Society

Wednesday

Scott Payton

Golden summit or false horizon?

Should you ever buy any investment — a share, a commodity, an acre of land — when its price stands at an all-time high, having risen by half in less than a year? Or does that make you the ‘greater fool’, the greedy investor who buys into the top of the rally? In recent days, the price of the world’s oldest and most universally recognised store of value, gold, has surged to all-time highs above $1,050 an ounce. Have those of us who didn’t buy months ago just missed the bus, or is there further to go? The gold price has been through three distinct phases during the past couple

Janice Warman

Safer savings and clearer consciences?

Janice Warman looks at two ‘ethical’ banks that are drawing customers away from the shamed high-street giants The credit crunch left most of our major banks in disarray, not to say disgrace. But it has been remarkably good for some of their smaller competitors. ‘Ethical banks’ might once have been dismissed by the high-street giants as a benignly unthreatening fringe, just as ethical share investment was considered by mainstream investors to be little more than an eccentric luxury for trustafarians. But in terms of cash savings, as opposed to equities, the opportunity cost of choosing to go ethical varies widely — and may actually be zero. As a result, savers

Edie Lush

Islamic finance stakes its claim

Banking governed by Koranic principles is a rare growth market in a shaken financial world, says Edie Lush — but is it really more stable than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent? The clash of civilisations between the Muslim world and the West takes many forms. Even on the financial front, there are deep differences of philosophy in relation to money, debt and profit. But at a time when the Anglo-Saxon mode of banking is flat on its back after the credit crunch, its Islamic counterpart is gaining wider acceptance, and even laying claim to be a more stable alternative. The requirements of Islamic finance — lower proportions of debt to equity, a

Richard Northedge

Twenty-five years on, the game begins again

In the autumn of 1984, solicitors were allowed to advertise for the first time, but if the public failed to spot their modest announcements it was probably because the newspapers were awash with a much more unusual publicity blitz. The government was selling half of British Telecommunications, as the phone company was then called, and it needed the help of people who had never previously owned a share. The BT flotation was the start of a phenomenon that was as much a part of the decade that followed as Bros, the Pet Shop Boys or Wham! Buoyed by a bull market, the government used the BT model to sell £80

Ross Clark Ross Clark

We have become a nation of shysters

Power cuts and uncollected rubbish form most people’s memories of the economic debacle that was the 1970s. But for me, a quite different story sums up the lack of business sense that distinguished the British at the time. My mother had gone into a village shop in Kent to buy some bacon, which the affable shoplady found some pretext to give to her for free. While she was there another customer came in and tried to buy a tin-opener. ‘Oh, you don’t want one of them, they’re rubbish,’ said the shoplady, scathingly. ‘Why don’t you borrow mine? If you go upstairs it’s in my kitchen drawer. But do please shut

Sinclair McKay

Happy 30th birthday Viz

Sinclair McKay celebrates 30 years of Britain’s funniest, sharpest and most irreverent cartoon. David Cameron need look no further for a perfect picture of broken Britain Some night soon on the peaceful back streets of Bloomsbury, you might want to keep an eye out for two young ladies from the north for whom the term ‘muffin top’ might have been invented. They will be extremely drunk, laughing like open drains and displaying unsuitable underwear. They will be looking for romance. They are known widely as the ‘Fat Slags’. Sandra and Tracey are two of the Hogarthian figures that populate the pages of Viz, a distinctly adult comic. It is now

Interconnect

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009 | 14 October 2009

Our political representatives have returned to Westminster, and the air is still thick with the Ghosts of Expenses Past. As MPs are ordered to pay back their more extravagant claims — with most of them complaining as they do so — you’d be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t a single decent one amongst them. But you’d be wrong. For the past few weeks, our readers have been highlighting the diamonds in the rough, via their nominations for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. This week, Paul Wheeler has nominated the Conservative MP Ed Vaizey for his efforts at helping people who lost their savings during the crunch: ‘Ed has been

Justin Cartwright

The man who saved Oxford University

The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored, so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter’s original allegory of truth and light striking the university, is now bright with playful cherubs and lustrous clouds. Here, bookended by large chunks of Latin, a new vice chancellor is to be admitted to the job. He is Andrew David Hamilton, his name Latinised for the ceremony into Andreas. He is not an Oxford man, having arrived here by way of Exeter, Cambridge and Princeton, where he was Provost. Later you could tell that he was not an Oxford man: he

Deborah Ross

Bottom of the barrel

Couples Retreat 15, Nationwide Couples Retreat and, if you have an ounce of sense, so too will you. Retreat from this movie, and retreat as fast as your little legs will carry you. I didn’t actually intend to see this film this week. I intended to see Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but events conspired against me, or it was the Gods, who haven’t liked me ever since I put a red T-shirt into a wash with my one good white shirt and then shook my fist at them. (It was quite a fist; it was my only serious white shirt.) I rather expected Couples Retreat to be bad,

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The right decision

There’s little more to add to Alex’s take on the news that Geert Wilders has won his appeal against the Home Office decision to bar him from the UK.  While there’s much about the Dutch MP which makes me feel uneasy, preventing him entry to this country always struck me as a needless and potentially inflammatory move.  Now, happily, that wrong has been righted, and there’s just one question left: will Jacqui issue yet another apology?* *Ahem, of course she won’t.  The Home Office is already saying that it may fight today’s ruling.

