Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 15 August 2009

Mr Alan Moore asked my opinion from the Letters column last week on the mother who insisted that swearing meant ‘taking the Name of the Lord in vain’, but using the word f*** was just coarse language. I’m not sure this isn’t a question better directed to Dear Mary, since swearing is as much defined by its effect on social taboo as by dictionaries. The word swear extends even to a kitten as anyone who read The Spectator on 11 April 1896 will remember: ‘When Phyllis was a kitten she had wild fits, tearing round the room and swearing horribly,’ wrote Francis Galton. Since one of Galton’s habits was swapping

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 15 August 2009

I have decided not to run as an independent at the next election. As readers of this column may know, I want to set up a grammar school in Acton and my plan was to run on this issue. However, most of my supporters would be people who would otherwise vote Conservative, thereby making it more likely that the Labour candidate would win. This is particularly true of my constituency, which is a three-way marginal. That seems downright crazy, particularly as the Conservative party’s education policy has so much going for it. The Tories may not be in favour of creating any new grammar schools, but they seem genuinely committed

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 15 August 2009

Q. I was asked to review a collection of letters and did so, praising to the skies the late author’s wit, integrity and astute judgment of human character. News now reaches me that an old family friend, lampooned in these letters, has taken offence. She saw my ringing endorsement of these letters as a ringing endorsement of their author’s ‘attack’ on her. I did not refer to this woman in my review although I remember very much enjoying the references to her. It was clear that their author had never allowed her absurd side to stand in the way of his liking her very much. I feel the same way

Peter Hoskin

Mandy continues his anti-Osborne operations

I know most CoffeeHousers have more than had their fill of Peter Mandelson stories, but it’s worth reading the quotes from an interview with him in today’s Times.  Why so?  Well, because they distill some of the main attacks Labour will aim at the Tories over the coming months. The central charge is that – while Cameron and Osborne are, in Mandelson’s words, “crowd-pleasers” and “good image-makers” – they have not “changed the thinking of their party”.  Indeed, to illustrate this spin-over-substance point, Mandy digs up another story from that Corfu dinner party last summer: “In today’s interview [Mandelson] suggests that last August — presumably in the same Corfu conversation,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cartoon cowardice

Yale University Press is publishing a book on the Muhammad Cartoons but — and against the author’s wishes – the book won’t include the cartoons themselves. This seems a wrong-headed decision. How are future scholars meant to judge what the whole episode was about if they can’t see the images at the heart of it? It is also worrying that Yale University Press’s reason for not including the cartoons is because it fears that they would spark violence. As Wendy Kaminer writes in The Atlantic: ‘This policy of appeasement may serve to encourage threats of violence against other authors or publishers of  allegedly blasphemous or presumptively hateful books.  Its chilling effect

Peter Hoskin

Has Osborne downgraded the Tories’ commitment to ring-fence health spending?

Osborne’s interview with the Guardian is mostly getting coverage for his attack on “unacceptable” banking bonuses.  But I reckon a passage about the Tories’ commitment to ring-fence the health budget from spending cuts may be more significant: “Only health and international development have been ring-fenced – though today, when it comes to health spending, [Osborne] says only that ‘we will work hard to protect it’.” This idea of “working hard” to “protect” the health budget is a good deal more ambiguous than the solid pledge to offer real-terms spending increases that we’ve heard so much over the past couple of days.  As I suggested yesterday, it’s also a more sensible

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 15 August 2009

It isn’t every day you hear the suggestion that British imperialism has ‘done more to alleviate poverty than all the world’s aid programmes in the last century’, and to hear such praise from the lips of an American is rarer still. All the more so when the American in question is an eminent economist called Paul Romer and is speaking at the TED Global event in Oxford (see www.TED.com), where earlier in the week Gordon Brown had received a standing ovation. Yet I am immensely proud to say I was there in person to witness Romer’s speech — in fact I even tracked him down the following day to say

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 15 August 2009

In Competition No. 2608 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of adjectives. While the inspiration for last week’s challenge was a verb-hating French doctor of letters, this time around you can blame Ezra Pound. In The Spirit of Romance he states, ‘The true poet is most easily distinguished from the false, when he trusts himself to the simplest expression, and when he writes without adjectives.’ The entry was a spirited and magnificently unPoundian celebration of this oft-maligned part of speech. Commendations to Martin Parker and Melissa Balmain. They were narrowly squeezed out by the winners, below, who are rewarded with £30 apiece. The bonus fiver goes to

Robert Beaumont

City Life | 15 August 2009

My abiding Bradford memory is of the aftermath of the terrible fire at the Valley Parade football ground in May 1985, which claimed 56 lives. As a young reporter on a Yorkshire paper, I had been sent to the scene to write what was then quaintly called a colour piece. There was precious little colour anywhere when I arrived. The air was thick with the stale stench of smoke and the atmosphere laden with grief. When a hardened Fleet Street hack tried to light his cigarette outside the charred ground, two residents of Manningham Lane screamed at him. In a nearby pub, seemingly oblivious to the tragedy, an ageing stripper

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In the swim | 15 August 2009

I do hope you’ll forgive me for writing about rivers twice in two columns. I do hope you’ll forgive me for writing about rivers twice in two columns. It’s just that when I got back from Wales, turned on a TV for the first time in a fortnight, and saw Griff Rhys Jones voyaging down the Wye and the Severn I found myself instantly transfixed. This is what happens when you’ve been cast out of paradise (aka been on holiday): you want to prolong the experience for as long as possible, even if only by artificial means. Rivers. If I see one — unless it’s totally crocodile-infested or it’s below

