Society

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Mugabe stripped of his knighthood

At last decency has prevailed, and the Queen has stripped Robert Mugabe of his honorary knighthood.  What’s more, Andy Burnham has blocked the Zimbabwe cricket team’s tour of England next year. As far as the plight of the Zimbabwean people is concerned, these are only the tiniest of gestures.  But sometimes small gestures can signal an immense tidal shift in attitude and action.  Hopefully, these will mark the start of a much less forgiving approach to the Mugabe regime by our government. 

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Welfare that works

James Purnell has again repaid my faith in him. What he is proposing is a much needed expansion in the part-privatisation of the benefits industry. As I say in tomorrow’s magazine, the task is not so much welfare reform as regime change. The DWP boasts that it spends more money than the economic output of Portugal. With 5.1m on benefits, it also has more people than the entire poulation of Ireland, Norway or Lithuania. Yet Purnell, following the tried-and-tested procedures in Australia and America, will invite bids from the private sector for welfare-to-work contracts, by which the private companies would be paid by results. Remember, a huge chunk of those on

Peter Hoskin

Apologies

We’ve been having a few technical problems with the website.  Everything’s been fixed now, so normal service can resume…  P.S. There’s a backlog of comments churning through the system, so they may take a while to appear on the site.  Again, apologies.   P.P.S.  If you think any of your comments haven’t got through, you can always e-mail to me on phoskin @ spectator.co.uk and I’ll post them manually for you.

Michael Millar

Planning Bill 2008 vs Reform Bill 1832

It’s the big vote on the Planning Bill today. As seems to be the way of things at the moment, the Government has made last minute changes to placate angry back benchers threatening a bit of laldy, as they say in Scotland. The most controversial part of the Bill is the creation of an Independent Planning Commission (IPC) to take all the big decisions on major infrastructure projects. Detractors say this is undemocratic. I happen to agree with the CBI’s John Cridland, when he asked the Today Programme this morning: why, if we trust the experts of the MPC to take decisions on interest rates, can’t we trust planning experts

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Where it all went wrong for Brown: he’s never said sorry

What is most remarkable about the descent of Gordon Brown is that the voters have never even hinted at giving him a second chance. Ever since the debacle of the election that never was Brown and Labour’s ratings have moved downwards at a pretty rapid clip. We are now at a point where 74 percent of voters think he is a change for the worse from Blair and the Labour party is in some danger of being overtaken by the Liberal Democrats in the polls. There is one very simple, overlooked reason why Prime Minister Brown hasn’t been given a second chance: he’s never asked for one. In his interview with Andrew

Martin Rowson

‘Yes! Ha! I’d have been up to the top job’

For over a decade and a half Ann Widdecombe has been a cartoonist’s dream come true. On top of the way she looks, she’s an avowed virgin endlessly pontificating about sexual morality, a woman politician self-consciously eschewing image self-consciousness and with a voice that could crack a font at 50 paces. For all those reasons and many more, she seemed to be the perfect choice as the first subject for this series of ‘Cartoon Interviews’, in which I’m hoping to pull off a kind of ‘double whammy’ by interviewing the victims of satire while drawing them at the same time. What I’m after is an understanding of how it feels

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Cummins may be part of the green ink brigade, but he was right about Islam

Rod Liddle looks back at the case of the British Council employee who dared to speak the truth about Islamic ideology — and notes that what was heretical in 2004 is now almost orthodox A madman has been bombarding Fleet Street journalists with extremely long emails, asking for redress, for a hearing. He feels traduced. Nothing new there, then. Lunatics write to me every day, long handwritten scrawls of bitter psychosis — and it really is true that the maddest are written in green ink, or a similarly unnatural hue. I imagine these woebegone people wandering into WH Smith’s and saying to some babe at the counter: ‘Excuse me, I

Mark Mason

Trivia really is very important, you know

But it’s a boy thing, admits Mark Mason. Women are just too sensible to watch Spinal Tap 35 times — but they don’t know what connects Ringo Starr and Shane Warne For years I thought it was just me and my friends. Merrily we dotted our conversations with random facts — Carlsberg Special Brew was invented for Winston Churchill, the M2 is the only British motorway that connects with no other motorway, a Rubik’s Cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a century… Never did we stop to think that this trait might actually say anything about us. But then along came Schott’s Miscellany, Does Anything Eat Wasps?

