Society

Wednesday

Martin Bright

A New Tory Policy: Back to the Eighties

I cornered Ken Clarke after the press conference on employment and welfare today and asked him a direct question about my pet subject – Margaret Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I couldn’t get in a question during the press conference itself, which was dominated by journalists from Channel 4 (three questions, come on chaps, fair’s fair!) and some bloke called Forsyth from the Spectator. I asked Clarke about his post on the Linked In social networking site asking for people’s experiences of the 1980s scheme for people wanting to come off the dole and set up their own small businesses. I have been lobbying for this for some time, as has the Federation of

Tuesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Taking on the Dear Leader of Stoke Newington

I notice that the journalist Suzanne Moore is standing against Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Good for her. I know some of you may consider an Abbott-Moore contest to be on a par with, say, Gaddafy versus Assad, but Suzanne is at least not a hypocrite. She’s got a fight on her hands though; one assumes Abbott is carried around the constituency every day on a giant litter, accompanied by hordes of schoolchildren chanting rap anthems in her honour. It is very hard to match that sort of charisma, outside of Pyongyang. But good luck Suzanne, stick it to the woman.

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tories back ahead with YouGov

Earlier in the camapign, a two point lead in the YouGov tracker poll caused panic in Tory ranks. But tonight, there’s a certain sense of relief that the Tories are back ahead by this margin with You Gov. The numbers are Tories up one to 33, Lib Dems down two to 31 and Labour up one to 27. Now this is, of course, only one poll and others show the Lib Dems still surging. But there’ll be a certain relief at CCHQ that the haemoragging of Tory support seems to have stopped.  

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Eh? Support for the BNP has nothing to do with immigration?

A quite bizarre report from the IPPR which attempts to prove that it is not immigration which tempts people to vote BNP, but a lack of “resilience”. This fatuous word, resilience, is used more and more by government and quangos and local councils, usually to transfer blame to ordinary people for the crimes of those in authority – such as putting up with mass immigration, or being poor, or having rotten schools, or being badly educated. “Resilient” communities are simply affluent, white communities – Richmond Upon Thames, Wokingham and so on. But what a deluded report, and how weak its terms of reference. The IPPR cross referenced where the BNP

Daniel Korski

A world without planes

In the book a World Without the West, the authors invite the reader to imagine the non-Western world where South-to-South grow so strong that they bypass the traditional Euro-Atlantic powers. Stuck in southern Europe because of Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption, I have begun thinking about life without airplane travel.   The last 15 years have not only seen an explosion in cheap airline travel – spawning new tourist industries in once-forgotten European cities – but there has been an increase in the use of air transport for goods, mail, soldiers and much else besides. What would happen if this is ground to a halt in Europe not for a weekend or weeks

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 19 April – 25 April

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

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris is the man to burst the Clegg bubble

Tonight’s YouGov poll is another reminder, if oner were needed, that the Tories have to burst the Nick Clegg bubble. But any direct attacks on Clegg are dangerous as they present him with an opportunity to attack the same old politics. What the Tories need to do is to deflate it with humour. They should point out the absurdity of a lobbyist turned Eurocrat turned MP presenting himself as the alternative to the old politics. Is there anyone better to do this than Boris Johnson? He’s quotable and has just the kind of gently mocking humour that could puncture this bubble. Boris has, to my mind, being under used in

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Election speak

‘It’s not good enough just to appear on your doorstep at election times,’ says the leaflet from Chuka Umunna, my local Labour candidate. Which is presumably why he hasn’t. This is not to imply that I have never seen him. I once caught a glimpse of him galloping past my house. I think he was speed canvassing. One of his helpers knocked on my door for a chat, though, which was nice. She was one of those cheerful, ruddy-cheeked, capable-looking community organiser types. The kind who knows how to administer basic first aid to a severed artery. She wouldn’t necessarily save your life but she’d make you a bit more

Jeremy Clarke

Spring cleaning

I was standing in line in front of the container truck-sized skip designated for waste metal. Each Sunday, the local council puts three of these huge skips — one for wood, one for metal and one for gardening refuse — on one of its old storage sites, calls it a civic amenity centre and invites householders to bring along recycling waste that is too bulky for the fortnightly collection. It also supplies a static dustcart for rubble and cardboard and three workers to supervise, assist and keep an eye out that nobody abuses the service by sneaking in old tyres, tins of paint or asbestos. Ten years ago, we would

Taki

Useful lives

New York If one was making £160,000 per week — that’s more than a quarter of a million dollars every seven days — it would be safe to assume that one’s father would not choose to deal in cocaine for a living. Not necessarily, it seems — at least not in the John Terry family. The man who had to stand down as captain of the England football squad for having screwed a teammate’s girl is a hell of a fellow. His mother and mother-in-law were cautioned last year for shoplifting. Now his old man is charged with dealing in the wrong kind of coke. What in hell’s name is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 April 2010

Q. May I offer an alternative solution to the query from Yokohama last week? A 60-year-old man wrote that people complimented him on his girlfriend’s looks — but in a manner barely concealing amazement that he has managed to attract such a beauty. When this happens, I would suggest he reply: ‘Yes, I agree. And the wonderful thing is that everyone assumes I must be much richer than I actually am.’ N.P., Winchester A. Thank you. This complements my own suggested response. Apologies to T.E. of Yokohama to whose letter I attributed the wrong initials. Q. Where a brown ‘Services’ sign appears on a main road and no public lavatories

