Society

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Why not just scrap ID cards, then?

So the protracted, wheezing death of ID cards continues, with Alistair Darling admitting in today’s Telegraph that: “Most of the expenditure is on biometric passports which you and I are going to require shortly to get into the US. Do we need to go further than that? Well, probably not.” The government are letting it be known that this doesn’t contradict their existing policy, but their shifting rhetoric remains striking.  Last year, we had the then Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, proposing that British citizens should be able to choose between a card and a biometric passport.  Earlier this year, Alan Johnson said that ID cards wouldn’t be compulsory for British

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Watching the Climategate scandal explode makes me feel like a proud parent

It has been a weird, weird thing having a ringside seat at the messy unravelling of the greatest scientific scandal in the history of the world. The only experience in my life even vaguely similar was queuing outside the Wag club in the spring of 1988 watching all the straight people staring at us freaks, and thinking to myself: ‘God, just imagine how totally awesome it would be if this Acid House craze ever caught on.’ From a tiny germ of a story on a few specialist blogs, Climategate has gone über-viral in a way few of us sceptics could ever have dared hope. As I write, the name has

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Climate change has become a proxy subject for people who just want to sound off

I know Alistair Darling had left Loretto School, Musselburgh (for Aberdeen University) shortly before Andrew Marr had arrived (en route to Cambridge), but it was still odd to see the pair of them on my television last Sunday. Odd, I mean, that neither mentioned that they’d been to the same top Scottish public school, even though they were discussing whether it mattered that David Cameron had been to an English one. I was at that Scottish school, too. Decades had passed, though, so our paths didn’t cross. I remember Marr coming back once, to give us a talk on how we could all become editor of the Independent. Alas, none

Venetia Thompson

Lycra-clad assassins on wheels

Just the idea of the Copenhagen summit is enough to fill me with dread. Not because I’m frightened of global warming or enforced vegetarianism, or because I’m worried that environmental evangelists are leading us up the garden path. But, truthfully, in case all the eco-awareness encourages more cyclists. London is under siege. They can’t be seen until they’re on top of you, can’t be heard, and can kill you instantly: bicycles are taking over and it’s got to the point where just the squeal of a bike break can induce in me a moment of sudden, heart-stopping panic. It’s difficult to trace the origins of my cyclophobia. My father insists

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 12 December 2009

In Competition 2625 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of any well-known person named John (a real person, living or dead, or a character from literature). The verse tributes poured in, to Johns I had heard of — Prescott, the Baptist, Donne — and those I had not: ‘John Harington, my jo, John,/ You’re a hero to my mind/ For inventing water closets,/ Great good for all mankind…’ (Josephine Boyle). R.S. Gwynn’s fine contribution was inspired by a multitude of Johns; from Braine and Wain to Lennon and Dryden. And snapping equally insistently at the heels of the winners were David Silverman, Janet Kenny, Sylvia Fairley, Mark

Neil Barnett

A faraway place we should care more about — as Gulf investors clearly do

You may have seen the recent Georgian marketing campaign on BBC World and CNN, which looks like a splicing of The Apprentice and the title sequence from The Professionals. Among the familiar names dropped in the ad, such as HSBC, is an enigmatic one, Rakia. And this, it turns out, is not Bosnian firewater, but the acronym of the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority, which is presumably a sovereign wealth fund from that microscopic Arab emirate — though its website presents it as an inward investment promotion body, something quite different. Nevertheless, Rakia has become a major player in Georgia, buying strategic assets like the powerful media group Imedi and

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: