Society

If you want an indication of just how unpopular the coalition will be, read this morning’s Guardian. Splashed across the front page is an unemployment forecast from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. The predicted figure touches 3 million – a psychologically shocking and politically important number, allowing the opposition to chant: ‘Thatcher’s cuts’, which remains a call to arms in parts of the country. The bulk of unemployment will follow the necessary squeeze on public sector jobs and pay. The CIPB estimate that 750,000 public sector jobs will go. The size of the dole welfare bill is unknown because the government plans wholesale welfare reform. This government’s battle will be with the

Oh my, what a credulous press corps we have. Selectively credulous that is. Put it this way: if a report compiled by a Philip Morris board member suggested smoking was good for you it wouldn’t be taken terribly seriously. But let an ASH board member – in this case Dr Anna Gilmore – put together a report that says the smoking ban in England & Wales “caused” a “dramatic” fall in heart attacks and the newspapers will be happy to be spoon-fed their reporting. Now, you may say that the existence of the report is itself news. Perhaps so. But, again, the provenance of the report matters too and should

As the build-up to the World Cup continues, my latest item at Goal Post defends Italy and the Italian way of playing football. Some of this, I confess, is based on sentiment. If Scotland cannot prevail – and it seems that some techinicality has made that more than usually impossible this year – then Italy are the european team I tend to support. Perhaps it’s because I spent the first year of my life in Rome that this is the case. No memories of that time, of course, but some bond of sentiment nonetheless. Anyway, there’s a magnificent austerity to Italian football sometimes and, while one might not want to

Paging John Rentoul and Oliver Kamm for this exception to the general rule that most questions asked in the press are best answered in the negative. Here’s Eliot Spitzer  – or, as Radley Balko puts it, “disgraced former tyrannical prosecutor Eliot Spitzer” – flying this beauty: After reading the Gettysburg Address, does the idea of a carbon tax to finally move us away from an oil and old-energy dependence that is fouling not only the Gulf of Mexico but our entire climate, foreign policy, and economy seem so outrageous? Why, yes it does! If, that is, it’s the Gettysburg Address that acts as the clincher, whatever the other merits of