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The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 September 2010

Nearly six million people began to receive letters from HM Revenue & Customs telling them they had paid the wrong amount of tax. About £2 billion has been underpaid, at an average of £1,380 per person, and £1.8 billion overpaid, averaging £420 per person. Connaught, the social housing maintenance company, which employs 10,000 people, went into administration. As his special adviser resigned, Mr William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, issued a statement saying: ‘Any suggestion that his appointment was due to an improper relationship between us is utterly false, as is any suggestion that I have ever been involved in a relationship with any man.’ He said that they had occasionally

The Spectator

War and peace | 11 September 2010

One subject about which we hope pupils will always be taught is the Blitz, which began in London 70 years ago this week. The ‘spirit of the Blitz’ may have been over-romanticised, but it is right that the brave determination with which Britons faced the aerial assault remains a source of national pride. But British courage is perhaps not best recalled by the proposed new memorial to the airmen of Bomber Command in London’s Green Park. While no one can doubt that we are deeply indebted to the 55,573 who lost their lives, and who are already remembered at the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede, there is a good reason

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 11 September 2010

Public life for politicians does not seem to get any easier. Have, as a male, a close male companion, and if the tabloids are not after you, the posh papers will attack you for your insensitivity in pointing to your marriage and desire for a family to demonstrate that you are not gay — disgusting! Enter a coalition, and all disagreements will be disasters. In his ‘Rules for Politicians’, the Greek essayist Plutarch (c. ad 46-120) gives sensible advice about all this. Any decision to enter public life must not be based on ‘an inability to think of anything else to do’; nor must one do it to make money,

David Blackburn

Field caught between reality and fantasy

Frank Field’s been thinking. He will make his report on poverty next week and he hints at its contents in an extensive interview with the Times (£). He is convinced that there is more to social mobility than money and he has some brilliantly simple ideas to alleviate poverty. He advocates creating four or five terms in the school year to shorten the long summer holiday, which he argues disadvantages the poor. ‘They have less help at home so they lose out even more in long holidays. They drop behind, they are not being read to or tutored or talked to in the same way as many middle-class children. They

Lucy Parsons

Beating the vested interests

This is the next of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. Earlier posts were on health, education, the first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, international experiences (New Zealand, Canada, Ireland), Hon Ruth Richardson’s recent speech and how to sell the case for cuts.  On Thursday, I took part in a spending review debate in West Bromwich, part of a series the BBC held across England (my colleague Patrick Nolan wrote about his experiences in London and the East here) to discover the public’s views on what should be cut or saved in their local area.    I felt a bit of an intruder talking to

Peter Hitchens

The Book of Common Prayer should be our manifesto

What a pity it is that all the hate and slime now directed against the Pope’s visit is not aimed instead at the Church of England. Why do God-haters and militant secularists have to turn on a pensionable German theology professor and head of a Rome-based religious multinational organisation, when they want to condemn the steadfast defence of Christian morality? For at least some Anglicans, the savaging of the Bishop of Rome will give rise to sinful pangs of envy. We would like Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman — and, I am rather compelled to mention, my brother Christopher — to be hurling their fiery darts at Thomas Cranmer’s church instead.

Dominic Cummings

How to solve our welfare problem

Dominic Cummings meets Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winner who has the answer to some of the West’s intractable problems. So why won’t politicians listen to him? One day in 1974, at the height of the famine in Bangladesh, an economics teacher from a nearby university wandered into a village called Jobra. There he found the ladies of Jobra struggling to survive. No proper bank would deign to lend to them, so in order to finance their tiny basket-making businesses the ladies were forced to borrow from loan-sharks and pay punitive interest rates. ‘This is absurd,’ thought the teacher, Muhammad Yunus. ‘There’s enough misery around without these women being burdened by

Robert Gray

Cardinal virtues

According to Cardinal Newman, who is to be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday 19 September, it is a rule of God’s providence that Christians succeed through failure. It is hardly surprising, then, that Newman’s great contemporary Cardinal Manning has never been a candidate for canonisation. He did not care for failure. That these two titans of Roman Catholicism in Victorian England — Newman, born in 1801, was seven years the senior — were frequently at loggerheads is well known. Indeed, the differences between them appear set in stone: Newman, the subtle, sensitive and (it is now official) saintly religious genius; Manning, the ruthless and wily Machiavellian, bent on

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The unexpected pleasure of gathering cowpats on the pastures of the High Andes

When I was a toddler in Newsham in Yorkshire we had friends at Hilltop Farm, and Mrs Todd used to send me to look for eggs in the boxes by the chicken run. The excitement and pleasure of lifting the lid and finding an egg — or two — in the straw is still sharp in my mind. Likewise the glee of spotting a mushroom in the woods when, later in life, I went on a mushroom hunt. The joy of finding half a crown half-buried in the sand on a beach in Cyprus, when I was six, is still fresh, and I’ve had an eye out for lost coins

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Don’t bet the house on a property plunge

The bubble may have burst, says Ross Clark, but a crash looks unlikely. For now, property remains a sensible investment — better than sticking cash in a low-interest account I’m getting fed up with my 2.5 per cent Northern Rock Super-Sucker’s Account. It was OK when it was paying 6 per cent and Alistair Darling was promising by the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin to repay every penny in the event of the bank going belly-up. But I can’t see the point now: why risk your capital for some measly little apology for interest which isn’t even keeping up with inflation? I keep wanting to hook out the money and put

