Society

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

Purcell puzzle

After Dido Young Vic Il trovatore Royal Opera House For the third collaboration between ENO and the Young Vic Katie Mitchell and her team ‘direct a new work using multi-media techniques to create a synergy of music, theatre and film, inspired by, and incorporating, the full score of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’. Fortunately, the performance of Dido is a very good one, superior in crucial respects to the recent Royal Opera’s effort. Christian Curnyn, who conducts from the keyboard, is flexible in tempi and phrasing, so the tiny opera proceeds with a convincing naturalness, and the singers, discreetly miked, are uniformly excellent. Susan Bickley, doubling as Dido and the Sorceress,

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Balls in trouble

Life is about to get worse for Ed Balls. Remember Ken Boston, the sacked head of the QCA exams quango who was sacked over the SATS exams fiasco? Well he is now released from the purdah of his contract, and we have been waiting for a while to hear his side of the story – namely that Balls and his deputy, Jim Knight misled both Parliament and the Sutherland Inquiry. He has written a letter laying out the porkie pies he claims that Balls and Knight served up, and I gather the BBC will run the story tomorrow. For example, he claims – staggeringly – that Knight concocted meetings that

Etan Smallman

Budget 2009: what the papers say

We at Coffee House have compiled a list of Budget rumours and predictions that have been in the newspapers over the last few of days. The round-up below should give you a good idea of what to expect tomorrow: HOUSING • £1billion rescue plan for housing market • £1billion housing plan will include a fund to reverse the trend of 30 years and build thousands of council houses, with intervention to rescue housing developments that have not got ahead or have been left unfinished. • The Chancellor will say that the Treasury is ready to go into partnership with private companies to ensure that developments proceed. • Whitehall will buy

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will the Budget surprise be meeting the child poverty target?

All New Labour Budgets contain an apparently good news story which has not been briefed out in advance. The idea is that this then becomes a key part of the Budget day story. One rumour doing the rounds in Westminster tonight is that tomorrow’s surprise will be that the cash will be provided to put back on track Labour’s manifesto pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. To do this would cost just over £4 billion and I can just imagine Brown loving the idea of paying for this by raising some taxes on the rich. This is exactly the kind of dividing line that

Matthew Elliott

Budget 2009: Cutting back the bureaucracy

There is going to be some extremely bad news in the Budget.  Public sector borrowing is rocketing out of control, and is now expected to hit around £190 billion in 2010/11, and threatens to bury any recovery and create a double dip recession.  With their new 45p income tax rate, the Government have sadly already started to put in place symbolic measures that will do little for the public finances but will undermine Britain’s long term competitiveness.  Those measures will have to be backed up by big tax rises if the Government don’t put in place significant cuts in public spending.  With the tax burden having gone up significantly over

Peter Hoskin

Clean slate politics

Hm. There’s some speculation ’round Westminster that Darling may be gearing up to apologise during his Budget statement tomorrow.  Indeed, as Jonathan Isaby pointed out earlier, the bookies are even offering odds on us hearing the S-word – and those odds are getting shorter by the hour.  At first, I wasn’t convinced.  After all, Brown seems to have an allergy to apologising – his “mea culpa” over the McBride affair was distinctly equivocal, and remember his mid-air tantrum about taking some responsibility for the financial crisis? – and I just couldn’t see Darling boldly going where his boss hadn’t gone before. But, having thought about it a bit, I’m not so

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 21 April – 26 April

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 – provided 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

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

It is inflation, not deflation, that we need to worry about

America has deflation: Britain doesn’t. Really. Not at all. In fact, rude as it may be to point it out, prices are soaring here. Britain has the highest inflation in any European country. Sure, the RPI index is in negative territory – as you’d expect given the collapse in interest rates. But the average British shopper is still being fleeced at the tills, and the consumer price index (CPI) was 2.9 percent in March – something like the third worst reading (above the MPC target of 2.0 percent) since the Bank of England’s so-called independence. It was only a couple of months ago that the Bank was forecasting 2.69 percent

James Forsyth James Forsyth

There is a trade-off between our values and our security

Torture is not a pleasant subject to discuss. But it is intellectually dishonest to argue that torture is always ineffective. Marc Thiessen, a former Bush official, writes in the Washington Post about what information was obtained by torturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed: Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that “the CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.’ . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and

Daniel Korski

Conway of Tehran

Where do disgraced Tory politicians go? Neil Hamilton hit the pantomime circuit, starring as the rear end of a horse. After serving half of his sentence in HMP Hollesley Bay for perjury and perverting the course of justice, Jeffery Archer has returned to book-writing. Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former Cabinet minister who served a prison term for perjury, is heading a policy review for the Centre for Social Justice. But what of Derek Conway, the latest Tory politician to be ejected from frontline politics? The MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, who was sacked by David Cameron for employing his son (a full-time student) as a political researcher, has taken

James Forsyth James Forsyth

RPI: Deflation is here

The Retail Price Index for March was -0.4 percent, the first time this measure has been negative since 1960. The Consumer Price Index, however, is 2.9 percent–considerably over the government’s 2 percent target.

