Society

Sunday

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.

Toby Young Toby Young

If the Lib Dems do well in this election, it will be down to the madness of crowds

It is now generally accepted that David Cameron made a colossal blunder in agreeing to the televised debates. Had last Thursday’s debate not taken place, the Conservatives would still have a comfortable lead over the other two main parties, on track for a small overall majority. Yet among the commentariat — even those in the blue camp — the consensus is that the debates are good for politics. Whatever the outcome of the election, the British public will have made a more informed decision about whom to vote for. In particular, large swaths of the electorate who might otherwise remain disaffected will have been engaged by the televised debates. But

The Spectator

Letters | 24 April 2010

Delingpole’s victims Sir: In his most recent column (You know it makes sense, 17 April), James Delingpole suggests that ‘even as the wall is pushed on top of’ me by anti-gay Islamists, I ‘will be squealing with [my] last breath that it’s all the fault of Western imperialism and white heterosexist Islamophobia.’ I found this slightly odd, since I am so critical of Islamic fundamentalists that I have received a substantial number of death threats from them. I worked undercover at the Finsbury Park mosque after 9/11 to expose Islamists; I have debunked Hizb ut Tahrir as a bunch of theocratic fascists on live television; and after I wrote an

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 April 2010

Like a baby that throws its rattle from the pram each time it is handed back, my husband responds to specific stimuli from the television. Every time he hears the phrase next up, he shouts, ‘Shut up!’ This exclamation also serves as a response to first up, and even listen up. English is rich in phrasal verbs, but the prepositions recruited for them seem to have become unruly recently. We are suffering from prepositionitis, and up is getting particularly uppity. Uppity itself is American in origin, not dating from much earlier than Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Uncle Remus’ stories (1880): ‘Hit wuz wunner deze yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck,’

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 24 April 2010

Monday Could barely drag self out of bed this morning. Mummy came in to draw the curtains in the end and reminded me I have to do it for Dave. Rang Gary Barlow as soon as got into office. He’s been racking his brains but says there may be nothing more he can do for us. Robbie wouldn’t help, he’s got a UFO conference in Utah this week. Everything is going against us! Told Jed I had failed miserably to deliver on Dave’s pledge to reform the original line-up of Take That and he wasn’t even cross with me. He thanked me almost politely and said I was not to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 24 April 2010

Some 150,000 British travellers were stranded when the National Air Traffic Services stopped all flights from 15 April because of a cloud of fine volcanic ash drifting from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. Some 150,000 British travellers were stranded when the National Air Traffic Services stopped all flights from 15 April because of a cloud of fine volcanic ash drifting from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. It was feared that the glassy particles would melt in jet engines, causing them to fail. The name of the volcano was very seldom heard on British media because it was hard to pronounce. No aeroplanes flew over Europe from the Pyrenees to the

The Spectator

Blue sky thinking

The volcanic ash cloud over Britain, which for days kept nearly all aircraft grounded, was much more than an inconvenience. For many, it was a catastrophe. Businesses that rely on air-travel have been paralysed, weddings ruined, and tens of thousands of passengers stranded abroad or stuck at home. Yet for all the chaos — which appeared to be ending after air-space was officially ‘re-opened’ on Tuesday night – Eyjafjallajökull has had its upsides. As our enthusiastic poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, pointed out, the skies looked clear and calm, ‘as clean as white slate’, uncluttered by helicopters and 747s. And the act of God eruption was not just an act

The Spectator

Battle for England

As we celebrate St George’s Day, it is worth asking just what England has done to deserve being landed in such a mess. She certainly did not vote for it. In the last election, the Conservatives won the most English votes. And no one, aside from 24,500 Fifers, has ever crossed a box beside Gordon Brown’s name. Yet the Labour Prime Minister has had a free rein to trample all over England’s economy. The voting system, many conclude, is a joke. So why not throw the mother of all spanners into the works — and vote Lib Dem? The English have a long record of defying authority that they do

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 24 April 2010

In this election there is one stupendous problem towering over all parties’ ambitions — debt. They all pretend it can be solved painlessly, but know they cannot tell the truth about it. Romans would have known where to start. In this election there is one stupendous problem towering over all parties’ ambitions — debt. They all pretend it can be solved painlessly, but know they cannot tell the truth about it. Romans would have known where to start. Romans made a point of emphasising that Senate and People stood together. Not for nothing was the famous SPQR logo Senatus Populus Que Romanus highlighted on coins, documents, monuments and the standards