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 14 August 2009

Robert Harris has dedicated Lustrum, the second of his planned trilogy on the Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 bc), to Baron Mandelson, commenting on the two men’s resemblances. There are indeed some. Both were outsiders who made their own way into elite politics by traditional routes, reached the top briefly, and fell from grace. Cicero, from a grandee family in the sticks, used his growing reputation as an advocate in Rome to work his way to the top. But after his consulship in 63 bc, he had served the elite’s purpose and his career stalled. In 58 bc he was exiled for a year and in 52 bc, much against his

David Blackburn

It is Fox News, not Daniel Hannan, who present a clear choice between the US and the UK health systems

Daniel Hannan appeared on Fox News again, this time with Sean Hannity. I do not agree with Hannan’s assessment of the NHS, but I do think that this affair has been overblown. Hannan is not presenting a straight choice between the US and the UK models; that division has arisen through Fox News’ presentation of what Hannan is saying.   Hannity’s website features this transcript: ‘HANNITY: And one of the reasons I wanted to have you back. For example, I have here — last time you were on, it had been decided a week before that you have a government rationing body, your national health service is what it’s called. And I

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Far-reaching economic reform has not materialised

At the risk of starting the weekend on the wrong note, I’d urge Coffee Housers to read Ken Rogoff’s piece on what’s next for the global economy. Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist of the IMF who has been advising the Tories, accuses western leaders of lazily concluding that the system that crashed was better than any alternative. He worries that this will have disastrous consequences: “Within a few years, western governments will have to sharply raise taxes, inflate, partially default, or some combination of all three.  As painful as it may seem, it would be far better to start bringing fundamentals in line now.” Rogoff might be

Peter Hoskin

Alastair Campbell does his bit for the cause

I do enjoy reading Alastair Campbell’s blog – he’s a snappy writer and, whatever his mistakes during the Blair years, he generally offers a thought-provoking leftist slant on the issues of the day.  But this passage in his latest effort is pretty low stuff: “American politics can be brutal, and as I remember Bill Clinton once saying, the right are far more brutal and aggressive in their arguments than the left, basically because progressives tend to be nicer people.” He’s attempting the same trick that Peter Mandelson used in his response to George Osborne’s “progressive politics” speech earlier in the week: blindly equating “progressive” ends with Labour means, as though

Henry Featherstone

Who has the world’s best healthcare system: the US or the UK? Neither

In an email this morning, David Cameron told me (and thousands of others registered for the Conservative conference) that he is proud of the NHS.  Me too.  Call it Orwellian if you like, but equitable access to healthcare is a pretty good thing. But who has the best healthcare system, the USA or the UK?  Answer – neither.  While total spending on health is very different – 9% of GDP in the UK and 17% in the USA – the extent to which both healthcare systems save lives show the USA as the worst in the developed world and the UK not far behind.  France, Japan and Australia are the

Peter Hoskin

Will the Tories regret their NHS spending bravado when it comes to government?

I wrote in my last post that Cameron’s reponses to the Alan Duncan gaffe and NHS Twitter campaign have been “well-judged” – by which I meant that the Tory leader had stepped in swiftly enough and delivered exactly the kind of quotes to defuse the situation.  But there’s an element to the Tory response which as frustrating as ever: namely, the emphasis on real-terms spending increases for the health service.  The Tories’ Head of Press, Henry Macrory, makes the point bluntly in – what else? – a tweet: “Someone should ask Andy Burnham if he will match the Conservative commitment to real-term increases in the NHS budget?” Now, I know

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can we have a constructive debate about the nearest thing we have to a national religion?

I must admit that I find this whole NHS controversy profoundly depressing. First of all, Dan Hannan by criticising the NHS in the context of the US healthcare debate has perpetuated the idea that there are only two options, the NHS or a US-style system. But the response to Hannan has been more emotional than rational. As Liam Murray has written, many of the Twittered defences of the NHS are at the same intellectual level as the more extreme American attacks on it. Finally, Hannan, by setting off this controversy, has hardened the Tory leadership’s resolve not to say anything remotely controversial about the NHS or think about reforming it

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The NHS isn’t free

If we are going to have a sensible debate about the NHS in this country, we need to deal with the myth that the NHS is free. Yes, the NHS is free at the point of use, but we all pay for it through taxation. I suspect that slightly fewer people would still ‘love the NHS’ if they knew precisely how much they were contributing towards its costs through all the taxes that they pay. I say this as someone who has no desire to import the US system. Before I went to live in the States, I was quite a fan of the US healthcare system. But having lived

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Freeing the Lockerbie Bomber?

Back when I worked at Scotland on Sunday I was never the Lockerbie Guy. Nor was I even the Lockerbie Guy’s Assistant. For years every paper needed a Lockerbie specialist, not least because having one ensured that the rest of us didn’t have to follow the tortuously complicated story any more closely than the readers. Which is to say, I don’t know the extent of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi’s involvement, though clearly even if he was involved he wasn’t the fellow who ordered or thought of the mission. Still, the speculation that he might be released on compassionate grounds – he has been diagnosed with incurable prostate cancer – has provoked

Peter Hoskin

The next government will have to help this lost generation

It’s noteworthy enough when David Blanchflower – a member of the Bank of England’s MPC until May this year – says that the government “isn’t doing enough” to stem the unemployment crisis, as he does in an article for today’s Guardian.  But his more specific points about the “lost generation” of unemployed young people are also worth highlighting. As Fraser blogged yesterday, this recession is taking a particular toll on those aged under 25.  Partially, this is down to school and university leavers being unable to find work.  But, as Blachflower points out, there’s another effect at play – young people with jobs are the first in line to lose