Society

Saturday

14 Feb 2009

Low Life | 14 February 2009

It’s good to talk Last week, when the snow lay thickly on the ground, in a rare burst of altruism I picked up the telephone and dialled the number of a frail, elderly and vulnerable member of our community, to ask her if there was anything I could get for her from the village stores. The phone rang and rang and rang. Just as I was about to give up I heard the receiver being fumbled into position and a quavering, phlegm-coated voice say hello. ‘How are you?’ I said. ‘Do you need anything from the shop?’ I ought to have known that getting answers to these simple questions was

Taki

High Life | 14 February 2009

All’s fair Gstaad At Easter 1215, a young Tuscan married woman innocently flirted in public with a man not her husband. He flirted back just as innocently, and then things got out of hand. A vendetta was declared between Guelf and Gibel, two rival brothers of Pistoia, that resulted in extreme violence, the splitting of Guelf factions into Whites and Blacks with ensuing massacres, 1,400 houses in the middle of Florence burnt, and a feud that brought out every long-simmering antagonism from politics, to money, to envy which lasted far longer than if the flirtation had not been as innocent as it was. Guelfs and Ghibellines came to mind as

Robin Oakley

The turf | 14 February 2009

There is no certainty today. For years we humble wage-earners were told that City bankers were sage repositories of special expertise who could be entrusted with that little that is left when the taxman and the bookies have finished with us. In reality, it turns out, they were greedy spivs who knew no more about the financial packages they dealt in to feed their bonuses than the betting shop loud mouth who claims infallible information about the winner of the forthcoming 2.30. Now in racing, too, we are riven with doubt. After his defeat at Kempton Park last Saturday on a seasonal debut delayed by a heart scare, many are

The Spectator

Letters | 14 February 2009

Solidarity with the strikers Sir: As a member of the English working class I write to express my approval of and agreement with Rod Liddle’s article (‘Would the working class vote Labour now?, 7 February). I would compare the action of the strikers with those of the shipyard workers of Gdansk in 1980 whose actions exposed to the world the falseness of the Polish Communist Party’s claim to protect the class it purported to represent. These strikers have shown up New Labour’s pretence that it cares about British workers. Peter Mandelson’s performance was eerily reminiscent of the party hacks who were wheeled out to attack Solidarity. What must have sent

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 14 February 2009

The case of Caroline Petrie, the nurse suspended for offering to say a prayer for a patient, discloses something of which most people may not have been aware. To work in the National Health Service, it is officially stated, you ‘must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’. It is remarkable that there should be a state rule about what you can think (the ‘personal’ commitment) before you can be employed. I also wonder if it is possible to have a commitment to equality and diversity at the same time. For instance, if, as Brighton and Hove Council tried to insist against a Christian care home, you

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 14 February 2009

Monday Major recession panic. Clearly we are being out-apocalypsed by Labour. Dave furious and wants to know why we’re still only predicting the worst downturn in 80 years while Ed Balls is calling it the Most Terrifying Depression in the History of Mankind. Obviously, we need to do the doom vision thing better, or we could find ourselves in government a year from now amid allegations that we didn’t see the end of the world coming. It’s not as if we didn’t make a good start with Gids predicting the death of sterling, but since then we have basically been playing catch-up. Thankfully our new economic recovery committee is now

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 14 February 2009

I had quite a sobering lunch this week. It was with Bill Griffin, the former CEO of Kiss FM and now the strategy director of a big London ad agency. The main topic of conversation was the cultural impact of the recession and Barack Obama’s election. Would brands that are closely associated with the boom era, such as Gucci and Prada, need to reinvent themselves in order to survive? This, in turn, led to a discussion of journalists and which ones are likely to go to the wall over the next 12 months. He took the view that the cynical, hard-bitten, wise-cracking style of many veteran hacks is out of

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 14 February 2009

Q. My 12-year-old son and I braved the snow last week to keep an appointment for him to look at a school. On the much delayed journey back to Paddington I was walking through to the buffet car when I saw two friends of a friend who kindly suggested I fetch my son and come and join them. Having said I would, I immediately regretted it because it meant my son (who boards) and I would not be able to chat together alone. I could not think of a way to backtrack and dragged him through to both of our regrets. How could I have explained that I had changed

Peter Hoskin

YouGov deflates the Lib Dem rise

Given the wave-making nature of the ComRes poll earlier, it’s worth pointing out the YouGov poll for tomorrow’s Sunday Times. Rather than a eye-catching increase in Lib Dem support, it records a 2 point fall for Clegg, Cable et al. Here are the headline numbers: Conservatives — 44 percent (up 1 percentage point) Labour — 32 percent (no change) Lib Dem — 14 percent (down 2) Over at Political Betting, Mike Smithson indicates that the difference may be down to polling methods, online vs telephone. I guess we’ll have to wait for more polls to know either way.

