Society

Saturday

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Service replaced their original contrivances with a bill so convoluted that the Repeal Act itself would have to be repealed.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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Hope this helps, Dan

I read Dan Hannan’s blog about the recent Spectator debate in which we argued about whether or not Britain was so completely knackered that we all ought to leave the place right now. I thought we should, Dan thought we should hang around for a bit longer. Anyway, on his blog Dan made reference to the fact that pretty much all of the other speakers were lefties…..’Or at least four of them were Lefties: Rod Liddle’s politics are as hard to define as Puck’s.’ I assume that’s a Shakespearian reference and not a misprint. It’s not every day you get called a fairy by a politician you admire, so I

David Blackburn

That’ll learn ‘em

At last, some will cry, teachers are to be given increased disciplinary powers to moderate unruly children’s behaviour. Rather than tear up the statute book, the measures aim to change perceptions and practices and redress the balance of rights in favour of the teacher. Force can be used to restrain pupils at present, but teachers rarely resort to force for fear of prosecution. The government will lessen what it terms ‘vilification’ by protecting teachers’ anonymity against complaints unless a criminal prosecution is brought. Search and confiscation powers will be extended and summary penalties imposed on transgressors. Currently, schools have to write to parents and give 24 hours notice to detain

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Mobility Gap

Growing inequality is, plenty of people agree, a problem. So what do you make of this chart from a Brookings Institute study from 2009? It’s a US-centric chart of “relative mobility”: This, via Jon Chait, comes from David Frum and is, in many respects, possibly the biggest issue of the age. I don’t think this means we have to become Scandinavian – though remember that Denmark is also one of the most economically free countries on earth (according to the Cato Institute) but I’m not sure one can look at this sort of thing without wondering about some things. This, I concede, is an even bigger question for the left

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Road to Hell is Paved with Cobblestones

I’m not going to write about the Tour de France every day – just as I won’t about the cricket season as soon as anything interesting or significant happens – but this was a great day in the Tour. Commenting on this post, Ronnie was right to suggest that a stage that involved a few kilometers over the cobblestones posed a risk that someone’s Tour might end today. He was right: Frank Schleck is done. But that, brutally, is a small price for a superb race and, anyway, could have happened absent the pave too. There was a time and not so long ago that the racing in the first

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Sex by sat-nav

Theo Hobson is depressed by the media’s rapturous welcome for Grindr, a new software device that helps gay men locate each other for impromptu sex I am not a homophobe. But I suppose I might be a pinkophobe. I do not think that homosexuality is wrong, bad, inferior, hateful in the eyes of God. And yet I find male homosexual culture objectionable. I think, especially in the last decade or so, that it has come to have a corrupting influence on sexual culture generally. The heart of the matter is the fact that male homosexuality has a special relationship with promiscuity, and gay culture fails to be ashamed of this.

Beryl Bainbridge

Archive Diary

For almost three decades the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who died last week, wrote book reviews and diaries for The Spectator. They were, without exception, brilliant. It has been said over the last week that she was the best novelist of her generation, but she was also (though a life-long Labour voter) the best sort of conservative: ‘What a mistake change is!’ she wrote in a diary in 2000: ‘Who needs those ghastly new buildings which have taken over Swiss Cottage? Why was Peter’s bookshop in Camden Town done away with, and the off-licence and the pet shop and the Delancey Café?’ Which Spectator reader would disagree? In one diary she

Mark Wood

Can the iPad save Fleet Street?

Will Steve Jobs go down as the saviour of the British newspaper industry? Quite possibly, if iPads are the big Christmas hit this year. That would mean they are becoming essential gadgets for business people, commuters, air travellers and the reading classes in general. They might just mark a turning-point for the fortunes of a British industry grappling desperately with dramatic declines in sales, defection of advertisers and woeful returns on the huge investments made in glitzy websites and marketing budgets. It is an industry praying for a miracle. Few newspaper readers appreciate the nightmare facing the companies who produce them. Classified ads, once about a third of an average