Society

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Rudy have the last laugh?

Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign has, to date, been a damp squid. Despite dangling his toe in the water in Iowa he still finished an embarrassing sixth behind the fringe candidate Ron Paul. In New Hampshire, Giuliani came in outside the medal positions despite having tried to move his numbers with a series of TV ads. He isn’t really playing in South Carolina having accepted that another state his campaign once thought was promising for him won’t go for him. But amazingly, Giuliani still has a chance of winning the nomination. If John McCain wins in South Carolina tomorrow, he’ll probably be the nominee. If not, things could break Rudy’s way.

The Skimmer

All the news that’s not fit to print

As the weekly news cycle comes to an end and darkness descends on a gloomy Friday, there are two great news stories doing the rounds, neither of which the great British media can report. One involves a famous broadcaster and his love child by another journalist and is covered by an injunction. The other is covered by a D-Notice. Good to live in a free country, isn’t it? PS The Skimmer has also heard of another famous broadcaster (who doesn’t have a love child, as far as we know) who was so hung over from celebrations the night before that he failed to make a scheduled morning interview with the Prime

Peter Hoskin

Weekend Culture

The Spectator’s Stephen Pollard has already blogged about this weekend’s big cultural draw – the Sunday performance of La traviata at the Royal Opera House.  Although, if you haven’t yet bought tickets for this “once in a generation” treat, then you’ll have difficulty in getting to see it – all performances are sold out. Far more attainable are tickets for this week’s best, new general release film: the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men.  This gritty, Texas-set thriller merges the violence and hopelessness of classic films noir with the Coen’s own offbeat sensibility, and it’s certainly their most accomplished work to date.  Check out Peter Bradshaw’s review in the

Peter Hoskin

The truth about income inequality

A new report from the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies makes the claim that “the outlook for inequality in Britain may depend more on the stock market than on Government tax and benefit policies”. Basically, the IFS have found that income inequality between the richest and poorest members of society declines “in the wake of extended falls in the stock market” (this is intuitive: falls in the stock market equate to falls in the incomes of the wealthiest).  By contrast – at times when the stock market is operating smoothly – income inequality is hardly altered by redistributing wealth via both higher taxes for the rich and increased welfare payments

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The children that we fail

Camila Batmanghelidj of the estimable Kids Company writes in the Telegraph this morning about how we have got into a situation where children kick a man to death. Batmanghelidj’s argument that those who have grown up in a brutal environment are more likely to behave brutally makes perfect sense to me. As she puts it, “they know how to kick because they have been kicked, they know how to stab because they have been stabbed, they know how to torment and humiliate because they have experienced the same.”  The extent to which we as a society fail these children is brought home by the fact that as, Batmanghelidj notes, 570,000

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Older generations doing their bit to stave off the credit crunch

As Larry Elliot reports in today’s Guardian, a rise in the number of over-50s gaining employment has “helped Britain shrug off the impact of the credit crunch”.  Recent figures from the ONS reveal that, in the three months to November, 175,000 new jobs were created in the economy, with an astonishing 90,000 – some 51 percent – of them being taken by those over 50 years-old. However, the surge in over-50s employment may not be all good news, as it’s not unthinkable that underlying economic problems are behind it.  After all – with private sector pensions being so uncertain; house prices falling; and the prices of consumables ever-inflating – the over-50s

Wednesday

The Skimmer

The Director-General needs to find out how the other 90% live

Calling for a sense of “perspective” and “proportionality” in coverage of British youth, the BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, complained on Radio 4’s Today on Tuesday that you could get the impression from much media coverage that Britain was a “nightmare landscape of roving bands of drunken teenagers”.   The blunt truth is that, in certain parts of the country, the nightmare is all too real and the BBC has consistently under-reported it. Within 24 hours of Thompson’s interview the London Evening Standard was reporting that, in London alone, five children are injured in gun or knife attacks every day. “We know we have a challenge in youth crime,” said the

Peter Hoskin

What should be asked of the independent sector?

With the Charity Commission recommending that private schools should do more for the “public benefit”, public school headmasters are at odds over whether or not they do enough already.  As Melanie Phillips has already noted in a must-read Spectator blog post, the first shot was fired by the headmaster of Wellington College, Dr Anthony Seldon, in yesterday’s Independent.  Seldon claims that the independent school system is helping to perpetuate “educational apartheid” (i.e. the inequality between the independent and state sectors):   “It is not right for any longer for our schools to cream off the best pupils, the best teachers, the best facilities, the best results and the best university

Matthew Dancona

The Wiki Man | 16 January 2008

Anyone who is interested in the wonderful world of Web 2.0 or simply likes great writing – or both – should read Rory Sutherland’s new technology column starting in tomorrow’s Spectator. As well as being Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, and generally regarded as the best writer in his highly competitive business, Rory is a masterly and witty guide to the revolution that is taking place on our phones, computers, ipods and other devices. So if you don’t know your wikinomics from your beta application, and you still think a mouse is a cheese-eating rodent, then this man can help. A warm welcome to the Spectator’s very own Wiki Man.