Martin Bright

Smoking Gun: Katharine Goes to Hollywood

It was great to hear Katharine Gun the GCHQ whistleblower on Saturday Live this morning talking about the morality of the leaker. I suppose the pretext was the banking crisis, but Katharine used the opportunity to explain why she had revealed details of a US/UK spying operation on the United Nations just prior to the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003. I have a close connection to the story as the journalist who received a copy of the original email request from the States. I published the revelations in the Observer in March 2003. The war went ahead despite Katharine’s efforts. Katharine was later arrested and charged for breaching the Official Secrets Act, although the case

Peter Hoskin

Labour down in the dumps, as Lib Dems climb

John Rentoul promised us a wave-making ComRes / IoS poll, and he wasn’t lying. The figures he revealed earlier show a 6 point climb in Lib Dem support, putting them within three points of Labour, who record their worst showing since last September. The Tories have fallen back slightly, too, but their lead over Labour is a hefty 16 points, the biggest since October last year. Here are the headline figures in full: Conservatives — 41 percent (down 2 percentage points) Labour — 25 percent (down 3) Lib Dems — 22 percent (up 6) Before writing off the surge in Lib Dem support as outlier, remember that last week’s ICM

James Forsyth

Petty Brown tried to bar Cameron from Thatcher dinner at No 10

Matt’s column tomorrow in The Sunday Telegraph contains this scoop: “Later this month, Gordon Brown is hosting a dinner to mark the unveiling of a new portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Naturally, No 10 asked the Iron Lady for the names of guests she wanted to attend. No less naturally, it was suggested by her office that the present Conservative leader should be invited. But when Downing Street heard that David Cameron was on the list, there was, I gather, a preposterous attempt to strike him off.” This really is pathetic. Indeed, judging by the qualifications coming out of Downing Street tonight they realise just how small this makes the Prime

James Forsyth

A costly victory

The stimulus package is now ready to be signed into law by the President. On the one hand, this is a pretty major legislative achievement for Obama within the first month of his administration. On the other, Obama has taken a few knocks in the process and has lost a decent chunk of his reputation for being able to bring the two parties together and for transparency. In the House, in both votes not a single Republican voted for it. In the Senate, only three Republicans crossed party lines; the post-conference version of the bill only passed the Senate with the minimum 60 votes. In the meantime, Obama saw his

Peter Hoskin

Mandelson’s June election advice for Brown

Those early election rumours just won’t go away. Here’s Peter Oborne writing in the Mail today about the decision to publish this year’s Budget on 22 April: “But there is another, more intriguing reason for the delay. Gordon Brown, acting on the advice of Peter Mandelson, wants to keep open the option of a General Election this year. The Prime Minister hopes that U.S. President Obama’s visit to Britain at the start of April for the G20 economic summit will boost his own credibility. He wants the budget to be held in the wake of the visit and to unveil a massive boost to public spending, like the one Obama

James Forsyth

Burns scolds Brown’s regulatory system

Tucked away on page six of The Guardian is a hugely important story that somehow everyone seems to have missed. Patrick Wintour writes that Terry Burns, the Perm Sec at the Treasury when Brown arrived, gave evidence this week to the Economic Affairs committee of the House of Lords and made clear that the flaws in the tripartite regulatory structure that Brown introduced had led to problems in the banking sector not being spotted. Wintour writes: “Burns said the tripartite structure covering the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority, had not properly overlapped – with the result that failed business models in British banking were not

James Forsyth

Labour is heading back to the dark days of August

James Kirkup and Andrew Porter’s guide to the moods of Gordon Brown, the Cabinet and Labour MPs is absolutely essential reading. They write that Labour MPs are increasingly convinced that the next election is lost, cabinet is becoming increasingly fractious and that Brown is heading back to his dark place, he has apparently had to give up exercising on a treadmill because of the strain it puts on his knees. The apology debate is still raging according to Kirkup and Porter: “The truth is, nobody saw this coming and we all got it wrong, Gordon included,” says one minister close to Downing Street. “He’s going to have to level with people

Matthew Dancona

How we got here

My first journalistic job was at the free speech and human rights magazine, Index on Censorship (which, many years later, I still warmly recommend to Coffee Housers who care about fundamental liberties). My months at its offices on Highbury Fields had a profound effect on me, and stirred in me a sense that something unexpected and of deep cultural significance was happening in the towns and cities of this country. Index had been founded as a bastion of free speech during the Cold War, a vehicle to unite liberals and conservatives in the common fight against totalitarianism. But, by 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it

David Blackburn

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report – ‘The era of American dominance is over’

There were few facts and plenty of fictions last night as Intelligence Squared debated whether the era of American dominance is over. Oliver Kamm, journalist and author, proposed the motion. He strode about the stage Cameron-style, with the sound bites to match. “America was on the wane because Americans had lost the appetite to lead.” US dominance rested on guaranteeing “public goods: international trade, currency reserves and collective security.” His vision of American decline owed nothing to the “tendentious deterministic theories of the milieu of anti-American Oxbridge educated Europhiles, such as Michael Moore and Harold Pinter”, (neither of who went to Oxbridge). Rather, Kamm’s vision was “rooted in indisputable facts”. The

Fraser Nelson

Extended web version: ‘We need to be ready for two years of recession’

Opposite Alan Johnson’s desk is a plaque from the Chinese health ministry — a gift that must, at times, seem like a taunt. The Health Secretary controls 1.3 million staff, more than anyone bar the commander of the Red Army. His £120 billion budget is greater than any government department in Beijing. The Chinese economy and the NHS were both subjected to limited market-based reform — yet there the similarities end. Deng Xiaoping succeeded. Tony Blair was ousted. And now Mr Johnson stands in charge of the largest bureaucracy on the planet. We have heard strikingly little about health since he took over, which he regards as a success. The

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 14 February 2009

Two years ago my father decided to try selling books on the internet. Since he had spent much of my childhood expatiating his theory that computers involved more work than they saved, this was something of a U-turn. But he quickly opened a seller’s account on Amazon where he listed for sale the 1,500 of his books he was least likely to miss before sitting back and waiting for the orders to come in. Rather to the surprise of his sceptical sons, orders did come in — and have kept on coming. Two years on, along with a few neighbours who are eBay sellers, he has turned the village post