Barack Obama’s budget plan has become a political debating point on this side of the Atlantic. Ed Balls set the ball a-rolling in an article for the Guardian this morning, which effectively claimed that the President isn’t planning to cut the deficit as quickly as George Osborne is. “The truth is that it is Osborne
13 years ago, The Spectator carried an interview with Nigel Lawson in which he gave his views on the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union – views that seem especially prophetic today. ‘It’s going to be very nasty’, Christopher Fildes, The Spectator 2 May 1998 The Nigel Lawson Diet now seems to suit its inventor. Gone
With all the talk about social mobility, it was inevitable that those who believe grammar schools were the doorway to opportunity would wade into the debate. The most prominent of these interventions came yesterday from David Davis, who said: “The hard data shows that the post-war improvement in social mobility, and its subsequent decline, coincided exactly
As the severity of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is upgraded and thousands of people are evacuated from Japan, here’s Samuel Phipps’ account of his own evacuation from Minsk following the 1986 Chernobyl explosion. A Sudden Evacuee, Samuel Phipps, The Spectator 10 May 1986 ‘You’ll be national heroes when you get back to England,’ said one
David Cameron is clear that his Big Society is about more than just volunteering. Yet during the recent spat on the matter, one of the strongest, most frequent criticisms voiced against it was that cutting state spending will lead to fewer volunteers. Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, executive director of Community Service Volunteers, claimed that the coalition’s
Yesterday, parliament asserted its supremacy before the European Court of Human Rights. As Ross Clark explains, it has been a long time coming. The Final Indignity, 10th November 2001 by Ross Clark It wasn’t so long ago that the very mention of the words ‘European Convention on Human Rights’ in conservative circles was enough to
Last night the Southbank Centre hosted its second “Think Tank Clash”. As last year, it was a sell out event, and saw representatives of six of the country’s top think tanks take each other on in three debates. These debates were ably and wittily compared by writer John O’Farrell and the winners determined by audience
With protesters in Egypt trying to force President Mubarak to resign, here is the piece that Roger Cooper wrote for The Spectator on the event that propelled him to power: the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981: The legacy of Sadat, Roger Cooper, The Spectator, 10 Oct 1981 Rarely has a political assassination set
At last we have it: a defence of the coalition’s NHS reforms that is worthy of the name. It came courtesy of David Cameron, speaking on BBC Breakfast earlier, and you can watch it in the video above. Suffice to say, the Prime Minister dwelt on the endemic waste and excessive bureaucracy of the current
It is 25 years, to the day, since the Challenger shuttle tragically disintegrated over Cape Canaveral. Here is the deeply poignant piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote for The Spectator at the time: The Shuttle Disaster, Christopher Hitchens, The Spectator 1 Feb 1986 Cape Canaveral was the scene of so many non-lethal disasters in the early
