Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 10 July 2010

Mr Nick Clegg attracted some mockery recently by using the words cuts and progressive in the same sentence. Mr George Osborne, in his Budget speech, said: ‘We are a progressive alliance governing in the national interest.’ Some accused them of using the word progressive because it meant nothing. In reality progressive means several things. Usage slides from one to another. Thus Mr Clegg had spoken in the same interview about reduced taxes for the poor (or, rather, ‘people on lower incomes’). Taxation which increases according to income is called progressive taxation. This appeals to progressive-minded people. The latter sense is the most slippery. Fortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary last month

Ozzy Osbourne

Diary – 10 July 2010

When I finally croak, this is what it’s gonna say on my headstone: ‘Ozzy Osbourne: born 1948; died whenever. PS: He bit the head off a bat.’ It’s been almost 30 years since I mistook that bat for a rubber toy — it’s not like I wanted to get rabies shots for the next two months — but it’s still the first question out of people’s mouths when I’m promoting a new album. But that’s what comes with being the Prince of Darkness, I suppose, so I’m not complaining — especially not when my new record, Scream, has gone into the Top Ten of the album charts in seven different

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 July 2010

The coalition government contemplated legislation to reduce Civil Service lay-off payments in prospect of large redundancies. The Public and Commercial Services Union predicted strikes. Mr George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was accused by the opposition of scare tactics after asking ministerial colleagues to prepare plans for departmental cuts of 40 per cent. Mr Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said that 715 school reconstruction schemes under Labour’s programme called Building Schools for the Future would not go ahead. Mr Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, encouraged ‘better off’ people with free bus passes to pay their fares. The BBC is to close its Asian Network radio channel but reprieve 6

The Spectator

God bless the Queen

The Queen’s speech to the United Nations this week was a masterpiece. A forum which hears so much from politicians with, at best, a passing grasp of world affairs was treated to the views of a head of state with half a century of experience and wisdom. As she so rightly observed, the most ‘sweeping advances’ she has seen came not at the behest of governments but because ‘millions of people wanted them’. Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the UN, perfectly captured the characteristics of her triumphant reign: ‘grace, constancy and dignity’. ‘In a changing and churning world,’ he told the monarch, ‘you are an anchor for our age.’ She

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Good News! The Government Will Not Ban Cheddar Cheese Sandwiches

I can’t say for sure if this is the strangest parliamentary question asked in recent years but, via John Rentoul, it’s certainly rum. John Spellar, Labour MP for Waring submitted this as a written question: Hospitals: Food Mr Spellar: To ask the Secretary of State for Health whether he plans to ban the sale of (a) tea and coffee with sugar and (b) cheddar cheese sandwiches in hospitals. [5340] Anne Milton: No. I suppose that we can only be glad that the answer was in fact “no”, not “we have no plans to ban cheddar cheese sandwiches in hospitals” or, more succinctly, “yes”. UPDATE: In the coments, Guto Daffyd has a good

David Blackburn

Insane culture

I’ve just flicked on the television in search of fresh disasters. The news that Raoul Moat shot himself when cornered in a kessel is still ‘breaking’. In this heat I’d be surprised if he wasn’t oozing by now, but 24 hour news doesn’t concern itself with such trivialities. The ‘Yours Concerned’ BBC reporter intoned in horror that 2 tasers had been used in the operation.  Now, I wouldn’t arm the officious clown who asked why I was carrying a bottle of Crozes Hermitage through Waterloo station yesterday evening. I oppose the adoption of tasers in anything other than extreme circumstances. But Mr Moat was fairly extreme in my book, given,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

When Death Freezes Over…

A fascinating and typically well-written piece by Kerry Howley about cryonics and death, published in the New York Times Magazine last week. It begins well and gets better: There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Virginia. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that

David Blackburn

Sir Humphrey always has the last word

The Great Repeal Act seems to have gone the way of all flesh. Perhaps the task was deemed too cumbrous. Or perhaps the Civil Service replaced their original contrivances with a bill so convoluted that the Repeal Act itself would have to be repealed. As Alan Clark wrote: ‘Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives and convoluted apology’. I mention the civil service because the government plan to ‘cure Labour’s Health and Safety neurosis’. Lovely turns of phrase from David Cameron in interview with the Mail: concern for safety and welfare has invaded the private sphere and it will be

David Blackburn

Send for Chote

And so it continues. The FT reports that Sir Alan Budd has denied that George Osborne cooked the OBR’s job loss forecasts. ‘It was genuinely a forecasting correction with no ministerial interference,’ he said, blandly. The correction was the result of the OBR’s use of a narrow definition of public sector workforce than is employed by other statisticians. That is not abnormal: statisticians are a law unto themselves. But, as the saying goes, it doesn’t look good. The OBR’s figures supported the government and the story is beginning to emit of a whiff of mendacity. Once more, George Osborne is in a mess of his own making. His political instincts veer

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Should the Schonrock kids be allowed to cycle to school?

