Society

Saturday

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

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 21 March 2009

‘Where’s Ajay?’ My producer Ed and I are making a film about India’s coalfields. ‘Ajay is busy.’ I complain, ‘But he’s our fixer. Why isn’t he out fixing things?’ In the world of journalism, a fixer is employed to arrange things on the ground. Paleologue in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop was a fixer. Others get fixers like Dith Pran in The Killing Fields. But Ajay is one of a kind. ‘Ajay is drinking whisky,’ comes the reply. It’s been like this since Ajay arrived by train from Benares. On day one, he accompanied us to a vast open colliery where hordes of impoverished Dalits were toiling in the dirt. Later he

Matthew Lynn

Green shoots are out there somewhere

Recessions end. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s, about which we have heard so much recently, eventually ran its course, though it took a world war to get business booming again. ‘Thatcher’s wasteland’ of dole queues, urban riots and closed steel mills in the early 1980s gave way swiftly to a world of rampant yuppies and triumphant admen. But when both the British and the world economy finally emerge, dazed and blinking, from the savage recession now upon us, it will look very different. It’s unlikely that hedge fund managers will be raising millions for whizzy new ways of trading derivatives, that property developers will be throwing up glass

David Young

Corporate governance

It all started at one of the Prime Minister’s monthly press conferences. Suddenly, in answer to a question, Gordon Brown named Sir Fred Goodwin, the now notorious former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, as the man who broke the bank. After the conference the press machine of Number 10 must have gone into action, for the next morning’s papers were full of pictures and stories of Fred, naming and shaming him as the father of the credit crunch. The publicity machine continued remorselessly day after day, as time went by and he and the other hapless chairmen and chief executives of failed banks were hauled before Commons committees

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 21 March 2009

Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes, and use the word ‘lobby’ in myriad, self-satisfied ways, as though it were a weapon. ‘You can’t go into the lobby because you’re not in the lobby,’ they’ll say, smugly, before telling you that they spend half their life in the lobby with the lobby, but not lobbying, because only lobbyists lobby. God knows what any of it means. I suppose they’re usually pissed. But anyway. Sir Liam Donaldson,

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 21 March 2009

Last Saturday I was sent a stiff, glossy brochure informing me of imminent changes in my local podiatry services. NHS Westminster plans to invest £540,000 in this pressing ‘service redesign’ and being a taxpayer and local resident they wanted my views. I had a questionnaire to fill out and return. Alongside the requisite ‘Are you male or female?’ boxes to tick, I was asked the following: Do you have a physical or mental health condition that has lasted at least 12 months or is likely to last at least 12 months? Yes or no? Although I quite fail to comprehend the correlation between having some rubber-gloved nurse gouge out a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The smoking ban was always going to be the thin end of the wedge

Rod Liddle is appalled by Sir Liam Donaldson’s deployment of statistics in the hope of making it harder to have a drink. A surrealist would struggle to keep up with such campaigns against our human pleasures Iatrogenesis accounts for the deaths of an estimated 72,000 British people every year — or slightly more than the combined numbers of those feckless people dying from smoking, drinking and being very fat. I suppose you could call it the silent killer; there are no government campaigns to educate the public about its lethality. When lists are published showing the top killer diseases it is never present, although it is the third most common

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The G20 summit is lousy value for money. Cancel it

Ross Clark looks ahead to Gordon Brown’s summit at which he will try to revive his own political fortunes, found a new global economic order and stage a Bretton Woods for our times. No chance: the whole thing is an expensive sham It is difficult to look at the photographs of the world’s finance ministers, bank chiefs and assorted hangers-on assembled at a hotel in West Sussex last weekend without thinking of those old BT ads with the slogan, ‘Why not change the way we work?’ Has anything come out of the meeting of G20 finance minsters in Horsham, or will come out of the follow-up heads-of-government summit in Docklands

The Spectator

Marx!

At The Spectator, we are anti-Marxist but pro-musical. So it is with mixed feelings that we learned that Chinese producers in Beijing are to turn Das Kapital into a stage show, complete with big dance numbers and catchy songs. The director, He Nian, told Wen Hui Bao newspaper that ‘the particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marxist theories cannot be distorted’. We disagree. Marx’s theories are wholly discredited, but the style in which musicals are performed is a matter of global importance. Imagine, then, the scene as the two founders of communism perform the duet that will lead to the Russian Revolution and the Cold War. Friedrich

Friday

Daniel Korski

Can you ever beat insurgents?

Counter-insurgency is a complicated thing. It used to be easy to tell whether you were winning a war. Either the enemy was retreating or you were. In counter-insurgency, things are more blurred. Some say you are winning if the insurgents take on asymmetric techniques – road-side bombings, assassinations, suicide bombings. Others argue that counter-insurgency has no “victory”, only containment. Perhaps you win so long as domestic opposition to a war (a normal, perhaps even constant, phenomenon nowadays) does not translate into effective political action i.e. street violence, civil disobedience or just the rout of war-making governments. If people care enough about an issue they will act, as in Iceland and