Lucy Vickery

Competition No. 2663: Grimm revision

In Competition No. 2663 you were invited to submit a politically correct version of a well-known fairy tale. The inspiration for this challenge was  Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, who recasts favourite yarns to take account of modern political sensibilities. In  Garner’s PC world, witches are ‘kindness impaired’ and Cinderella wears a robe ‘woven from silk stolen from unsuspecting silkworms’. Bill Greenwell pockets the extra fiver this week. His fellow winners, printed below, get £30 apiece. Honourable mentions go to G.M. Davis, Robert Schechter, Gillian Ewing and Marion Shore. An omnivorous, optically-challenged wiccan appropriates two pre-pubescent and differently-gendered siblings whose

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 11 September 2010

It is a joke I have heard told 20 different ways since I first heard it 23 years ago. Often the location has changed, along with the nationality of the subject or his transgression. However, the ur-joke, told to me by an anthropologist in 1986, went like this. A tourist is exploring the coast of a minor Greek island when he arrives at a charming fishing village, a model of contented pros-perity. Freshly painted boats bob at their moorings behind a stout breakwater. On the hillside opposite there is a handsome church, almost a cathedral. Enchanted, our traveller asks several passers-by to recommend a good bar for a drink. Each

Deborah Ross

Stale buns

Tamara Drewe 15, Nationwide Tamara Drewe is directed by Stephen Frears and is based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds and so you may think, as I did, what’s not to like?, to which I would now have to reply: where do I start? Where, where, where? I wanted to love this film. I strained with every fibre of my being to love this film and, had the fibres of your being been available — which they rarely are; you are quite stingy with your fibres — I’d have strained with those too, but Tamara Drewe is just so determinedly superficial, uninteresting and predictable that, in the end, it

Alan Judd

Value for money

If money is a universal act of faith — working when we believe in it, collapsing when we don’t — what about value for money? Is that just part of the beneficial illusion or is it something more tangible? If money is a universal act of faith — working when we believe in it, collapsing when we don’t — what about value for money? Is that just part of the beneficial illusion or is it something more tangible? I was pondering this recently in relation to Hyundai and Aston Martin. One range starts at £7,725 (the excellent and frugal Hyundai i10, champion beneficiary of the scrappage scheme) and the other

Friday

Patrick Nolan

What you need to know ahead of the spending review – making the case for cuts

This is the next of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. Earlier posts were on health, education, the first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, international experiences (New Zealand, Canada, Ireland) and Hon Ruth Richardson’s recent speech. Last night the BBC showed 12 major regional television debates examining impending cuts to public sector spending. I spoke at the debates in London and the East of England (held in Ipswich). There were interesting similarities and differences in the two debates and these illustrated some important lessons for the spending review. Both debates showed that there is still work to do to explain to the public, and some

The Spectator

The week that was | 10 September 2010

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. James Forsyth charts the coalition’s shifting horizons, and notes the coalition’s vulnerability on crime. Peter Hoskin says that Alan Johnson has been caught in the Coulson crossfire, and recalls Stephen Green’s double-dip warnings. David Blackburn watches the vice chancellors scupper Vince, and believes that Andy Coulson has loosened the noose that was tightening around his throat. Rod Liddle thinks that Sir Liam Donaldson can seriously damage your health. Alex Massie points out that Andy Coulson already faces a day in court. And Melanie Phillips explains why Tony Blair remains a class act.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Daftest Tsar Yet?

It’s official: Tsars have jumped the shark as surely as the phrase “jumped the shark” has itself jumped the shark. We’ve reached the end of an era since, frankly, I’m not sure you can beat the Obama administration’s appointment of, wait for it, an Asian Carp Tsar: The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes. On a conference call today with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and other congressional leaders, President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality announced the selection

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Thank you

All the baristas here at Coffee House would like to thank those who voted us no1 in Total Politics magazine list of top 60 media blogs. It’s a real honour, especially given the quality of the company we’re in. And two of our other stablemate blogs are also in the top20: Melanie Phillips at 14 and Rod at 17. Had Alex Massie’s blog been in this category (it’s not, for some reason) I’m sure it would have made the cut as his superlative blog on Scotland’s recent football match demonstrates. But as CoffeeHousers will know, the quality of a blog is often judged by the comments – and we have

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Buchan on Foreign Policy

Sandy Arbuthnot in The Three Hostages: “Lord!” he cried, “how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world.  That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice.  But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor.  We take violent sides, and make pets, and of course if you are -phil something or other you have got to be -phobe something else.  It is all wrong.  We are becoming Balkanised.” Discuss, paying special attention to

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Catholics should welcome their persecution. That’s what Christianity is all about

Catholics fuss too much about anti-Catholicism. Yes, there’s been lots of hostility to next week’s papal visit. (Peter Tatchell’s documentary, which will be broadcast on Monday, looks particularly nasty.) The secularists have got their knives out, and Catholics are understandably alarmed and angry.   But should they really mind? Isn’t Christianity supposed to be all about suffering and persecution? Rather than moaning about prejudice, Catholics should welcome it. Having pompous men like Geoffrey Robertson bother to deliver their ‘devastating legal indictments’ against the Vatican is a compliment, of sorts. It suggests that Catholicism still has some bite in the modern world. As Peter Hitchens admits in this week’s magazine, many