Society

Saturday

Richard Northedge

House prices

Here’s my hot prediction for 2009: house price inflation at 10 per cent. Yes, that is a 10 per cent increase, and yes, I do mean 2009. Halifax figures for the year to November were still showing prices down by 1.6 per cent — but believe me, by the end of this month housing will be showing double-digit growth. To be honest, this is not really a prediction: the 10 per cent increase in property prices across the country is already in the bag. While the statisticians at Halifax and Nationwide have been reporting annual falls in the market, their raw data shows a full-blown boom. The last year when

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The winner by a nose

Sprawling, cheesy, gimmicky, full of toe-curlingly embarrassing interviews — but still the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, dammit, lifts the spirits in a way few other events in the sporting calendar manage. Sunday night. Pull up a chair. Grab a drink. It only needs that theme tune to strike up for me to break out in goosebumps. What is it about the old SPOTY? Well, there’s the dramatically lit auditorium full to bursting with the sporting great and good, all in their finery, this time up in Sheffield. It’s also something to do with the link to a halcyon BBC past, when Peter Dimmock did his establishment thing

Deborah Ross

Less is more | 12 December 2009

Where the Wild Things Are PG, Nationwide Here is what you most need to know about this film: it isn’t a patch on the book. Usually, I wouldn’t put it like that. Indeed, as I have said before, and wouldn’t need to say again if only I could trust you had paid attention the first time, a film should stand or fall on its own merits, regardless of the source material, but I can’t seem to let it go with this one. Perhaps it’s because I’m just too close to this particular book. I grew up on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which was first published in 1963,

Peter Phillips

How early is early?

The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’? The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’? Recently the music which has fallen within the ‘early’ bracket has been so late (Brahms, Strauss, even Stravinsky) that my grandmother could have attended the first performances, and possibly did. The original banner of ‘authentic performances on original instruments’ is so taken

Friday

Martin Bright

Rediscovering Paul Berman

Six years ago I wrote a review for the Observer about Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, a quite brilliant polemic about the way the legitimate liberal desire to overturn the conventional or the bourgeois can so often turn to murderous terror. I recognised at the time that it was an extraordinary book, but I couldn’t quite accept his final conclusions, which seemed to elide different forms of barbarism so that Palestinian suicide bombers became equated with the genocide of the Nazi death camps. I still think it is important to make distinctions between the geographical, cultural and historical specifics of individual patterns of atrocity. This is not to say there

Daniel Korski

Not Foxy enough

Analysts analyse, reporters report and politicians, well, they are meant to make decisions. When in power, they are meant to decide things; when in opposition they are meant to set our alternatives to government policy. But not, it seems, when it comes to defence policy. Or at least not always. I have just sat down to read Liam Fox’s NATO speech (as I could not attend), which he gave at Chatham House recently. To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I think Liam Fox is a first-rate politician. His ongoing exposure of the Government’s military under-resourcing has been excellent. On a Tory team that is sometime accused of

The Spectator

The week that was | 11 December 2009

Here are some posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson says we shouldn’t worry about the tax on jobs, and reveals the hidden cuts in the Pre-Budget Report. James Forsyth wonders whether Labour has u-turned on defence spending, and says the Tories should attack the national insurance increase. Peter Hoskin gives his verdict on the Pre-Budget Report, and watches the government’s economic narrative unravel. David Blackburn notes a significant endorsement for Osborne and Hammond, and wonders how long it will be until the plug is pulled. Martin Bright gives his take on the PBR. Susan Hill reflects on readers’ abiding fascination with authors. Rod Liddle apologies. Sorta.

Peter Hoskin

The unravelling continues apace

Has Brown got away with his horror Budget?  Reading the Populus poll in this morning’s Times, you might be tempted to say he has.  Sure, there’s some bad news in there for the government: trust in Dave ‘n’ George’s ability to manage the economy has hit an all-time high, and only 12 percent of respondents think that the measures outlined in the PBR will be sufficient to deal with our country’s fiscal woes.  But Labour types will also seize on those numbers which show quite high levels of support for the individual proposals annouced on Wednesday.  78 percent back the bonus tax.  61 percent back the capping of public sector

The Spectator

Apologies | 11 December 2009

We’ve been experiencing a few technical difficulties on Spectator.co.uk this morning, which mean some of you may not have been able to access the site We’re hoping that things will be fully fixed shortly. But, in the meantime, blogging may be a little sporadic.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Another PBR, Please

That would be a Pabst Blue Ribbon, of course, though another, better, Pre-Budget Report would be welcome too. As Fraser says, the public finances are ruined and will not be rebuilt for many years. Bill Jamieson’s piece in the Scotsman framed the matter rather well and explained why the level of debt matters more than, I suspect, many people think it does: But why should debt figures matter so much? This is why: Next year, we will be paying £44.4bn in debt interest alone – never mind debt falling due for repayment. That debt interest in 2010-11 will absorb the entire proceeds from capital gains tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Those hidden cuts in full

