Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
To listen to Camila Batmanghelidjh on the Radio 4 this morning, you’d think that her upstanding charity had been mysteriously assassinated by a vicious media – and by nothing else. This sounded like a very different Camila Batmanghelidjh to the one who telephoned me after The Spectator first blew the whistle on the irregularities at
On Broadcasting House, one of my favourite Radio 4 programmes, was this morning discussing a report (pdf) from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty commission. It finds, amongst other things, that ‘education at a private or a Grammar school is also associated with an increased chance of labour market success’ amongst dim kids. Who’d have
George Osborne’s Budget plan to raise the minimum wage to £9.35 for over-25s was a surprise – which means it has not yet been much scrutinised. Ed Miliband’s £8 by 2020 pledge was pretty much a non-pledge as inflation would probably have taken the £6.50 minimum wage to £8 by the end of the decade
Poor old David Lammy. At 11pm last night, the Labour mayoral hopeful tweeted that his mum had depended on tax credits so he supports them now. Twitter went wild, saying that they were only invented in 2003 so he must have been fibbing! Even Derek Draper got stuck in. And, oddly, the story has grown since then
Last autumn, I presented a Ch4 documentary on inequality. I could have made three hours’ worth of that show – or written a book – but it was distilled down to 27 minutes so a lot was chopped. Including my interview with Alistair Darling about the malfunction of tax credits. (Our conversation to QE is above).
Yes, it’s a sunny Sunday – but for Tories, it will be a lot sunnier after watching the Labour Party leadership debate. With some helpful suggestions from Twitter, here’s my guide to what they’ll say: Yvette Cooper: ‘Working mum!’ or ‘as a mother’ What she’ll mean: ‘I am one, unlike Liz Kendall! So I’ll make out like
Reassuringly, not even anti-monarchists are making mischief out of today’s pictures of an eight-year-old Queen being shown by her uncle how to make a Nazi salute. It’s a striking picture, but as everyone knows, it simply did not mean then what it means now. It was taken in 1933, when the full horrors of Nazism
It’s hit Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and the New York Mets and now the Labour Party has become the victim of vote hijacking: people voting for an unlikely candidate for a joke, just because they can. The impeccably informed Stephen Bush reveals that: ‘”More than two thirds” of new recruits since the election are supporters of
After 17 hours of negotiations Greece and its creditors have just agreed a third bailout deal – and already there’s a new hashtag campaign on Twitter protesting that #ThisIsACoup. Paul Krugman agrees. Why so? The terms of a €86bn, three-year bailout involve sharper sending cuts than those rejected by the Greeks in their recent referendum and flogging some €50bn of
The Budget contained little economic analysis of George Osborne’s sensational plan for a £9 minimum wage for the over-25s. Of course, it’s not driven by economics: the main objective is to destabilise the Labour Party. So far, the policy is being defended by Tories using rather flimsy logic: business moaned when Tony Blair introduced the minimum wage, but did
My Saturday morning would not be complete without Amanda Platell’s delicious put-downs in the Daily Mail, usually aimed at people who richly deserve them. But today she identifies a target that doesn’t. Her piece, “White Dee, and how the Left lost the war on welfare,” argues that Ch4 made Benefits Street to “provide a powerful argument for the
So much has happened in this Budget that it’s easy to overlook one of the most important announcements: that George Osborne will, after all, fit a lock on defence spending to make sure that it stays at 2 per cent of GDP until 2020. The Spectator has been calling for this for some time; I
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/summerbudget2015/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Summer Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]The morning after the election, Ed Miliband said that his party had lost the election but won the argument. He was mocked for this observation but surveying Osborne’s summer budget, he may have a point. It was cleverly spun: the tax-cut for
During the last Labour campaign, there will be been a few moments where George Osborne will have looked at Ed Miliband proposals and thought: damn! Wish we’d come up with of that. Take a pledge to raise the minimum wage to £8 by 2020. That was Miliband’s pledge; Osborne says £9. Doesn’t cost the government a
We learn this morning that George Osborne is planning a tax cut for the middle class, by raising the earnings threshold for the 40p tax. Of course, this was raised automatically in the Labour years (in line with RPI inflation) and even tricksy Gordon Brown never billed it as a tax cut. It’s only a
Let’s face it: George Osborne’s pledge to save £12 billion from welfare over two years was never really credible. He never told us where the savings would come from, and it seemed as if he didn’t really know. So tonight’s news, that the Chancellor has cut this to £8bn and given himself an extra year (or two) to make the full £12bn, is
It’s Budget day tomorrow, and as James Forsyth put it recently, George Osborne will never have a better time to do bad things. The Labour party is a complete mess, the quality of scrutiny will be pretty ropey. So if he’s going to pull a fast one, now’s the time. Gordon Brown’s budgets were famous
In a landslide vote, the Greeks have said ‘no’ to the latest EU bailout deal – and, perhaps, to the Euro itself. Alexis Tsipras will stay as Prime Minister, and treat the result as a mandate to negotiate a better deal. But that’s not how the Germans see it: their economic affairs minister, Sigmar Gabriel, has just told the Tagesspiegel newspaper
We learn today that George Osborne will say in his Budget that he’s using the fines he’s collected from bankers to build a memorial to terror victims. I find this juxtaposition rather odd: why link terrorism to banking? Why not just be honest: that any memorial will be funded from the the same tax pool
‘They are just as you hope they’d be,’ said my colleague Damian Thompson midway through our readers’ tea party today. I knew what he meant: we were actually getting to meet the people we work for, the people we imagine when we’re commissioning or writing stories. You build up a fairly clear idea what they’re
