Society

Sunday

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. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Osborne is playing it right on 45p tax

The 45p tax rate for those earning over £150,000 is a political measure not a fiscal one; calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that it will raise virtually no revenue. Labour desperately wanted to create a dividing line with the Tories over the issue: Labour want to raise taxes on the wealthiest few, the Tories want to cut services for the many. At the time of the PBR, the Tories sensibly avoided this elephant trap. Now, George Osborne’s remarks that the 45p rate will be “difficult to avoid” have caused a storm. Tim Montgomerie has declared that “George Osborne needs to get a grip” and warned, “Tax rises

Peter Hoskin

Taxpayers should look on and tremble

The public finances are deteriorating – and fast.  Alistair Darling’s PBR forecasts seemed optimistic back in November, but now they seem like a sick joke at the expense of the taxpayer.  Indeed, a report by the Ernst & Young Item club today predicts that government borrowing over the next five years will be some £270 billion higher than Darling accounted for.  The debt mountain keeps getting bigger and bigger; measured now in £trillions not £billions. The priority for the next government will be to balance the books, to stem the upwards pressure on borrowing.  As a great double-page spread in today’s Times suggests, even that’s not going to be easy. 

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 21 March 2009

One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of rapid gentrification. I call it after the artist because, from 1920 until his death in 1979, he lived (on and off) at 130 Elgin Avenue, and made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little sketches of its people. He had not much artistic training, apart from a spell under Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art, but he had an extraordinary skill at doing rapid

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 21 March 2009

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2587 you were invited to submit an opening to an imaginary novel so magnificently bad that it would repel any would-be reader. This is an unashamed rip-off of the hugely popular annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Paul Clifford features the immortal and much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ To parody bad writing successfully takes great skill and I hope that this assignment was as enjoyable to grapple with as it was to judge. The postbag was humming with overwrought prose of inspired awfulness: subject-matter ranged from the spirit-sappingly

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 21 March 2009

Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. I’ll be hoping that Barcelona and Bayern Munich manage to avoid the same old quartet of English clubs that squat over the later stages of the Champions