The truth about the Pre-Budget Report was revealed today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies: the new National Insurance tax will hit everyone on £14k or over, not £20k – and there are implied 19 per cent cuts of some £40 billion in the “non-protected” areas. The event was sold out, because it now has the reputation as the only place you learn the truth about Budgets passed by this government. Yet again, Gemma Tetlow from the IFS has unearthed the cuts which the Chancellor felt he had to conceal from the public (and – unwittingly, I hope – lied about this morning on the radio). Coffee House showed you yesterday that the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Laffer Curve & Its Reverse

Danny Finkelstein makes an obvious, if oft-ignored or forgotten, point and does so with his customary elegance: This idea of [Arthur] Laffer’s is clearly true. We don’t know what the curve (does it have a different dips for different taxes or a sharp fall near 100 per cent, say) would look like exactly and we don’t know the lags. But obviously something like a Laffer curve must exist. But the reverse Laffer argument is also true. If tax rates were 0 per cent there would be no tax revenue. So there must come a point at which as you cut taxes revenue falls. The relationship between tax rates and revenue is therefore not

Peter Hoskin

The cuts unveiled

Well, as expected, the IFS have put the lie to Darling’s claim that the budgets of non-ringfenced departments would be “pretty much flat”.  Here’s how Nick Robinson reports it: “The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that government plans imply £36bn of cuts in departmental spending ie over 19% from 2011-2014 in order to protect schools, hospitals and increase overseas aid. They say the police pledge is meaningless. They also say that defence, higher education, transport and housing are most likely to be hit.   The cost of paying back the debt over the next eight years is equivalent to £2,400 per family in taxes or cuts over that period.” UPDATE:

The Spectator

In this week’s Spectator | 10 December 2009

The latest issue of The Spectator is released today. If you are a subscriber you can view it here. If you have not subscribed, but would like to view this week’s content, you can subscribe online here, or purchase a single issue here. A selection of articles from the latest issue are available for free online to all website users: James Forsyth argues that David Cameron could learn a lot from Boris.   The Spectator condemns Gordon Brown’s toxic legacy. Allister Heath believes that Alistair Darling’s budget was bad; but George Osborne’s complicity was worse. Rod Liddle wants everyone to calm down and understand what the internet is about. And

James Forsyth James Forsyth

An expensive piece of spin

Labour briefed out its plan to tax banks that pay bonuses so extensively that everyone in the City knew it was coming. The result is that a slew of banks paid their bonuses out early. Small, private banks that aren’t encumbered by bureaucracy moved to award their bonuses early as soon as these stories started appearing in the papers. The legislation says that the moment when the tax is awarded is when the tax applies, so if a bank awarded its bonuses as late as Monday — when the details of this plan were all over the papers — they avoided the charge. As one City accountant who works with

Mark Bathgate

The markets’ verdict on the PBR

The press didn’t like Darling’s budget – and neither do the markets. What Darling didn’t say yesterday is that the Treasury is looking to borrow £243 billion from the City by the end of the financial year – this info was slipped out by the debt management office (link here). Brother, can you spare a quarter of a trillion quid? The markets are not sure they can. Gilts are being hammered today – biggest single day sell off for some time – 13bps so far this morning on 10yr gilts. They now stand at 63bps above German bunds, the widest since the crisis started. On another measure, Credit Default Swaps,

Peter Hoskin

The Darling deception

Alistair Darling normally strikes us as an honest man dropped into an impossible situation. But whether he misspoke, or whether he set out to mislead, he told a lie on the Today Programme this morning which needs to be highlighted. So what was it?  That non-ringfenced departmental budgets would remain “pretty much flat” rather than receiving significant, if not sufficient, cuts.  As Fraser demonstrated yesterday, there were spending cuts hidden in the Budget   and we’ll see the full extent of those as soon as the IFS processes the numbers later today.  Last time around, after April’s Budget, they calculated cuts of 7 percent across three years.  Thanks to a

Peter Hoskin

Last orders in the last chance saloon?

It’s the set of headlines which Labour must have dreaded after their recent progress in the polls.  The Times: “The axeman dithereth … but the taxman cometh”.  The Guardian: “Darling soaks the rich … and the rest of us too”.  The Mail: “The Buck Passer’s Budget”.  And so on and so on.  It doesn’t look too good inside the papers either.  The FT rails against a  “lack of clarity on public spending plans”, while the Independent says that “rarely has a pre-Budget report promised so much and delivered so little”.  The Sun’s opposition may not be too surprising, but it’s there in bucketfuls: “Britain is staring into the abyss. After

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

American Exceptionalism & the Decline of Limited Government

Via Megan McArdle, a sentence to ponder from Tyler Cowen: One implication [of this book] is that the United States kept “small government” for an artificially long period of time, due to North-South splits and the resulting inability to agree on what a larger government should be doing. I suspect there’s something to that. The realignment of American politics over the past 40 years has created coherent parties that, while disagreeing on the details, agree that the Federal government needs more power. Republicans may pay lip-service to federalism but their record in office tells a different story. It was a Republican President (George W Bush) that gave new powers to