Society

Much ado about the Guardian’s scoop this evening: a leaked Treasury document which forecasts that up to 1.3 million jobs could be lost as a result of the spending cuts in the Budget.  Or, to put it in the words of the document itself: “100-120,000 public sector jobs and 120-140,000 private sector jobs assumed to be lost per annum for five years through cuts.” You can expect Labour to get stuck into these numbers, and the fact that they were previously hidden from public view, with no uncertain relish.  Ed Balls has already described them as “chilling”.  But it’s worth making a couple of points, by way of context: i)

A quick post to point CoffeeHousers in the direction of our new-look arts pages. There, naturally, you’ll find the usual archive of reviews and articles from the back half of the magazine – but there’s also a new addition. Our old arts blog Cappuccino Culture has been deposed, and in its place is Touching From A Distance, an independent arts blog we liked so much that we decided to co-opt it for the site. Simon and Scott, the co-editors of TFAD, have introduced themselves and their blog here. So suffice to say for now, it’s a pleasure to have them on board.

This week’s New Yorker has a little piece about Cherie Blair’s efforts to get an International Widows’ day recognised. Most of it is about Blair doing the diplomatic rounds, she compares the process to the one for trying to win the Olympics for London. But there is an interesting anecdote about what happened when the Blairs were both looking for chambers to join: “When Tony and I were looking for jobs, they said they had a boy and a girl and they couldn’t possibly take another girl, so I went to another chambers, and Tony was taken on.” It is easy sometimes to forget just how much things have changed

There’s nothing quiet about Iain Duncan Smith this morning. Echoing Norman Tebbitt’s infamous ‘On yer Bike’ comments of 1981, Duncan Smith has vowed to obliterate ‘welfare ghettos’. For once I agree with Ed Balls: Duncan Smith is going further than Tebbitt, much further. The government is planning to move the long-term unemployed out of sink estates and into other areas, possibly hundreds of miles away, where unemployment is negative. Incentives for work and promises of low regional taxes in Northern England, Wales and Scotland were included in the Budget to this effect. This may be manna from Heaven for Balls – the traditional candidate in the Labour leadership contest can evoke the