Toby Young Toby Young

Funny to think that empowering ordinary citizens was once a rallying cry of the left

Just how much appetite is there for David Cameron’s Big Society? Not much, according to the chattering classes. One of the more bizarre sights on the day the Conservatives’ launched their manifesto was watching the liberal left poo-poo the notion that ordinary people could be ‘prised away from the telly’. Jackie Ashley in the Guardian, for instance, had never heard of such a preposterous idea. ‘Modern life is so busy, with longer working hours, 24-hour TV, emails, blogging, tweeting and the rest, that I wonder how many people will find the time to go along and organise their local school or hospital or police force,’ she wrote. Funny to think

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 17 April 2010

Monday So exciting! Our lovely Cadbury bluey-purple manifesto is finally ready. The toll it has taken on Mr Letwin is horrific but Jed says a few months in the Austerity Room and he should be back to ‘normal’. (Our head of strategy’s finger quotation marks, not mine.) Mr Willetts jumping up and down with excitement at California-style referendums. Dave a bit cross-patchy about them. He says people had ‘bloody better not start demanding daft things like taking all the traffic lights down. What then, eh?’ Mr Letwin just squeaked. Our Leader also nervous about the ‘be your own boss’ idea. Keeps asking Mr Gove to explain how it won’t mean

The Spectator

Letters | 17 April 2010

Tea parties began here Sir: Daniel McCarthy is right that the tea party is ‘a symbol of colonial rebellion’ (‘The trouble with tea parties’, 10 April). But where does he suppose the rebels drew their inspiration from? The American patriots of 1773 didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen. Part of that birthright was liberty from unjust, arbitrary or punitive taxation. The proposition that taxes ought not to be levied except by elected representatives would have been every bit as popular in contemporary Great Britain as in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 April 2010

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, sent the Foreign Secretary to a nuclear security summit in Washington, so that he could launch the Labour party manifesto in an empty hospital in Birmingham. It promised to halve the annual deficit by 2014, through growth, taxes and cuts, but not to raise rates of income tax and not to extend VAT to food, children’s clothes, books, newspapers and public transport fares. Underperforming schools might be taken over by more successful ones; failing police forces might be taken over by more successful ones. There would be a referendum before 2011 on the alternative vote method of electing MPs. Mr David Cameron launched the

The Spectator

Manifesto destiny

If economics is the dismal science, manifesto-writing must rank as a candidate for the most dismal of arts. Too often in recent times it has been a case of writing down the word ‘future’ and then throwing virtuous-sounding words such as ‘fairness’, ‘change’ and ‘all’ into the air and seeing in what order they land. Manifesto-writers ought to subject each sentence to a test: do not include any statement unless you can imagine your political opponents saying the opposite. The title of Labour’s manifesto sums up its intellectual exhaustion: which politician this side of the 19th-century would ever have opposed a ‘Future Fair for All’? That is what makes the

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 17 April 2010

Manifesto pledges, arguments, debates: but do any of them discuss the real issue at hand — what makes for good government? Socrates had strong views on the subject. Manifesto pledges, arguments, debates: but do any of them discuss the real issue at hand — what makes for good government? Socrates had strong views on the subject. In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato puts Socrates head-to-head with Callicles, who proclaims the gospel that might is right, and that by effective use of rhetoric a politician can rise above the common herd and get whatever he wants. Socrates was talking in the context of a radical, direct democracy, where all decisions about the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lib Dems in the lead

A BPIX poll for the Mail on Sunday has the Lib Dems in the lead. The poll, which uses a similar methodology to YouGov, puts the Lib Dems up 12 on 32, the Tories down 7 to 31 and Labour down three to 28. Time will tell if this is a bubble that will burst but the first ever TV debate has certainly shaken the kaleidoscope of British politics. Update: Do read Andrew Neil’s blog on whether the Lib Dem surge will last

James Forsyth James Forsyth

More evidence of a Lib Dem poll surge

There’s another poll putting the Lib Dems in second place now, Com Res has them up eight to 29, the Tories down four to 31 and Labour down two to 27. An ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph has the Lib Dems up 7 to 27. The Tories are on 34, down 3,  and Labour are down two to 29. Interestingly, the paper is reporting that most of the polling was carried out before the debate–so ICM’s numbers may well under-estimate the Lib Dem’s current strength.   Again, we will have to wait a few more days to see whether this Lib Dem surge is solid. But there’s no doubt that something interesting is going on.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron needs to go big on the big society

The more I think about David Cameron’s debate performance the more I think that the problem with it was that it was too one-note. He said little that would make voters think of him as a different kind of Conservative. As with his 2008 conference speech, there was too much health and safety and not enough hope. Cameron actually started the debate strongly, I thought his answers on immigration and crime were solid. But an example of what he didn’t do came when education came up. Cameron talked about excessive bureaucracy, discipline and government waste. Not once did he mention how he was going to let parents, teachers and voluntary