Irwin Stelzer

The economic consequences of Mr Brown

Gordon Brown might be overstating his case when he ignores his Thatcherite inheritance and a benign global economic environment, and takes sole credit for Britain’s rather good economic performance during his tenure at No. 11. But, asked whether they are better off now than a decade ago, most Britons would have to agree that in material terms their lives have improved during Brown’s tenure at the Treasury, and that his decisions to keep Britain out of the euro and to grant a sort of independence to the Bank of England (Brown still selects the Bank’s inflation target, and decides whether the Governor is to be reappointed or let out to

James Hughesonslow

It helps if the doctor actually looks at the X-ray

It’s six years since I wrote in The Spectator about my broken right ankle, humiliatingly sustained when I slipped while arguing with a swimming-pool attendant in a French ski resort. The joke among British patients in the hospital in Grenoble, all of them with much worse injuries than mine, was that it was better to stay where we were, where staff knew about broken bones and where there was a comfortable hostel for patients’ relatives, rather than return to the bosom of the NHS where we might catch MRSA. Well, now I’ve broken my left ankle and this time I had no choice. My motor scooter skidded on slippery cobbles

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

In the unlikely event that anyone wants my organs, it should be up to me

Rod Liddle says that the notion of ‘compulsory donations’ is oxymoronic and the pinnacle of the medical profession’s zeal to get its hands on our corpses The question is, I suppose, hypothetical in my case. Or beyond even hypothetical. They are not going to want the liver of someone who opens a bottle of Rioja just as Naughtie announces it’s time for Thought for the Day. I find it impossible to listen to that vapid, platitudinous drivel without some form of sustenance close to hand. When it’s that endlessly emollient Sikh bloke, or Anne Atkins, I make it a large Jack Daniels. Nor, I suppose, would they want my lungs,

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Correcting the narrative

Ed Balls was on the World at One, taking a bow for the teachers’ pay deal. He again referred to low inflation and falling interest rates – which will not sound at all right to those reading the Telegraph’s splash about food prices rising at the highest rates in history or the 1.6m poor souls renegotiating their mortgage this year. One of Brown’s key tactics is the fake narrative: cherry picking statistics to cast his years in No 11 in the best possible light. But his official version is now becoming so detached from what people experience and read about that it just sounds fake. One of the reasons the

Clemency Burtonhill

Arts Council seems distinctly un-excellent…

In Piccadilly Circus this lunchtime, under an apocalyptic grey sky and wearing plain white face masks to evoke the classical symbol of the dramatic trade, a ‘flashmob’ of hundreds of actors, directors and stage professionals gathered on the steps of Eros to silently express their continued grievance with the Arts Council of England (ACE). Today marks the last day of possible appeal for those unlucky arts organizations who were slapped with the shock news just before Christmas that, despite a recent fifty-million pound boost from the DCMS to ACE coffers, they would be losing some or all of their subsidies. These unfortunate organizations, who include in their number London’s much-loved

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A dose of Iraq realism

The military success of the surge in Iraq now seems to be paving the way for political reconciliation and the prospects for Iraq look more hopeful than they have in a long time. However, this does not mean that withdrawal any time soon would be a good idea as the Iraqi Defence Minister made clear yesterday on a visit to the United States: “According to our calculations and our timelines, we think that from the first quarter of 2009 until 2012 we will be able to take full control of the internal affairs of the country,” Mr. Qadir said in an interview on Monday, conducted in Arabic through an interpreter.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pensioned off

Today at Centreright.com, Matthew Elliott flags up a truly shocking fact: “by 2009, each person working in the private sector will be paying more each month into the pension of a civil servant than they will into their own pension.”

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can McCain keep the momentum going?

Today, John McCain will either take a massive stride towards winning the Republican nomination by winning the Michigan primary or a triumph for Mitt Romney will scramble the contest still further. McCain is the candidate with the wind at his back. His victory in New Hampshire has vaulted him into a considerable lead in the national polls and in the crucial first in the South primary in South Carolina. Victory tonight should ensure that McCain maintains his lead in South Carolina and if he wins there, McCain will likely win in Florida and pick up the lion’s share of delegates on Super Tuesday; leaving him as the Republican nominee presumptive.

Monday

Liz Anderson

Facing down Facebook

I always knew I was right not to be one of the 59 million (7 million in the UK) people who have joined Facebook, and Tom Hodgkinson’s article in today’s Guardian has confirmed my prejudice. He makes an extremely convincing case for not wanting to be part of Facebook’s ‘heavily funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands’. Read it — and sign off.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

<strong>Is it our guilt that makes us so critical of Britney?</strong>

Ayleet Waldman has a sure to be controversial piece in this week’s New York Magazine arguing that the reason society is so keen to jump on bad mothers like Britney Spears is because mothers are acutely aware of their own failings. As Waldman writes, “The single defining characteristic of iconic Good Motherhood is self-abnegation. Her day is constructed around her children’s health and happiness, and her own needs and ambitions are relevant only in relation to theirs. If a Good Mother works, she does so only if it doesn’t harm her children, or if her failing to earn an income would make them worse off. She takes care of herself