Society

The latest issue of the Spectator is out today, and here are my top four features: 1. Britain on the brink.  Allister Heath, the editor of City AM, blogged about his cover story earlier. But the full article really is a must-read: it explains just why hung parliaments don’t work in Britain and why the AAA rating is now a red herring. There is a real risk of Britain following Greece into the vortex. 2. Why do we let South Africans play cricket for England? Peter Oborne cares deeply about cricket – and has written an impassioned piece about what he sees as a  South African invasion of our national

While we’re talking about countries on the brink, it’s worth taking a look at Greece – which has probably passed beyond it.  The government has published its package of austerity measures – aiming to reduce its deficit to 8.7 percent of GDP by the end of 2010 – and the markets are deciding what they think. But, in the meantime, the country faces strikes; the Euro is taking a pummeling; there are fears that problems may spread to countries like Portugal and Spain; and Greek foreign policy – particularly with regard to Macedonia and the Balkans – is stalling.  Nobody is through the woods yet. All this mean that George

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap. You will all have had your epiphanies long before me, I suspect, reading the smug drivel of la Toynbee and Gary Younge and Monbiot, or its pathetic attempts via The Guide to be down with the kids on the street (perhaps the worst written, most cringe-inducing, supplement in Fleet Street). The horrible irony is that it possesses great writers – Laura Barton, Alexis Petridis, Sam Woolaston, Vikram Dodd and the wonderful Marina Hyde, even Tim Dowling; yet they are largely

Contrary to what you might think, it is actually quite hard to find someone on benefits who doesn’t want to work. When you ask a claimant whether they would like to, they will invariably say “Yes, I want a job.” At first, this seems like a strange answer: why do we have nearly 6 million people on benefits when so many of them want to work? The answer is simple when you ask a few more questions: they don’t want just any job. They envisage doing what they used to do or would like to try – but aren’t willing to look for anything else. Getting them to try any

I assume there is something more to this story than meets the eye, because otherwise it seems to me inexplicable and outrageous. A fireman, on his way to attend an emergency, has been arrested and charged with manslaughter because it is alleged that the sirens on his engine “spooked” a herd of cows which consequently trampled to death an elderly farmer, Harold Lee, aged 75. The Daily Mail’s version of the story carries a little more detail than the rest – to the effect that the fire engine at first turned off its sirens when it encountered Mr Lee and his son Richard moving the herd along a narrow lane