Society

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Dear Dave,

Tonight is about the economy – the most important issue troubling voters. Amazing, though, your economic mesage has not been particularly clear. Incredible given what the Labour government has done, I know, but true. George Osborne cannot seem to win over the City; the Lords of Finance never miss an opportunity to tell the FT that they don’t like/trust him. Your deficit-reduction message is on the other hand clear – but voters don’t seem to like it, believe it is actually necessary and seem worried about the “Sword of Cable”, which, like that of Damocles, is said to hang over the country by a hair and can come plunging down

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Gordon needs Jamie

Motherwell Rules. Obviously, like…  He’s a nice chap really… Also from The Thick of It: Peter Mannion: This is the trouble with the public, they’re fucking horrible! Emma Messinger: Peter, you can’t say the public are fucking horrible. Peter Mannion: Yes I can, I’ve met them. All true, all too true.

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Deeper into the mire

It is just getting worse and worse for Brown. The woman he insulted is a widow whose husband died of cancer and who worked with handicapped children.  

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A devastating moment for Brown

Now we know why the Labour campaign was so keen to keep the Prime Minister away from ordinary voters. This moment is going to be replayed again and again. Already lobby journalists are calling their offices saying, ‘Shall we buy her up?’ The moment is so devastating for Mr Brown because it sums up what people hate about politicians. He didn’t tell the woman she was a ‘bigot’ to her face but waited until he was back in the car to say it. Next, it is going to be turned into a story about how Brown thinks that anyone who worries about immigration is a bigot. One final thought: spare

David Blackburn

A deeply emotive issue

Jonathan Bartley, the man who ambushed Cameron yesterday, has written a piece for the Guardian. In it, the education establishment’s counter-productive monopoly is exposed. Bartley writes: ‘Either we are for inclusion or we aren’t. To include children with special needs in mainstream schools takes commitment and a lot of work. Indeed, it requires “bias” – which has actually been lacking in the education system, despite all the talk of inclusion from Labour. There are few parents of children with special educational needs who would not want their children to attend their local school with brothers and sisters and friends, provided that the school is properly resourced, equipped and able to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Trust Factor

The other day, writing in the New York Times, Tyler Cowen suggested: The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed. Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997. […] To be sure, the spending cuts meant fewer government services, most of all for health care, and big cuts in agricultural subsidies. But Canada remained a highly humane society, and American liberals continue to cite it as a beacon of progressive values.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Labour’s disintegrating campaign

Fireworks at Labour’s press conference this morning, thanks to some brilliant questioning of Mandelson and Balls about the cuts which Labour is concealing from the public. A while ago, the FT did its own version of a table that Coffee House ran in February: the implied cuts that departments will make under HM Treasury forecasts. I reprint it below. The IFS has sought to quantify these cuts. So Sky’s Adam Boulton read out this list and confronted Mandelson: which of these would Labour not do? Freezing benefits? Cutting public sector pay? Halving the spend on teaching assistants? Cutting funding to Wales and Scotland? Nick Robinson from the BBC piled in

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Delaying gratification

I’m a bit late to this, so apologies, but there’s a very good piece in the current issue of the magazine by Andrew M Brown, about why almost everybody is fat. Andrew suggests that as a consequence of the class system breaking down, we no longer know when we are supposed to eat and so, like cows, we eat all the time. He makes a persuasive case but I’m not sure that he is right. It is true that, coming from a working class background, I have often been confused by existing class terminology for meals. For example, when I first started work for The Spectator I asked the then

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Strong Society

The ideas buried in the Tory manifesto – buried I say because they’ve not spent nearly enough time explaining them – are good and classically conservative. Family, Community, Country. Those are the pillars. But they’ve not been able to build upon this good work and instead the “Big Society” has left voters cold and confused. What does it mean? And that’s left the Tories vulnerable. During the second debate Gordon Brown even suggested that the Tories’ Big Idea was little more than a kind of “DIY NHS” – a double calumny since the NHS is the one area that the Conservatives have decided to leave well alone. So the idea

David Blackburn

Seeking an audience with the Pope

Rod Liddle’s right, Steven Mulvain should not be sacked for his limp attempt at humour. You know, Benedict branded condoms and the like. (Maybe endorsing the age of consent with a brand called ‘XVIs’ might have worked better. I don’t know.) However, there is a possibility that Mulvain’s email was part of an FO ‘brainstorm’. This raises questions about the section of the FO concerned and the hypocrisy often engendered by political correctness. James Macintyre is ‘reliably’ informed by a senior Whitehall figure that: ‘This was not written as a joke. It was meant to be a serious brainstorming by various people designed for a meeting. I know it is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Meeting real people, the staple of campaigning

