Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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Feeling the genitals of freshly hatched chickens may not be the most glamorous job in the world but at £40,000 a year it’s not badly paid. It requires some stamina: you pick up hundreds of chicks a day and check their ‘vent’ for boy parts. If it’s a baby hen, then she’s sent off for
As ever, the story of the Budget was hidden in the small print. There are no hidden tax rises, but the story isn’t really in the tax. It’s about the cuts to come, the incredible jobs recovery and the games already being played for the general election campaign. Here’s my take:- 1. The rollercoaster of cuts to come:-
George Osborne is the most political of Chancellors, and his Budget today will doubtless read like a party political broadcast. The economic momentum is on his side: soaring employment, plunging inflation, fuel prices down. But he has had more trouble with the public finances than he expected (as things turned out he could afford it, as global borrowing rates have
I was at the hall of Swedish Church in Marylebone last night to watch the final of Melody Festival – the bar was selling dill crisps, pear cider and plenty merriment. As I expected, ‘Heroes’ won. But the show itself was a masterpiece of entertainment, an example of how Swedish TV is now vastly superior
I do feel sorry for Danny Alexander. He’ll have been worked off his feet for the Budget due next week but his party then dispatches him to butter up a would-be donor – or, in this case, an undercover reporter from the Daily Telegraph. Not that he said anything incriminating, but the idea of him
Alex Salmond’s brand of populist nationalism involves portraying the Tories as the party of the class enemy. But his latest attack on David Cameron and the TV debates has crossed the line of decency. ‘Like most posh boys, given half a chance, he’ll run away from a fight,’ he said yesterday. This is bigotry, pure
Last night’s UK Press Awards stood out for deserving winners – and some undeserving losers. Andrew Norfolk of The Times won two gongs for his extraordinary investigation into child abuse in Rotherham, which exemplified what good journalism can achieve. Norfolk ploughed away at this for years, often as the only journalist in the courtroom putting
The Sunday Times today reports proof of what many have long suspected: that if you give bright disadvantaged kids the same support that pupils get at private schools and they beat their privately-educated rivals at top universities. Get three decent A-levels at a private school and you’ve a 65 per cent chance of going to
I wish I could get worked up about the televised election debates (or lack thereof). I can understand that it’s a very important to the broadcasters, who don’t mind reducing the campaign to three US-style standoffs. But if they don’t go ahead, is it really an outrage? Is our democracy really the poorer for it? When broadcasters are angry, they
You almost have to admire Justin Forsyth’s brass neck. He is a former Gordon Brown spin chief earning a Prime Ministerial £138,000 for running Save the Children. Or, rather, transforming it into Save the Labour Party with various attack ads claiming that kids need to be rescued from wicked Conservative austerity. Here’s an example of its handiwork: You’d think
This is a blog written after the first screening of Måns Zelmerlöw’s Heroes, which went on to win the Swedish nomination and the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. The world’s most-watched cultural event is some time away, but for Eurovision affectionados the entertainment has started already. Britain and Sweden are the continent’s two greatest exporters of pop music, but the UK Eurovision
I’ve just seen a poster from the NASUWT teaching union at a stall they have taken at this year’s Welsh Tory conference in Cardiff (where I am today). It suggests that the poor have it easier getting to university in Wales than in England because of the wicked ‘Westminster Coalition Government.’ This is an utterly dishonest poster. The poor, in
The embarrassing truth is that David Cameron did not think carefully about this pledge to take net immigration into the ‘tens of thousands’. The pledge originated in a Thick-of-It style farce: it was an aspiration mentioned by Damian Green, then immigration spokesman, that caught media attention. The Tories didn’t want to make a fuss by
For years I saw Malcolm Rifkind as an unusually principled politician, one of the very best and brightest talents in the Conservative Party. After the rout of Scottish Tories in 1997, he decided to stay and fight for his old seat, Edinburgh Pentlands, rather than follow Michael Forsyth and Ian Lang along the high road to the
To listen to the debate about Labour’s prospective Mansion Tax, you’d think that the UK didn’t have any wealth or property taxes. So your CoffeeHouse baristas looked up the figures, which are collected by the OECD. Our stamp duty, business rates and council tax give the UK the highest property tax in the world. This has
It seems hard to believe now, but only The Spectator supported Margaret Thatcher in the first leadership ballot. She had been Keith Joseph’s campaign director, and when he faltered she took his place. The Economist, true to its endearing habit of being wrong in major calls in modern British history, said she was “precisely the sort of
The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, and our rise continues. The website’s traffic is up a remarkable 50 per cent year-on-year to 1.8 million monthly unique users and over 4.5 million pageviews. But the rise in digital is not coming at the expense of print sales, which are also rising – our sales in the
The tragedy of the Rab C Nesbitt caricature is that there is a lot of truth in it – Scots do tend to have more problems with booze then those in the rest of the UK. Things are improving: today’s figures show that the alcohol-related death rate for men in Scotland is 29.8 per 100,000 –
All you want from Europe is free trade, cheap flights and the Eurovision Song Contest – the rest is bureaucracy. One of the contest’s many strengths is its generous, expansive definition of ‘European’. Its soft power is awesome, and effective. It reaches out to countries banging on the door of the West – nations the European Union
