Society

Saturday

Stephen Brien

Make work pay – for all

Stephen Brien explains how Britain’s welfare system must change Welfare dependency is one of the most pernicious problems facing modern Britain and its deprived communities. When William Beveridge was planning the welfare state, he spoke about the giant evil of idleness: not just a waste of economic potential, but of human potential too. The tragedy is that his welfare system has gone on to incubate the very problem it was designed to eradicate. It was intended to support those who were unable to work, or for whom there were no jobs. But the benefits system now actively discourages people from taking a job, or working more hours. For millions, welfare

Douglas Carswell

Time to lift the House of Commons off its knees

What if we win office, but nothing changes? What if, instead of running a new government, triumphant Tory ministers discover that the machinery of government runs them? Making sure that does not happen requires a strategy. Opposition may be a time for tactics, but how we fare in office will hinge on having a robust, coherent plan. We must have a strategy to make government properly accountable to parliament, and parliament to the people. The MPs’ expenses scandal has turned many people against democracy. ‘If this is how those scoundrels behave,’ runs the argument, ‘MPs can’t be trusted with anything.’ It is almost as if being elected to public office

Matthew Sinclair

The unelected bodies that just won’t die

Unruly, bizarre and hungry for your money, Britain’s quangos must be stopped, says Matthew Sinclair They are our longest-running political horror story. And, under Labour, they have been ever more unruly, increasingly dangerous and always ready to suck the blood of taxpayer’s wealth. For several decades politicians have been discussing cutting the number of Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (quangos). Back in 1991, even Gordon Brown was talking about it. But it seems Britain’s vampire quangos cannot be killed. The most recent TaxPayers’ Alliance survey found that there are now 1,148 national quangos and other arm’s-length bodies in the UK, spending over £90 billion of taxpayers’ money and delivering huge areas of

Julian Glover

And in the event of a hung parliament…

David Cameron may have to rely on Nick Clegg to form a majority. But Julian Glover says that a deal should be simple – if they focus on areas where they already agree In late 2007 two fresh-faced, privately educated party leaders gave speeches setting out their philosophies. ‘We’ve always been motivated by a strong and instinctive scepticism about the capacity of bureaucratic systems to deliver progress,’ said one. I want ‘a politics of people, not systems, of communities, not bureaucracies; of individual innovation, not administrative intervention,’ said the other. ‘The days of big government solutions – of “the man in Whitehall knows best” – are now coming to an

Samuel Brittan

Don’t panic — a hung parliament might be good

Although I have been a reader of The Spectator almost since I have been in short trousers I have rarely been as irritated by an article as I was by last week’s cover story, ‘Britain must be saved from the financial abyss’. Its author, Allister Heath, is by no means a lone voice: he speaks for a considerable number of vocal, if unrepresentative people in the City who believe a hung parliament would mean weak government and fiscal peril. This view is profoundly mistaken. The implication of this argument is that, even to Conservative voters, a Labour victory would be preferable to a House of Commons where neither of the

Harry Mount

‘I went into the war as a student and came out as an artist’

Ronald Searle, who turned 90 this month, talks to Harry Mount about being captured by the Japanese, chronicling the 1950s and inventing both St Trinian’s and Molesworth High in the mountains of Provence, in a low-ceilinged studio at the top of his teetering tower house, Ronald Searle is showing me the simple child’s pen he uses. As he draws the pen down the page, the ink thickens and swerves; a few sideways strokes, a little cross-hatching, and suddenly the famous Searle line comes to life: part Gothic, part anarchic, part comic. The girls of St Trinian’s, Nigel Molesworth, Adolf Eichmann, thousands of Punch caricatures, the Goya-like pictures of dying prisoners

Peter Jones

Greek sex, infallible logic and fearless honesty

It is not difficult to see why the greatest Greek scholar of his generation, Sir Kenneth Dover, who died last Sunday, was a man who attracted controversy. His edition of Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds (1968) was the first to go into the same detailed explanation of its sexual jokes as of its textual cruces. Readers were appalled: surely you did not pick up a classical text to read about the relationship between erections and pre-ejaculation fluid? That it was the finest commentary ever produced on every aspect of a comedy featuring the controversial figure of Socrates seemed to pass people by. His Greek Homosexuality (1978) caused even more of a rumpus.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

It’s time we bank customers started talking to each other in the queue

I’ve been interested in informal banking ever since, frustrated in a long Lloyds bank queue in the West End, I persuaded some American tourists queuing with me to exchange their dollars for my pounds at the rate of interest marked on the notice board. No customer is an island, as John Donne did not quite remark. But today, when it comes to depositing funds and borrowing funds, our financial institutions are acting as though we customers were indeed islands. It’s time we started talking to each other in the queue. Banks and building societies assume that they alone can make the link between those with money and those in need

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Our man in the car park contemplates the grotesqueries of ‘the beautiful game’

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy — but I’m irritated by the modern fashion for corporate chiefs to declare their club allegiances in the interest of looking blokeish. I’m prepared to accept that the governor of the Bank of England has a lifelong passion for Aston Villa, on the basis that no one would make that claim to impress, but — to

Jonathan Davis

Is now the time to buy back into China?