David Cameron is visiting Hampshire today, hitting both Labour and Lib Dem held seats. In a visit to Southampton University, he was confronted by a feisty Lib Dem supporting student who accused him of planning changes that would make it more difficult for working class kids like her to go to university. Cameron dealt with the question well. He said that the Tories would keep bursaries and that there simply isn’t the money to abolish tuition fees. He also pointed out that currently only 40 odd children on free school meals go to Oxford and that Tory plans to bust open the state monopoly in the provision of education would

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 26 April – 2 May

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

Steven Mulvain’s a hypocrite but he doesn’t deserve to be sacked

What should we do about Steven Mulvain, the young civil servant who suggested that the Pope, when he arrives for his visit here, should be asked to open an abortion clinic, or sponsor a new brand of “Benedict” condoms? If you haven’t already read about the case, here it is. Mulvain’s email is certainly typical of a certain faux left, middle class, public-school educated mindset, one which reeks of self-righteousness and moral superiority, and which I suspect is prevalent throughout the modern civil service (and indeed most of the public sector). You cannot imagine that Mr Mulvain would have been quite so ready to make similar sorts of jokes if

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron must make sure he carries the party with him if he has to make a deal

There is clearly a real chance that the Conservatives will get the most votes and the most seats at the election but still be significantly short of a Commons’ majority. If Cameron is asked to form a government in these circumstances, he has two options. The first, as I say in the Mail on Sunday, is to play chicken with the Liberal Democrats; to compromise on nothing and dare the Lib Dems to bring down the government. The second is to make some kind of deal. The Lib Dems, who have had many internal discussions about what kind of deal they would cut, have a whole set of mechanisms—the triple

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Making the big society agenda real

We’ve just seen the first Tory event designed to show—not tell—people what the big society actually is: David Cameron and Michael Gove speaking to a rally of parents in West Yorkshire who want to set up their own school, something that they’ll be able to do if the Tories win. At last, the Tories are selling their best policy: the right of parents, teachers and social enterprises to set up free, independent schools. The parents at the rally today are motivated by the fact that their local school has been shut down by educational bureaucrats and that their children now have an absurdly long journey to school. To compound the

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Log jam

The consensus among my girlfriends is that it is simply marvellous that I’m free, that I’m being true to myself, that I have taken my power back. On the other hand, if I don’t find another man soon I’m never going to get this sack of logs out of the footwell of the passenger side of my car. The gamekeeper at the farm where I keep my horses loaded them in there three weeks ago and I’ve been driving around with them ever since. I don’t know what I was thinking. My head must have been stuck in ‘I have a boyfriend’ mode when I accepted them because it seemed

Jeremy Clarke

Film studies

I saw three films at the cinema last month. The first was a French-made job, with subtitles, called A Prophet. It was awarded the accolade of ‘best film’ at Cannes in 2009 and I drove the 20 miles to the arthouse cinema full of optimism. In the café beforehand for a cup of green tea and a slice of carrot cake (I know, I know — ponce), I asked the woman behind the counter if she’d seen it and what it was like. The still-handsome, slightly intimidating woman in a green apron must have been a real stunner when she was young. She looked at me carefully before answering, as

Taki

Taxable earnings

New York April in the Bagel is as good as it gets. The girls are back in their summer dresses, people are crowding the outdoor cafés, and Central Park is an explosion of greens and pinks. Spring, as the song says, is busting out all over. And the taxman cometh — though not for 41 per cent of NYers. Last week, on tax day, it was revealed that an eye-popping 41 per cent of the state’s filers did not pay any federal income tax last year. I don’t know the London figures, but I’d guess they’d be about the same. Being on the dole nowadays is good business, and being

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 24 April 2010

Q. My wife and I live in a very pretty, modestly sized farmhouse. It comes with two barns to scale and since long before I met her, friends, and friends of friends, have been in the habit of asking my saintly wife to store things for them, while they get their lives and accommodation together. Now both barns are completely full and we cannot use them ourselves at all. The worst offender is taking up one whole barn. This dear woman, who was turned out of her previous house, perhaps for having 22 cats, had moved all her possessions into professional storage and was paying an iniquitous £125 a week.