all because the blazers at Twickenham axed a real coach in Brian Ashton (that’s a coach who makes you a better player once you start working with him) and decided to get someone famous, whether or not he was any good at coaching. And as Danny Cip recognises, the team now running England

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 16 October 2010

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2668 you were invited to submit a poem that contains advice from young to old. Several of you took as your starting point Robert Southey’s po-faced ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and how he gained them’ — or Lewis Carroll’s much more enjoyable parody of it as recited by Alice in chapter five of her Adventures In Wonderland. Michael Birt, Tim Raikes, Katie Mallett and Josephine Boyle impressed but were squeezed out by the winners, printed below, who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch bags the bonus fiver. You are old, Father William, though threescore and ten Is not the top whack any

Irwin Stelzer

Picking losers

So we are to have a new industrial policy, this one courtesy of the coalition government and, more specifically, George Osborne and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Transport Secretary. Both are economically literate, professing faith in markets as allocators of resources; but they have found the lure of shaping the economy in their image irresistible. The goals of the new industrial policy are two: to reduce the relative importance of financial services, and to disperse economic activity more widely throughout the nation. In pursuit of the first we have bank-bashing that will discourage the growth of financial institutions, limits on bonuses, an increase in the marginal

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 16 October 2010

I’ve just tried out a newly discovered term of abuse on my husband. ‘You’re nothing but a lol‑poop,’ I exclaimed as he sat, or almost lay, like a John Prescott, except with a glass of whisky resting on his stomach instead of a cup of tea. I’ve just tried out a newly discovered term of abuse on my husband. ‘You’re nothing but a lol‑poop,’ I exclaimed as he sat, or almost lay, like a John Prescott, except with a glass of whisky resting on his stomach instead of a cup of tea. He only laughed. But I think it might sting some of our ‘new generation’ of ‘front-line’ politicians more,

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

All I’m asking for is coherence of abuse

This morning, on the way up to my desk, I bought a croissant. In doing so, I immediately penalised almost everybody who sits anywhere near me, because I had one and none of them did. And I didn’t even feel particularly guilty about it. I’m a right bastard, me. And that’s not all. I came into work by Tube, using my Oyster card. In doing so, I now realise I was penalising all those people out there who would be just as good at doing my job as I am, but can’t afford the £2 to get to Wapping. If I had any decency, any soul, I’d forgo Transport for

The Spectator

Barometer | 16 October 2010

The deficit fairy A six-year-old girl from Manchester, Niamh Riley, sent David Cameron a pound coin left by the tooth fairy to help pay off the deficit. If all children followed her example, how near would we be? —With 790,000 children born a year, each with 20 milk teeth, this would raise £15.8 million a year. —According to a survey by the Halifax last year, British children receive an average of £6.24 a week, or £324 a year, in pocket money. If all this money was sent to the government it would raise £4.29 billion a year — one twentieth of the £80 billion structural deficit, and equivalent to ten days of

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Director’s cut

In the spring of 2008 I went on a press trip with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, to Hadrian’s wall. It was one of a series of jaunts planned by the BM in the run-up to its great Hadrian exhibition, a little Roman holiday. But though the wall was fascinating, I spent most of my time inspecting the director. He’s charming and universally admired — but also enigmatic. What are his politics? What does he do for fun? Nobody seems to know. So I watched him at Segedunum in Newcastle, talking to local grandees, charming, mercurial, alert. I watched him out by Housesteads fort, chatting to the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A hotel on the Strand is a potent symbol in the great money-Monopoly game

‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who nicknamed it the Dealmakers’ Arms, was often at the captains’ tables. ‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its

Alex Brummer

The bond supremacy

The crash has led to a new boom in corporate bonds. When Tesco’s debt yields more than its shares, every little helps When the Bank of England began its £200 billion programme of quantitative easing — ‘QE’, its technical name for printing money — at the height of the credit crisis in March last year, it made two important discoveries. The initial plan of the Bank’s markets director, Paul Fisher, was to use the money to buy up bonds issued by major companies. This, it was hoped, would put cash into company balance sheets and help prevent the crisis cascading though the rest of the economy. But the Bank quickly

Jonathan Davis

Trying not to be too clever

Before he became one of London’s most admired fund managers, Jonathan Ruffer had, by his own account, two spectacularly unsuccessful spells as a barrister. Not long into our interview, I gain a clue as to why this seemingly harsh self-assessment might be true. We’re discussing the credit crunch, which he predicted well before it hit, and policymakers’ responses to it. Ruffer is explaining where the Japanese went wrong 20 years ago when their economy first showed signs of slumping into debt deflation, from which it has still fully to recover. ‘So what you’re saying they should have done is …’ I prompt, not certain that readers would follow Ruffer’s meaning

Susan Moore

Art is a high-risk business

Never before have so many people in so many places collected works of art. In the past decade, the auction houses in particular have made heroic efforts to expand their markets, both by reaching out to emerging economies and by embracing new technologies. Thanks to instant translation by online search engines and live online auction platforms, it is now as easy to buy a work of art offered by an English provincial auction house or a Manhattan dealer while sitting in Guangzhou as it is from Guildford. The international art market has become global, and art is now seen as an asset class for investors. Given the current performance of

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m sure Richard Curtis doesn’t really want to kill my children. Well, I say that …

For some time now I’ve had this idea for a running gag in a comedy sketch series. For some time now I’ve had this idea for a running gag in a comedy sketch series. It would star a character called Unfunny Observational Comic. Each week we’d see him dying a death with his ‘Have you ever noticed…?’ comedy of recognition before an appalled audience. He’d say things like: ‘You know how it is, when you’ve broken into your neighbour’s house to rummage through her knicker drawer…?’ and ‘Gerbils. Just what is it about gerbils that makes us all want to shag ’em?’ The humour would lie, of course, in the

Allan Massie

Less is more | 16 October 2010

‘A good rule for writers: do not explain over-much’ ‘A good rule for writers: do not explain over-much’ (Somerset Maugham: A Writer’s Notebook). Like most of what he had to say about the craft of writing, this was good advice, although he didn’t always follow it himself. Even in his best stories he was inclined to tell you quite a lot about his characters before showing them in action or letting us hear them speak. Breaking his own rule worked well for him, because one of the charms of his writing rests in the knowledgeable man-of-the-world tone. You always feel that he is giving you the low-down on human nature.

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The cuts are almost settled

We are entering the end game of the spending review. The Department of Education settled this morning, according to both Tory and Lib Dem sources. Although there is confusion about whether the money for the pupil premium is coming from inside or outside the education budget – Clegg’s speech suggested outside but other Whitehall sources are not so sure. Liam Fox has told friends that he knows the final number for the defence budget and that it is a lot better than expected over the summer. Fox has played a blinder in terms of defending his budget but this has come at a huge personal cost for him. Even supporters