It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains. I would walk the half-mile or so along Clifton Road by myself and camp out — usually on the southbound platform — well away from the occasional adult trainspotters with their flasks, anoraks and notebooks. I think we all recognise today that adult trainspotters are invariably paedophiles, but this was something I knew, at the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Lefties have got away with feeling superior for too long — let the fightback begin

I was at a debate at the Institute of Economic Affairs last week when the speaker next to me — a preening, prickly chap with a moustache and hugely self-important manner — took it upon himself to apprise the assembled throng of the most extraordinary fact: apparently, James Delingpole is nowhere near as good at delivering Ronald Reagan quotes as Ronald Reagan was. ‘As I can testify from experience,’ he added, impressively, ‘having heard Reagan speak on several occasions.’ ‘Gosh!’ I thought to myself. And again ‘Gosh!’ I’m often taken aback when complete strangers decide to have a go at me personally in debates. ‘Hey, you don’t even know me,’

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The wrong Blanchflower: Jackie would have understood the need to cut now

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I once heard an after-dinner speech by Jackie Blanchflower, brother of the great Spurs captain Danny. Jackie also played professional football, for Manchester United, but his career was cut short by his injuries in the 1958 Munich air crash, in which eight of his fellow ‘Busby Babes’ died. Thereafter he scratched a living as a publican, a bookie and an accounts clerk, and by the time I saw him, not long before he died in 1998, he looked so knackered that I wondered whether he would be capable of standing to speak. But he did, and delivered an unforgettably funny and poignant account of

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 10 July 2010

In Competition No. 2654 you were asked to submit a piece of lively and plausible prose, the first word beginning with ‘a’, the second with ‘b’, and so on, throughout the alphabet. Then to start again from ‘a’ and continue up to a maximum of 156 words. This was a real stinker, I admit. There were slip-ups from experienced competitors (Mary Holtby, Nicholas Hodgson), and many entries petered out into exhausted and exasperated silence well before the 156-word limit (though there was no obligation, of course, to reach it). As Basil Ransome-Davies so eloquently put it: ‘Basta! You will go to hell for this one.’ Well, Bazza, you can blame

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Wunderkinder

Quite the best piece about any sport you’re likely to read in a long time is a vibrant profile of Roger Federer in the New Yorker the other day by the octogenarian art critic Calvin Tomkins. In the course of it the Fed observes: ‘The problem with experience is that you become content with playing it safe. I have to push myself to stay dangerous, like a junior player — to play free tennis, but with the mental stability of an older player.’ Before the World Cup Bayern Munich’s Thomas Müller had won just two caps for Germany, Werder Bremen’s Mesut Özil had made five appearances for his country, as had his

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Fighting talk from IDS

Iain Duncan Smith is on a roll, and the roll continues with his interview on Straight Talk with Andrew Neil this weekend. Supporters of welfare reform will hear plenty to encourage them, even if only on a rhetorical level. Duncan Smith discuses how the fiscal climate makes this a “once in a generation opportunity and chance to change [welfare] now,” and how Beveridge’s original intentions have been subverted by a system which traps people out of work. But the most reassuring segment, by far, is this: “I, well, certainly, you know, I’ll be honest with you, there was certainly a discussion about that, everything was in the discussion, but my

Peter Hoskin

Osborne must make the workings of the OBR even more transparent

Forget the hubbub about Gove’s schools list, the most damaging story for the government this week could well be on the cover of today’s FT.  Alex Barker does a great job of summarising it here. But the central point is that the Office for Budget Responsibility changed its forecasting methods just before the Budget, with the effect of reducing how many public sector jobs would be lost due to the government’s measures. This isn’t damning on its own: statisticians constantly tweak their forecasting methods. But when you consider that the OBR’s new methods incorporated policies which haven’t even been announced yet (including one which pre-empts the findings of John Hutton’s

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why we shouldn’t worry about overpopulation

Perhaps the most sinister side of the environmentalist movement is the idea of an “optimal population,” where human life is seen as a menace. The Optimal Population Trust has today said that there are 45 million too many people living in Britain – which, for a country of 60 million, is quite some statement. The peculiar thing is that this “problem” may well have a solution in the form of the human race failing to reproduce. The hands of the world population clock are slowing. The natural population replacement level, 2.1 kids per woman, is achieved by no European country (pdf here). England stands at a respectable 1.75, Scotland at

David Blackburn

Gary McKinnon should convert to radical Islam

The European Court of Human Rights is an essential check on executive excess, but today it has perverted justice. It has halted Abu Hamza’s extradition to the US, where he was to be tried for colluding with al Qaeda. Its view was that Hamza would likely be subject to inhumane and degrading incarceration. In other words, the ECHR has decided that the US prison system is not compatible with the standards agreed by signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. Fine. Except, of course, it has not. There is a pernicious double standard at work here. Gary McKinnon, the aspergers sufferer who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, is

Peter Hoskin

Bring on people power – but Cameron will still need to get his hands dirty

You’ve got to hand it to him: David Cameron knows when to dish out the charm. Just days on from news about cuts to their pay-offs, he is today giving a speech to civil servants in which he purrs that they “the envy of the world”. Not that he withholds the stick, though. The meat of the speech is a series of measures designed to make the operations of Whitehall more transparent and its actors more accountable. Which, lest it need saying, is something I’m all in favour of. But it’s worth noting that much of this “post-bureaucratic” agenda will still require strong central control to work properly. Take Cameron’s

Wednesday

David Blackburn

PMQs Live-blog | 7 July 2010

11:45: Stay tuned for live coverage from 12:00. 12:03: Cameron opens by marking the victims of 7/7. For the second week running, Cameron has not read the butcher’s bill from Afghanistan. 12:05: Labour backbencher Alan Michael praises Somiland’s recent fair and democratic election. Cameron seconds that. 12:06: Here’s Harman. She begins with a tribute to the victims of 7/7. Now she’s off with domestic violence and segues into Ken Clarke’s sentencing review which is likely to reduce short-term sentences. Will wife-beaters be immune? 12:08: Cameron assures her it won’t – Clarke’s review will not ‘favour the recividist’. 12:09: Harman’s rather perky, saying that Clarke looks down in the dumps and