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Vince flip-flops on yet another issue

On Wednesday, Vince Cable said during the Chancellors’ debate that the Tories’ planned £6 billion of efficency savings really didn’t amount to that much. Here’s the exchange: Andrew Neil: ‘Vince you used to be an economist. Are you seriously arguing that 6bn would make a difference one way or the other to a 1.5 trillion pound economy’ Vince Cable: ‘No I wouldn’t. But what I would argue for is broad fiscal neutrality. On this issue of timing it’s absolutely right in the coming year’ AN: ‘What does that mean in English?’ VC: ‘It means in simple English it’s not having a severe contraction of the budget deficit’    AN: ‘Well 6

Alistair Horne

Kissinger’s man from Moscow

When Anatoly Dobrynin died earlier this month, aged 90, the British press paid little notice. Yet it is increasingly clear that he was one of the most remarkable players in the Cold War — someone who did much to stop the conflict turning hot. Over 24 years he served as Soviet ambassador to six US Presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan. Perhaps his most telling contribution was his role in the period of détente during the stewardship of Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s all-powerful national security adviser, and later secretary of state. Dobrynin arrived in Washington just in time to be thrown into the Cuban Missile Crisis. At 42,

Andrew M Brown

Eating disorder

The class system, with its fixed mealtimes, stopped us all from getting fat, says Andrew M. Brown. Today we are a nation of all-day munchers — and it shows Imagine if, at breakfast, a mother were to offer her family, instead of cornflakes or boiled eggs, slices from a gigantic cake smothered in icing. Would that seem odd? Well, yes, it would: but that’s exactly what a lot of us do — eat cake for breakfast. A muffin is a cake by another name. And on our way to work plenty of us snap up a white chocolate and strawberry muffin, say, from Starbucks, at 583 calories, and wash it

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 24 April 2010

In Competition 2643 you were invited to submit what might have been just another dull news story from a local paper had you not spiced it up with a number of misprints. The wording of the challenge inevitably produced entries that were in a smutty vein and there were plenty of instances of ‘erection’ for ‘election’, ‘copulation’ for ‘population’ and ‘bums’ for ‘buns’, which got a bit wearing after a while but is no doubt my own fault — as one competitor put it: ‘Well, you did ask us to spice things up…’ It was plausible misprints rather than malapropisms that I was after, and D.A. Prince’s local ‘dress shops

Kate Chisholm

Speed limit | 24 April 2010

I’ve hardly dared switch the radio on over the last few days so blissful has been the quiet engendered by the Ash Crisis. I’ve hardly dared switch the radio on over the last few days so blissful has been the quiet engendered by the Ash Crisis. The absence of noise is uncanny; this new soundtrack of life so deep, stretching way up into the empty skies. Why spoil it by turning on the radio? Yet an election looms, my sister’s stuck in Sri Lanka and I discover that my mind is just too addicted to grazing on news and ideas, facts and opinions to stop listening. On Saturday night, Terence

Friday

David Blackburn

A culture of intimidation and a conspiracy to silence

On the afternoon of 4 June 2009, John Hutton, then Secretary of State for Defence, told the House of Commons: ‘Every one of our servicemen and women has the right to know that we are doing everything possible to ensure that every pound of investment in our equipment programme goes towards the front line and is not wasted in inefficient or weak processes of acquisition. That is why I asked Bernard Gray in December last year to conduct a detailed examination of progress in implementing the MOD’s acquisition change programme, as I hope right hon. and hon. Members will recall. I have to be satisfied that the current programme of

The Spectator

The week that was | 23 April 2010

It’s been a busy week at Spectator Live, where Gaby Hinsliff argues that what’s wrong the TV debates is the visual aspect, and Rory Sutherland thinks that the Lib Dem surge may give the Tories a lasting advantage in Middle England. There is also a selection of videos, polls and additional articles for your delectation. Here is what Spectator.co.uk made of the second televised debate: Fraser Nelson says Cameron has pulled the Tories out of the fire. James Forsyth says an improved Cameron hasn’t burst the Lib Dem bubble. Peter Hoskin calls it Cameron’s evening. David Blackburn thinks the camera doesn’t like David Cameron. And Susan Hill bets that David