Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
It’s not often that M&G’s retail bond team link to education pieces; they tend to be more interested in inflation threats and sovereign defaults. But this morning, the guys at @bondvigilantes drew investors’ attention to research published in the current issue of The Spectator on the true economic cost of British educational failure. It makes
The victory of Hassan Rouhani has stunned pundits, and it seems even Iranians can’t quite believe it. He is a moderate (if not, quite, a reformer) who defeated five conservatives. He was helped by the fact that other moderates had stood back to give him a clear run. His victory was massive – 51pc of the
It’s official – Hassan Rouhani has been declared the new President of Iran with 51pc of the vote. He’s a cleric, a moderate and a polyglot (speaking English, German, French, Russian and Arabic). “Let’s end extremism,” he said during a campaign speech. “We have no other option than moderation.” He took swipes at the Basij,
Now that Barack Obama has decided to arm the ‘good’ rebels in Syria, it’s more likely than ever that Britain will follow suit. The G8 summit next week in Northern Ireland may well turn into a pre-war summit, which will certainly be interesting seeing as Putin will also be there. The Russians may respond by
The Labour years can, in retrospect, be seen as a massive experiment into the link between cash and education. Gordon Brown almost doubled spending per pupil over the past decade, the biggest money injection in the history of state schooling. But as he did so, England hurtled down the international league tables. It now languishes
From the moment that the Sunday Times caught Tim Yeo offering to advise energy companies for cash, it was clear that his chairmanship of the energy and climate change select committee was untenable. Yet he’s coming to this conclusion slowly. It has taken him until now to decide he’ll “step aside,” apparently under pressure from Labour members of the
You can accuse Ed Balls of a great many things (and we do), but he doesn’t do gaffes. His interviews are always worth paying close attention to, because every soundbite is carefully-considered, weighed for its political potency and constantly reused. Anyone who missed his interview with Andrew Neil yesterday should catch it (here) because –
Ed Miliband argued this morning that the Labour party ought to be more focused on people working. ‘The clue’s in the name,’ he said. The irony is that Labour gave up on working people some time ago, and used the boom to keep five million Brits on out-of-work benefit while foreign-born workers accounted for 99.9%
Jo Johnson is now in situ, Christopher Lockwood has started his two-year sabbatical from the Economist and David Cameron’s new policy unit is in in place and ready to go producing ideas of how to win the 2015 election. But word is that they’re not entirely overflowing with ideas, and believe it will be tough
Does marriage matter anymore? Not so long ago, David Cameron was foremost amongst those giving an unfashionable ‘yes’ to this question. It became his signature theme, the closest he had to a Blair-style ‘irreducible core’. It seemed, at the time, as if a 1979-style realignment was underway. The Labour Party was being sucked into the
I would have loved to have been in the room when David Cameron’s advisers were thinking of an acronym for the new anti-terror committee. Something that sounded scary enough, but not too Monty Python. They eventually went for TERFOR, according to the Mail on Sunday, although it’s still unclear what the T will stand for.
From his base in New York, Rupert Murdoch knows where to get the best analysis of British politics: The Spectator. He has just Tweeted that David Cameron is in trouble, after reading James Forsyth’s brilliant political column. It’s easy to see why he was so struck. As so often, James’ tells you more about what’s
The reporting of yesterday’s murder was driven not by journalists, but by eyewitnesses quickly able to share what they saw. Here is one extraordinary chain of tweets by a rapper, Boya Deemarko, who says that one of the murderers fired a gun but lost his finger when the weapon backfired. Ohhhhh myyyy God!!!! I just see
The Muslim Council of Britain has denounced the Woolwich murder and has been joined by hundreds of Muslims who have taken to Twitter to voice disgust over the idea that Islam could have been be invoked in such a barbaric act. Here are a few of them: I can’t tell you how sick I am
Great news for all progressives: a private school has been effectively been nationalised. Queen Elizabeth Grammar in Blackburn, founded in 1509, is to enter the state sector as one of Michael Gove’s free schools. Education that had previously been affordable only by the rich will now be open to all in Blackburn. It’s one of
HMS Ark Royal leaves Portsmouth for Turkey today to be dismantled and sold for scrap; the Harrier jets she once carried are being sold to the Americans for spare parts. She’s being decommissioned early as we can’t afford to keep her now. Times are tough, and hard choices need to be made. The same bulletin
Last night’s Eurovision was, as always, a collision of music, culture and politics. As always, the official British entry was dire – but, as always, the invisible hand of Britain’s world-class musicians lay behind many acts that did well. So it was with Denmark’s winner, Emmelie de Forest, whose song Only Teardrops won by quite
What a strange day. Lord Feldman, the Tory co-chairman, appears to have identified himself as the unnamed Cameron ally reported by several newspapers as referring to party activists as ‘swivel-eyed loons’. He strenuously denies making the comments, and for good measure says he is consulting lawyers. Here’s what he has to say: ‘I am very
The mis-selling of higher education is one of the least remarked-upon scandals of our time, but anyone under 40 should be familiar with the concept. You’re told, at school, that a degree will make you far better-off. Politicians even put a price on it: a degree will make you, on average, £100,000 better-off in your
Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to see the whole thing as a bad joke. We send out Bonnie Tyler/Engelbert Humperdinck etc to face an army