Society

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Losing perspective 

At The Spectator, we’ve been so close to the spending debate that one worries about losing perspective. But this post from Faisal Islam gives one a sense of just how important today’s revelations are: “We have never seen this level of detail on a budget situation before. Much of what was implied or left out of the budget is stated in astonishing detail here. It is a total disaster for the treasury and the government, but some will argue the Tories have taken a big risk with financial confidence in publishing it.”

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is the reporting of Richard Goldstone’s findings guilty of unconscious racism?

The headlines in this morning’s newspapers, and indeed on the BBC last night, were: “Israel found guilty of war-crimes”. This followed the publication of Richard Goldstone’s 600-page report which, forgive me, I haven’t read yet. I wonder, though, if those reporting the findings are not guilty of a little unconscious racism. Goldstone found both Israel AND Hamas guilty of war crimes which might also be crimes against humanity – but the culpability of Hamas was only a secondary feature of the reportage, and scarcely mentioned at all in some reports. It seems to me that, in news terms, it was assumed that it was a better story that Israel copped

Andrew Gilligan

Chucking millions down the Tube

Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in? At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings. George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans. For two vital elements of New Labour — fiscal extravagance and gesture politics — some of the last rites are being performed in the rather more prosaic surroundings of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How to spring the benefits trap

Fraser Nelson reports on how a revamp of the benefits system could finally end the scourge of Britain’s mass and hidden unemployment In the reception of The Spectator’s office stands a statuette of a Welsh miner, pick and shovel over his shoulder, above an inscription ‘from the townsfolk of Aberdare’. The town had been savagely hit during the collapse in demand for British coal in the 1920s, with almost half of its residents out of work. The magazine launched an appeal and our readers responded with £12,000 — equivalent to £580,000 today. It gave a taste of a mood of national solidarity that was to go on to create a welfare

Alasdiar Murray

Clegg needs to find a way out of No Man’s Land

Not many people know this, but next week will be Nick Clegg’s third annual conference as Liberal Democrat leader. It often seems as if he is still awaiting his debut. The last two conferences were overshadowed by falling pieces of financial masonry (Northern Rock then Lehman Bros) and thus the leader was overshadowed by Vince Cable, who was settling in to his role as Sage of Twickenham. Next week Mr Clegg will have to think of how he, personally, can shine. The Vince phenomenon has been a mixed blessing for the Lib Dems. A party that struggles to find a place in the national debate saw its deputy leader catapulted

Sam Kiley

Fixers are the unsung heroes of foreign wars

The black Mercedes lurched forward and sideways, a thick grey cloud erupted at its rear and its boot flew open. The thump of the detonating Israeli tank round reached me 300 yards away as I looked on from the Jewish settlement of Metulla. There was a cheer from local residents, who had gathered to watch the withdrawal of their army from southern Lebanon after 18 years, from the relative safety of Israeli territory. An Israeli army sniper directed the tank’s heavy machine-gun towards a building off to the left. I sat on the grass hitting the redial button on my phone. I was trying to get through to Abed Takoush,

Ursula Buchan

Quarter-century of words

This month sees the 25th anniversary of my first ‘Gardens’ column for The Spectator. This month sees the 25th anniversary of my first ‘Gardens’ column for The Spectator. This is an event more interesting to me than to you, dear reader; indeed, if asked, you might well have said 40, 20, or five years. It is, of course, only a number (as Clint Eastwood said about approaching 80) but this anniversary has encouraged me to reflect on what has happened in gardening in the past quarter-century. It has been eventful, to say the least. In 1984, gardening was still dominated by the post-war ‘low-maintenance’ movement, which encouraged the planting of

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cable’s cuts

Imagine for a second if Alistair Darling or George Osborne wrote a pamphlet about spending cuts which contained plans which were not yet party policy. The press would go into overdrive. Journalists would demand to know if Gordon Brown or David Cameron agreed with their numbers man.  If there was no instant answer, splits stories would lead the news. The whole thing would be considered a disaster. But when Vince Cable does it, it is not a problem. Bagehot, The Economist’s respected political columnist, writes admiringly of Cable’s pamphlet for Reform before saying, “It isn’t all Liberal Democratic policy yet, but much of it is likely to be.” I think

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Purnell’s enjoying the freedom of the backbenches

James Purnell has just spoken at The Spectator’s Paths to Prosperity conference, with sideburns bushier than ever after the summer. He was doing an on-stage interview with Andrew Neil and was quite firm on the release of al-Megrahi. “He should have died in jail” said Purnell. “I would have left him in jail.” I suspect the freedom to say such things is one of the reasons that Purnell quit government. He later took questions (quite often rude ones) from the floor. Sir Richard Sykes had been on earlier, talking about the dismal state of British education, and Purnell was asked why he couldn’t just agree that schools had gone downhill

The Spectator

Introducing the revamped Spectator.co.uk

We’ve revamped the design of Spectator.co.uk.  There are technical tweaks and improvements aplenty, but three will be of particular interest to CoffeeHousers. First, you can now register for comments by following the instructions here.  If you register, it means that any comments you make on Coffee House, and on other blogs, will appear instantly.  You can still make comments without registering, but they will enter the moderation queue as normal.  Once registered, you can sign-in using the “Login” button at the top right-hand side of any Spectator.co.uk page. Second, we’re delighted to welcome Rod Liddle on board as a blogger.  His Liddle Britain column is one of the most incisive,

