Society

Last week, the New York Times ran a very un-New-York-Times-y article, ‘Resentment Grows Over Who Gets Health Care Aid’. It contrasts two women in New Hampshire. Married with one child at 30, last year Gwen Hurd paid more than $11,000 for her family’s health insurance, purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchange. They had to shell out $6,300 per person — $18,900 — before the insurance kicked in. Both parents were working. Their pre-tax earnings just exceeded the $82,000 cut-off for government insurance subsidies. The couple dropped date night, and couldn’t save for retirement. A few miles away, single and living at home, an aspiring opera singer of 28 is

This piece was first published in Spectator Schools. In 2007, many of today’s young parents were either graduates or school-leavers testing their skills in their first jobs. They were saving for a mortgage or just enjoying the freedom of being young with few responsibilities. Back then, UK average annual earnings were around £23,765. Now, they are £27,271 — a rise of just under 15 per cent. The average house price in 2007 was £181,383. Today, it’s £215,847 — a rise of more than 19 per cent. Tough on today’s young families, you may think. But the rise in house prices relative to income is nothing compared with the increase in

Donald Trump recently disparaged Britain’s National Health Service for “going broke and not working,” leading Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to express his pride in a system “where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance.” But the news has been filled for months with stories of people unable to access care they need under the NHS, regardless of their efforts or financial resources. Beyond the nationalistic pride and defensiveness of politicians both sides of the Atlantic, how do British and American healthcare really compare? Are both sides as crazy as the other imagines, or do they each know something the other can learn from? Sweeping generalizations regarding

The film I, Tonya, has been well-received and is even up for an Oscar or two. I’m pleased about that because I’ve met Tonya Harding and her story has always fascinated me, not least because to watch her skate in the run up to the 1994 Olympics (particularly in Oakland, California in 1991 at the Ladies Free Skate competition) is to witness sport, art and sheer guts come together in an unfathomable holy trinity. It all went terribly wrong, of course, and she became the most reviled ice skater in the world. Just to recap, six weeks before those Olympics, Harding’s bodyguard, acting on instructions from her already ex-husband, Jeff

‘Revealed,’ blares the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Churchill’s secret affair and the painting that could have damaged his reputation.’ ‘Winston Churchill’s secret love Doris Castlerosse a blackmail risk,’ agrees The Sunday Times. At least the Daily Mail inserted a note of doubt in its headline – ‘Churchill may have cheated with society’s wildest woman’ – and included a question mark in its opening line: ‘Did Churchill cheat on Clemmie with Cara Delevingne’s great-aunt, who was 1930s society’s wildest and most ecstatically beautiful woman?’ The allegations that Winston Churchill was unfaithful while on holiday in the South of France in the mid-1930s have been knocking around for eighty years, with nothing substantial to back them

Some time ago I labelled Oxfam ‘the anti-capitalist lobby group which is also a part-time aid charity’: my column has repeatedly highlighted the fact that donors have unknowingly funded a hard-left think-tank (recent publisher of a list of ‘the eight people who own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’) as well as a Third World relief operation that has now been tainted by allegations of sex abuse. I also objected to the plague of its 650 charity shops, cannibalising the trade of established small businesses in struggling high streets. So I have scant sympathy for Oxfam’s embattled boss Mark Goldring. But I would not want the

Something interesting is happening in the House of Lords. Baroness O’Loan’s Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill, now at the committee stage, has put on the agenda an issue which well-deserves to be there. Its point is simple: all healthcare professionals should have a legal right to opt out of certain procedures which they find objectionable. It specifies three areas: abortion provision, withdrawal of life-saving treatment, and actions relating to certain reproductive technologies. This is not particularly radical; the 1967 Abortion Act already explicitly protects conscientious objection. Indeed, it could even be asked why this should, in a country with a tradition of liberty like ours, even be up for debate.