Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A storm in an inherited tea cup

The supposed Tory split on inheritance tax is big news this morning, making both the front pages of the Mail and the Telegraph and the 8.10 slot on the Today Programme. But as split stories go this one really doesn’t have much going for it. It requires a stretch of even the journalistic imagination to believe that Ken Clarke’s comments revealed some fundamental disagreement between him and George Osborne. Indeed, if Clarke was guilty of anything it was revealing what Tory high command is fretting about in public. Given the state of the public finances, it is hard to believe that raising the inheritance tax threshold should be a priority.

Peter Hoskin

The system needs an overhaul

There’s a futility about the calls for an investigation into Tony McNulty’s housing arrangements.  Sure, McNulty’s expense claims are outrageous – a mockery of the taxpayer that will further undermine the public’s trust in politicians – but I expect the refrain of the investigators will be depressingly familiar: McNulty acted within the letter, if not the spirit, of the rules.  That, or something similar to it.   Of course, this isn’t to say that McNulty shouldn’t be investigated.  MPs can’t engage in this kind of behaviour without some sort of scrutiny of their actions.  But it is to say that there needs to be a wider review of MPs expenses. 

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The case for prison reform

Iain Duncan-Smith has an op-ed in the Sunday Telegraph previewing the Centre for Social Justice’s paper on prison reform. Setting aside the moral case, one sentence in it makes a compelling pragmatic case for it: “Two thirds of all prisoners are re-convicted within two years and half are re-convicted within a staggering 12 months” Purely on a cost basis, reducing recidivism has to be one of the many priorities of the prison system. On those grounds alone, the current system is clearly failing and in urgent need of reform. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pakistan, the sum of all fears

My old friend Carlos Lozada has an interesting interview with David Kilcullen, one of the men behind the successful shift in counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. His remarks about Pakistan rather concentrate the mind: “Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn’t control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don’t follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We’re now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Life and Times and Death of Jade Goody

At some time in the future, historians will view the Jade Goody Affair with the same kind of bewilderment and revulsion that we reserve for the excesses of Victorian Britain. But of course Goody’s celebrity – absurd and mawkish and repellent as it was – demonstrates how little human nature changes and reminds us that we’re much closer to the past than we sometimes like to think. And that, of course, is just another way of observing that the sky is always falling. To wit, here’s the Telegraph’s (lengthy) obituary, which also serves as a commentary on the marvellous monstrosity that is the British tabloid press: The first time she

Peter Hoskin

The Tories reposition themselves on inheritance tax

Now here’s another tax debate for the Tories to get caught up in.  Appearing on the Politics Show today, Ken Clarke has suggested that the Tory plan to raise the inheritance tax threshold is no more than an “aspiration”.  Here’s how the indispensable Politics Home reports it: “Mr Clarke said Tory plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold would not be a priority if they win the next election. Hinting plans had been kicked into the long grass, he called inheritance tax reform ‘an aspiration’ but not something they would do ‘the moment we take power’. Asked if inheritance tax was ‘off the shelf’, he said: ‘We’ll have to consider

Peter Hoskin

Brown and Miliband: not seeing eye to eye?

Remember David Miliband’s wrongheaded Guardian article from earlier this year; the one where he questioned the use of the phrase “war on terror,” and railed against the idea of a “unified, transnational enemy”?  Well, today, Gordon Brown has an article in the Observer which seems dead set against his Foreign Secretary’s thinking.  Its headline: “We are about to take the war against terror to a new level”.  And it sets out the global threat of Islamist groups operating “under the banner of al-Qaida”: “We should be under no illusion, however, that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown has the Comprehensive Spending Review postponed

Andrew Rawnsley’s column today contains this great little scoop: “A comprehensive spending review was due this summer. Gordon Brown has quietly told Alistair Darling to scrap it.” Rawnsley reports that the review is being postponed because it would reveal that the state of the public finances dictates that there will have to be huge spending cuts whoever wins the next election. If the government has to admit this, Brown’s Tory cuts attacks will lose its force. At the moment when Labour politicians appear on TV and radio they keep asking what the Tories would cut. The media should respond by asking them what they would cut.  Indeed, Darling has already

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 21 March 2009

Monday V exciting! Our new Apology and Regret Strategy is such a success we are going to expand it. Jed says we’ve really set the agenda with some groundbreaking grovelling which has made Gordon look like a horrid grump who can’t own up when he’s as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a pile of doo-doo. Or should that be do-do? By contrast Dave is a man of towering integrity who is not afraid to say when something he’s had nothing to do-do with has gone horribly wrong. Just as when he apologised manfully for the slave trade, Our Leader’s Apology For The Recession has blazed a trail in

Dot Wordsworth

It’s ‘no problem’ for Dot Wordsworth

The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’ A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past that now. An advertisement that Veronica showed me on the internet offers T-shirts with the words: ‘Quieres tomar un café?’ The English-language website explains that this means: ‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ It is not that I think ‘Can I get?’ is particularly rude. It’s just that it does not convey the thought