Peter Hoskin

A big poll boost for the Lib Dems

The polls sure are volatile in the wake of Smeargate.  The weekend brought hefty leads for the Tories of 17 and 19 percent.  Yesterday, an ICM poll recorded a 4 percent drop in support for Cameron & Co, although they remained 10 points ahead of Labour.  And, today, the latest Ipsos-MORI political monitor shows a massive jump in support for the Lib Dems.  Here are the headline figures: CONSERVATIVES — 41 percent (down 1 percentage point) LABOUR — 28 percent (down 5) LIB DEMS — 22 percent (up 8) One theory is that the Lib Dems – who have emerged from recent political scandals relatively unscathed – are benefitting from

Peter Hoskin

A review for all occasions

The official response to the latest government security blunder – captured in the last line of this snippet from the Sun – is straight out of Yes, Minister: “CULTURE Secretary Andy Burnham left a briefcase containing confidential documents on a train yesterday. The minister’s blunder triggered a security breach alert after he arrived at London’s Euston Station from the North. But the case was retrieved by a passenger on the train’s next trip and handed in to cops when it reached Glasgow. Documents, believed to be Cabinet papers marked “restricted” were found inside, according to police sources. Mr Burnham apologised for the blunder and ordered a review of security procedures

Monday

Tony Dolphin

Budget 2009: Alistair Darling should announce a bold Budget

100 years ago, one of Alistair Darling’s predecessors as Chancellor, David Lloyd George, was faced with a tough set of circumstances. He chose to be bold and proposed the most radical – and arguably the greatest – UK budget, establishing the principle of a progressive tax system to finance public spending. The budget was such a success that it was given a soubriquet – the ‘People’s Budget’. Alistair Darling should be as bold as David Lloyd George was 100 years ago. He should announce a £1,000 increase in the personal tax allowance and increases in benefits and child tax credits to ensure that the Government achieves its goal of halving

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What kind of Labour MP had never heard of Damian McBride until Smeargate?

Guido flags up the news that Damian McBride is facing expulsion from the Labour Party. His local MP, Rudi Vis, has said that he supports expulsion and that he has “never even heard of [McBride] before”. Now, I’m sure some Coffee Housers will be applauding Vis, who has been the MP for Finchley and Golders Green since 1997 and is standing down at the next election, for having kept his distance from McBride. But it strikes me as almost negligent for an MP to support someone for leader of their party without knowing anything about the people they surround themselves with. If you want to understand who Brown is, look

Peter Hoskin

How much fiscal tightening will we see?

One of the questions doing the rounds in Wesminster today is whether Alistair Darling’s £15 billion of efficiency savings represents all – or most of – the fiscal tightening that will be in Wednesday’s Budget.  So far, the reports coming out of the Treasury are inconclusive, although it’s worth pointing out this passage in the FT: “[A] wait-and-see approach, Mr Darling is likely to argue, will give a future government more time to restore prudence to the public finances without killing any economic recovery. The Treasury believes that economic uncertainty is so great at the moment that it makes no sense to set a detailed strategy for deficit reduction when

Elizabeth Truss

Budget 2009: The waste myth

Peter Gershon, David James and many others have scoured government for rare prey; wasted expenditure that no-one wants. And there are indeed signs that a culture of plenty, and a lack of cost control, has generated fat in Whitehall – the many new subdivisions of the Communities department testify to that. However, the unacknowledged truth is that the majority of government expenditure has taken place for a reason, however spurious, and there will be objections if it is taken away by what economists describe as the “losers”. In our new report “Back to Black”, Reform argues that politicians will have to go beyond waste to achieve necessary reductions; tackling programmes

James Forsyth James Forsyth

IFS: Past performance suggests that a 40p top rate would generate more revenue than a 45p one

The latest release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies is going to restart the whole 45p rate debate: “If people respond as they did to the last set of changes to the highest income tax rates, in the late 1980s, then the new 45% band will actually reduce the Government’s revenue slightly, as the existing 40% income tax rate is the one that would generate most revenue.” This confirms that the 45p rate is about politics not revenue. But it doesn’t change my view that the leadership is right not to engage on this issue. If the Tories announced that they would repeal a new 45p rate on those earning

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ex Labour Cabinet Minister: Brown is ‘the biggest liar in modern politics’

It is no secret that there is real hatred between some ex-Blairite Cabinet Ministers and the Brownites. But this quote in Trevor Kavanagh’s column shows just how poisonous relations are: “We’re down to 26 per cent, but there is nothing to stop it going lower,” said an ex-Cabinet minister. “We are in freefall. “People accused Tony of telling lies but Gordon is the biggest liar in modern politics. “The question on election day will be: Do you want Brown for another five years? Millions and millions of voters are going to say NO.” The problem for Labour is that the press will eat up this kind of quote, counter-quote stuff.

Peter Hoskin

Darling’s £15 billion to keep up appearances

So Wednesday’s Budget will feature some £15 billion of spending cuts.  Here’s how the Times reports the latest bit of early information: “The Treasury has already said it is seeking efficiency savings of £5 billion by 2011. Mr Darling is expected to say that should be extended by a further £10 billion over the following three years. There will be huge implications for public-sector jobs as ‘back office’ functions are pared back. Only frontline services such as education will have budgets protected.” You sense this is a rhetorical device, as much as anything; an opportunity for the Government to say that they’re taking the “tough decisions” to “get our economy