David Blackburn

Cable: no budget should be ring-fenced

Vince Cable has joined the cuts debate, arguing that the “time for generalities is over” and that “politicians must not shy away from explaining in detail how they will tackle the problem of deficits and debt”. He identified 9 areas for specific savings: public sector pay and pensions, centralised education, family tax credits, defence procurement, quangos, asset sales, ID cards and the NHS super computer. Crucially, he stated that no department should be “ring-fenced”, and proposed cutting fees paid to hospitals and scrapping the strategic health authority, a move backed by Michael Fallon in a Telegraph article last week. Indeed, it’s striking how much common ground there is between the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Moonbat

So, spite, then: is there anybody in Britain with a more exalted opinion of themselves than George Monbiot?  His entire column in today’s Guardian deals exclusively with the one subject which has obsessed the man for many years, and bored the rest of us: himself. In particular, he is outraged that the scientist Ian Plimer has apparently failed to rise to the challenge and debate the certainty of man-made climate change with the world’s acknowledged expert on the subject, George Monbiot. Plimer’s views were published in The Spectator recently: he is, according to Monbiot, a “climate-change denier” (a typically loaded phrase which deliberately echoes the accusation of “holocaust denier”). Monbiot

David Blackburn

The irrefutable fact about cuts is that they are needed now

I did Lord Myners a disservice by suggesting he’d gone off message by saying that spending would continue until recovery was “firmly rooted”. Peter Mandelson’s cuts speech yesterday supported that line, renewing the cuts versus investment dividing line. Steve Richards argues that the government’s approach is correct and Tory policy is a recipe for disaster. He writes: ‘He (Cameron) is now pledged to a revolutionary shrinking of the state without being able to specify how he will go about making the big changes. His speech last week about cutting the subsidies on meals in parliament was beyond parody. Yesterday Mandelson made use of the space that has opened up in

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Striking the right balance

How worried should we be about national debt? I just had a rather enjoyable spat with Will Hutton on Simon Mayo’s Five Live programme. The situation is atrocious, I said. And that set him off: why did I use such a word? I replied that we are spending more in debt interest than educating our children or defending the realm. That is a dismal state of affairs, and will soon become even worse. Forget about the economics, it is a moral failure to blithly keep spending now and knowingly saddle the next generation with billions upon billions of our debt to pay off. Hutton said all this was hysterical, that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Name a famous Victorian…

I’ve become obsessed with a woman. I think she is going to crop up in this blog quite often because I can’t get her out of my mind. She is the last thing I think about before I sleep at night. I wake with her name on my lips. I feel shivery and bereft when others mention her name. She’s a nurse, of course – they always are. Her name is Mary Seacole. My two boys, aged 10 and 11, have been learning about the Victorian era. They enjoy history, believing it to be a sort of competition. I once saw them fighting over who was “better”, the Romans or

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Welcome to my new blog

I’ve always rather liked the idea of blogging, as it seems – from the available evidence – to be motivated by two qualities I have a lot of time for: narcissism and spite. So I hope that this new blog of mine comes, in time, to be the very apogee and spitefulness and narcissism, on as broad an agenda as possible. I’ll be writing here every day, just about, and look forward to discussing stuff with you in an open, democratic and interactive medium. The man from Hounslow, for example, who regularly writes me letters addressed to that “filthy jew-boy Ron Little” will now be able to save himself the

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall September 14 – September 20

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 14 September 2009

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson believes the politics of decline are back. James Forsyth argues that the government’s child protection initiative does more harm than good, and wonders if Brown will last until December. David Blackburn finds Lord Myners not toeing the party line over cuts, and thinks John Denham’s Mosley intervention sensationalised race tension. Martin Bright asks if John Denham should shut up about right-wing extremists. And Melanie Phillips laments Obama’s acceptance of Iran’s offer of talks.

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The government’s latest ‘child protection’ idea is positively harmful

Alsadair Palmer neatly sums up the absurdity of the government’s new child protection plans in the Telegraph: “Once it receives your application, the ISA will invite people to submit information about you. The ISA’s officials will be looking for any claim to the effect that you have done something which might have caused “physical, emotional, financial or developmental harm” to a child. Don’t ask for a definition of such “harm”, for there is none – the term will be interpreted in any way the Government’s assessors choose. Those assessors will not be required to ascertain whether or not “harm” actually took place, nor whether you were in fact the cause

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Graphs Menu: a work in progress

xxx New template: Six templates: 3. Line chart, no nav, decile x-axis: ywulob 6. Date x-axis, with navigator: efubow 7. Area chart: azuseb 8. Column chart, no nav, disappearing values above each bar: ekusyq 9. Line chart with linked series: opigab 10. Bar chart: orekyg GRAPH 3. Line chart with decile x-axis. Code: ywulob Click here to edit: https://cloud.highcharts.com/charts/ywulob Could you implement an option so I can easily turn off the flag. When I’ve tried turning it off in the code other bits of the chart start to go wrong! Graph 6: Line chart with date x-axis and navigator: efubow Click here to edit: https://cloud.highcharts.com/charts/efubow We need an option to disable the flags easily – or if