The Spectator

Letters | 21 March 2009

Art for money’s sake Sir: It is hardly surprising that Olivia Cole (‘How to put children off art’, 14 March) found so many schoolchildren in the National Gallery and that they seemed to be learning little about art from their visits. The Gallery, like other public bodies, has a funding agreement with its sponsor department, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The agreement for the current financial year is not on the Gallery’s website but for 2007/8 it was set a target for the number of children aged 15 and under visiting the Gallery in ‘organised educational sessions’, of 105,000, which it exceeded. There is no target for the

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 21 March 2009

I’ve come into some money. Twenty grand. Nice. Best not to shove it straight in my permanently overdrawn current account, though, I thought. My laptop is riddled with computer viruses. It would be just my luck if, after holding off for years, the hackers strike the moment I go into the black. So I decided I’d open a new current account with a different bank and put the money in there while I decided how to spend it. More or less at random I took the cheque to a branch of the Alliance & Leicester in the high street. There were no other customers. As I approached her window, the

Taki

High Life | 21 March 2009

Gstaad It’s past midway in March and the slopes still don’t have that used-up look which comes by the end of February. No gritty slush, just beautiful pure powder tracked only by furry things such as foxes and deer. While out cross-country skiing, I feel elated by animal tracks next to my own, a great silence enveloping the bowl where I’m skiing, without a human in sight. It could be Russia, with giant pines lining my path, the river slapping on the ice along the edges. Yet it’s only Lauenen, seven klicks from the glitz of Gstaad. The lake is above me, and it goads me uphill, climbing on my

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 21 March 2009

I pride myself on being quite a wily old bird, one of those naturally suspicious individuals who is not easily fooled. You have to get up pretty early in the morning… etc, etc. But last week I was stitched up like a kipper and I am £200 poorer as a result. My only excuse is that the fraudster in question was a middle-class housewife. The saga began when my wife and I decided we would like our five-year-old daughter to start having piano lessons. To that end, my wife contacted her friend Kate who runs a small music school in west London to see if she knew of any good

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 March 2009

Q. In the last few days I have opened six separate letters asking for sponsorship for the London Marathon. Each one comes from either a godchild, a relation or a child of a really close friend. I think £100 is about the going rate but I can only afford £100, not £600. I cannot sponsor one and not the others. What do you suggest, Mary? P.Z., London SW15 A. It is time the junior generation had a reality check, so have no qualms about replying with the news that you are having to divide your London Marathon budget equally between all the applicants. Enclose a cheque for £16.65 and make

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 21 March 2009

Pupils, we are told, must be kept ‘happy’ at all costs. Pupils, we are told, must be kept ‘happy’ at all costs. It is a surprise, therefore, that the educational potential of drunkenness has not been recognised by Mr Ed Balls, or by government adviser Professor Sir Liam Donaldson who has proposed that the price of drinks be increased in order to cut drunkenness. In his last work, Laws, Plato (427-347 bc) describes a Spartan boasting about how Sparta had abolished that most anarchic and licentious activity of all, the drinking party. But Plato disagrees, arguing that ‘Drunkenness is a science of some importance… and I am not speaking about

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Leave capitalism to the Chinese and relax

Venetia Thompson and Rory Sutherland say that the era in which all graduates want to work in the financial sector is at a close: a splendid time to rebrand inactivity as ‘travel’ University careers fairs have always been a complete waste of time. In the old days students came away armed with nothing more than ABN-Amro highlighters and miniature alarm clocks (probably now collectable), some unusable minute RBS Post-it notes, and perhaps the odd snow-shaker. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and their cohorts quickly ran out of all paraphernalia — but no matter because everyone wanted to be a banker anyway. Even hapless blondes who hadn’t studied maths, economics, business or

Peter Hoskin

Disappearing companies

Yet another set of alarming recession statistics, these from today’s FT: “One in every 56 businesses is expected to collapse this year as the recession intensifies, a leading accounting firm has warned. BDO Stoy Hayward says the rate of business failures will increase by 59 per cent by the end of this year to 36,000 companies, up from 22,600, or one in 87, in 2008. As the UK economy contracts at its fastest rate since the second world war, the firm’s Industry Watch report predicts that more company casualties will follow in 2010. It says 39,000 businesses, or one in 50, are likely to fail next year.” What’s particularly striking

Peter Hoskin

Cameron should avoid dancing to Brown’s tune

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Cameron leadership is how its strategy is sometimes (overly) determined by what Labour will do or say.  Take what was their long-standing commitment to match Labour’s spending plans.  This was made in fear of the “Tory cuts” attack, and ensured that the New Labour orthodoxy – that “spending = investment” – remained in place long past its use-by date.  Cameron now admits that he should have ditched the commitment sooner, and regards the failure to do so as one of his biggest mistakes. Why mention this now?  Well, there’s a similar air about George Osborne’s statement on a 45p tax rate yesterday.