Steve Richards

Some advice for Brown’s second year: find a John Reid and bring back Charles Clarke

Gordon Brown’s first anniversary in Number 10 Downing Street is passing in the usual whirl of Prime Ministerial hyperactivity. It would have been out of character for Mr Brown to raise a glass if the year had been an unambiguous triumph, but even a more fun-loving leader would balk at toasting the last 12 months. Instead the event is marked by an eruption of articles and television programmes seeking to analyse what has gone wrong. Mr Brown will not have liked any of them. A less commonly asked question in the media’s volcanic eruption is what, if anything, the Prime Minister can do to change the situation in his second

Venetia Thompson

Princely homes that hold their value in every sense

Venetia Thompson says that the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment does work that nobody else can and constructs homes that buck current property market trends Robin Hood famously robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but I am certain that he never suggested that the poor should then be crammed into tower blocks like battery chickens in the name of Modernist architecture until they were finally stabbed to death in a deserted stairwell. There is nothing truly egalitarian about the ironically named Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London — except the equality of squalor. It is no surprise that most of its 400 residents want the

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Playing with toy soldiers

Danny Finkelstein has responded to my post suggesting that he is fighting the last war by saying, rather ingenuously, that this is generally a smart strategy. Now, at the risk of stretching this metaphor to breaking point, I’d counter that the last wars the Conservative party has fought have been all about minimising its loses or reclaiming ground lost to the enemy. The coming campaign offers it a very different opportunity, a chance not only to reverse the result of previous conflict but to advance into new territory. It is the opportunities on offer that mean that a new campaign strategy is required. The Tories would probably win if they

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Olympic pollution

Last night I was having drinks with a China expert and he made a rather startling prediction: Beijing will be the first summer Olympics where no records are broken in track and field. His thinking was that the air quality in China is so poor that the athletes in every outdoor event are going to be severely hampered by it. Certainly, looking at Jim Fallows’s photographs (link via Clive) it is hard to imagine how anyone could comfortably run 100 metres in these conditions let alone 26.2 miles. 

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall

This week’s CoffeeHousers’ Wall is here. Head over there to have your say on the week’s events and to let us know what you’d like to see on Coffee House.

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The first spouse problem

Clive flags up Maureen Dowd’s entertaining column on how the Americans would react to having Carla Bruni as First Lady. But on top of the comedy value there’s a serious issue to be grappled with. From now on, it is going to more common than not that a president or a prime minister’s spouse works. This means there’s an urgent need to work out some set of rules about what is OK for them to do and what is not. Otherwise, these spouses are going to constantly be accused, and often unfairly, of exploiting their position. The problem is compounded by the fact that a number of potential ‘First Ladies’ work

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Rip off Britain

One would have thought that getting a bunch of passport photos done in London would be no great hassle—but you’d be wrong. For a while I’ve needed to get some taken for the Tory conference accreditation form so on Thursday I popped into Hampstead Post Office to use the photo machine there. It was out of order. I went back this morning thinking that it would have been fixed in the meantime. How foolish I was. This lunchtime I went to Victoria to use the machines there. I went into one and started plopping in the four pounds that I had to pay to get four photos. But when I

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Chalk one up for the Davis campaign 

The letter from Sir Simon Milton, head of the Local Government Association, to local councils telling them not to use the powers granted to them under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to deal with “trivial offences” is a triumph for David Davis. (These powers were designed to assist in anti-terrorism investigations but are now being used by councils to check up on what people are putting in their bins and whether they are scooping up after their dogs.) Although, the letter might have been sent anyway there is no doubt that Davis has turned the spotlight onto these kind of abuses. Davis is going to have to battle to