David Blackburn

Under these criteria, the legal case against the repayment of expenses is unanswerable

Sir Thomas Legg’s statement is yet to be published, but I’ve trawled through the internet and made some calls to discover its contents. It is plain that Sir Thomas has imposed rules retrospectively. His remit was to enforce the ‘rules and standards in force at the time’. The Green Book, however badly written, should have been his sole source of reference; instead he cites the ‘fundamental principles of propriety’, defined by him, as criteria for passing judgement. His reason for doing so is obvious: these claims were outrageous. But that is a moral judgement, not a legal argument to enforce repayment. He states that the Commons Fees Office allowed ‘disproportionate

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Good Day: Geert Wilders May Now Visit Britain

Against all the odds, this is turning into a rare fine day. First the Guardian wins the Battle of Trafigura; now the courts have over-turned the order prohibiting Geert Wilders from entering the United Kingdom. Another small, if doubtless temporary, victory for liberty. Long-time readers will know that I’m not one of Mr Wilders’ fans (see here, here and here) but the decision to exclude him from the UK was a nonsense and an affront to decency that discredited this country while doing nothing to discredit the Dutchman’s ideas. He’s a nasty piece of work, but that’s not a good enough reason for banning him. Not that his actual physical

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice

The Guardian is reporting that, “Within the last hour, Trafigura’s lawyers Carter-Ruck, abandoned an attempt to prevent the Guardian from reporting proceedings in parliament which revealed its existence.” This is welcome news. It is not hyperbole to say that the injunction threatened British democracy; the people must be able to know what their representatives are doing. It was, to my mind, quite incredible that a newspaper could be prevented from publishing a parliamentary question. One hopes that the injunction will focus attention on whether the right balance is being struck in our libel laws. MPs now have a chance to stand up for the dignity of Parliament which has been

Mark Bathgate

Deconstructing David Blanchflower

What with his new column in the New Statesman and his articles for other outlets, David Blanchflower – a former member of the MPC – really does seem to enjoy laying into the Tories.  Problem is, much of what he says fails to convince – so much so, in fact, that I thought I’d bash out a quick fisk of his Guardian article from last Friday.  Here’s the full article with my comments in bold: We are in the midst of the worst recession most people alive have ever experienced, or will probably ever experience. It is already worse than the 1980s and it isn’t over yet. The only comparison

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Introducing Mark Bathgate

I was at the Editorial Intelligence Comment awards this morning, where the Cultural Commentator of the Year, Johann Hari of The Independent, said that all commentators are only as good as their sources – the people who have the honesty and energy to bash you when you’re wrong, and give you tips so that you might one day get something right. It’s an excellent point. And today, I’d like to introduce CoffeeHousers to one of my most dependable informers: Mark Bathgate, a banking analyst who has agreed to write a few posts for us on economics (which I can’t do as much now that I’ve moved back of the shop).

Andrew Lilico

Ongoing deflation

This morning the inflation figures were released for September.  They show that the economy is in ongoing deflation, as it has been since March 2009, with the annual change in the Retail Prices Index (RPI) standing at -1.4 percent.  At the same time, the policy index used by the Bank of England to determine its interest rate and quantitative easing policies – the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) – saw its annual rate of inflation fall to 1.1 percent from 1.6 percent. Some press commentary suggests that the fall in CPI inflation to 1.1 percent suggests there is now a threat of outright deflation next year.  This is wrong.  The country

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The costs that come before savings

It’s a simple fact of politics that many measures which would save money in the medium-to-long term incur costs in the short term.  Normally, this point is brought up in relation to public service reform – e.g. Gove’s Swedish Schools agenda.  But today’s FT highlights a similar effect in relation to public sector redundancies. The important fact is that “civil servants aged under 50 can receive up to three years’ pay if made compulsorily redundant, and those who joined before 1987 more than six years’ pay”.  This means that there are actually massive upfront cash costs to cutting jobs across the public sector, whatever the potential savings further down the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Whatever happened to duty, responsibility, thrift and local solidarity?

I’ve been so tied up with my financial advisers, getting my bid together for the Dartford river crossing (my plan is to prevent people from Essex visiting Kent, because I don’t like them), that I missed this letter from one of the country’s more thoughtful and free thinking Labour MPs, Denis MacShane. It’s been causing a minor stir in blogsville, not least at Aaronovitchwatch. I know that many of you resent Mr MacShane because of his wish for us all to speak German and live in a fascistic European super state led by Tony Blair, but let’s leave that to one side for a moment. His letter, to the Grauniad,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Repairing the broken society

One line from the Sunday papers is still haunting me today. In the Mail on Sunday, Phillip Blond wrote that, “one million children have alcohol-addicted parents”. Think about that for a minute. What hope can these children have growing up in these kind of households? How can we as a society ensure that these children have a decent chance in life despite such a challenging start? There are no easy answers to these questions. Considering the state’s appalling record with children in care, taking these children away from their parents is not the answer. But then what is? It seems that the only answer is to deal with the problem