One tried and tested rule in investment is that the bigger and more widely shared the worry, the less likely it is to be realised. Remember Y2K and the Sars epidemic? Both produced warnings of global disaster. Neither turned out to be anything like the threat that doomsters had predicted. Contrast that with the subprime mortgage crisis, whose dimensions only became widely apparent some time after the crisis had already broken. In the years when investors should have been worrying about uncontrolled bank lending, most were too busy loading up on anything they could buy with cheap credit to notice the impending disaster that their own insouciance was helping to

Jasmine Birtles

Cult collectibles from Barbie to Gaga

Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. They’re hardly van Gogh, but they have been commanding headline-grabbing prices at auction for long enough now to be interesting to serious investors. The new collectibles say little about art — although they belong very much to the world of design. They are all about icons, dreams, personalities, popular culture and the fixations of youth. Toys, comics and gadgets from as recently as the

Dominic Midgley

Poor prospects in the sell-us-your-gold rush

The permatanned television ‘entertainer’ Dale Winton is hosting an unintentionally hilarious series of commercials on daytime television these days. Using the same format as The Antiques Roadshow, the ads for something called CashMyGold show members of the public sitting round a table with Winton and an ‘expert’ who values their gold trinkets. They beam in delight when the jeweller informs them what he thinks the bling is worth. One of them even says: ‘That’s a lot more than I thought.’ On the face of it, these ads are very convincing. After all, the gold price at the moment is indeed higher than it has been for years. At the beginning

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 13 March 2010

In Competition No. 2637 you were invited to take an existing word and alter it by a) adding a letter; b) changing a letter; and c) deleting a letter; and to supply definitions for all three new words. This challenge is a shameless rip-off of the legendary change-a-letter competition over at the Washington Post’s ‘Style Invitational’, where ingenious new permutations of this crowd-pleaser appear at regular intervals and attract a mammoth postbag. Judging by the bombardment of entries from some quarters, it proved equally popular with Spectator competitors, one of whom described it as ‘unnervingly addictive’. As often happens, there were many more worthy winners than there is space for.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 13 March 2010

If you have used Oxford railway station recently, you may have noticed a strange electronic sign on the up platform displaying a ‘parking code’, a seemingly random three-digit number. I wondered about this and asked around. It seems that, when parking next to the station, you can either ‘pay and display’, in which case you pay a kind of rip-off-the-clueless-tourists hourly rate, or else you can pay by mobile phone. By including the ‘parking code’ when you call (it can only be seen from the platform, and hence is known only to those with train tickets) you pay much less. It’s a system of discrimination where there’s one price for

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories won’t need a majority to have a majority in the House

If we are going to spend so much time talking about the possibility of a hung parliament, it is worth noting that you don’t actually need 324 MPs to have a majority in the Commons. As John Rentoul reminds us, Sinn Fein MPs do not take their seats as they refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the Westminster parliament. (Although, in one of the many concessions to Sinn Fein that turn the stomach they are still allowed to have offices in the Commons and claim a salary and expenses) There are currently 5 Sinn Fein MPs and the polls in Northern Ireland indicate that they might well pick up some more seats. So, the Tories could well

Alex Massie Alex Massie

To Murrayfield…

No blogging here until Monday: it’s Calcutta Cup weekend and I’m off to Edinburgh today for the festivities. It’s an odd feeling this, the notion that England aren’t the obvious and heavy favourites. Two average sides will meet tomorrow and it’s quite possible they will produce the worst match of the championship. How grim that would be depends, naturally, on the actual outcome. It can’t be any worse than the 1988 fixture which was, quite possibly, the worst game of rugby I’ve ever attended. Really, we should have a better anthem than Flower of Scotland. It’s a pretty rotten and, in some senses, sentimental dirge. Just occasionally, however, it aspires

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Hague’s modern Realism

In a splurge of activity, William Hague gave both an interview to the FT and another foreign policy speech at RUSI outlining the views of a Conservative government. It was time for an update on Tory thinking, not least because David Cameron’s description of his policy as “liberal conservatism” and his unwillingness to march into a “massive euro bust-up” has had little effect. That is because a struggle over how to engage with the world continues to run beneath the party leader’s message of party unity. Four main schools of diplomatic thought exist in the party: the modern Realists, the Neo-Conservatives, the anti-Europeans (not the same as the Euroskeptics, which

David Blackburn

Uptown girl

David Cameron warns the nation to “get ready” for Samantha, who will be interviewed by Sir Trevor Macdonald on Sunday. If Sarah Brown is the damsel in distress, saved by her heroic husband, Sam Cam is the trouser-wearing uber-bitch. Allegedly, she is terrifying: cowering Smythsons’ interns refer to her as Anna Wintour. She never does hyperbole. She will extol her husband’s virtues succinctly, saying he’s never let her down in 14 years of marriage. Presumably she will then talk about her career, the tragic loss of her son and her Bohemian youth. Following Ed Vaizey’s bid for de-selection, great efforts have been made to present the twentysomething Sam as a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The slow creep of the suburban south-east

There’s a lot to commend in the Lord Adonis proposal for a high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. Trains, it is said, will cover the distance in 49 minutes, at speeds of up to 225mph. The opposition cavils that Labour would be better off spending money improving existing, dilapidated, commuter line seem to me wide of the point; the railways have needed a co-ordinated, high profile government directed initiative to capture the imagination of the public and revitalize the network. You might argue we have needed a co-ordinated high profile government initiative since about 1835; railways have ever been starved of planning and cash. But what, exactly, will

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Highlights from the latest Spectator | 11 March 2010

The latest issue of the Spectator is out today, and here are my top five features: Nick Clegg takes to the stage. With a hung Parliament looking increasingly likely, I thought we should pay a bit of attention to the Lib Dem leader in this week’s issue.  Interviewed by me, he does his best to reach out to Tory voters – pointing to his party’s tax-cutting agenda and its spending cut-heavy plan to lower the deficit. He even cites Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration – we put up an excerpt on Coffee House yesterday.  Meanwhile, Bruce Anderson warns Tories to avoid Clegg at all costs: the Lib Dem leader’s allegiance