Society

Tuesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through the Ukraine crisis

First published in 2014, this bluffer’s guide may still help you feel like Chatham House’s finest at your next dinner party… We’re all journalists now, apparently, so when a major foreign policy crisis comes along it is important to be prepared. Everyone must learn the art of winging it as the big news breaks. That’s not easy these days. What with Wikipedia on every mobile phone, our understanding of international relations can be called into question at any moment. So here, as a beginner’s guide, are ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through a conversation about the situation in Ukraine: ‘It’s simplistic to think in terms of east versus west

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

When it comes to working dogs, sometimes tail docking is the kindest option

Imagine you’re a dog with a long, silky tail that you like to wag. The problem is, you spend your days running across moorland, through prickly undergrowth, which makes your tail hurt and bleed. Might you wish that someone had made it a little bit shorter when you were a puppy? Many people – and especially those with working dogs – argue that docking is by far the kindest option. This is why it is odd that Scotland is the only country in the UK with a complete ban on tail docking. England, Wales and Northern Ireland all have exemptions for working dogs, as long as they are docked when

Elizabeth Truss

The coalition has stabilised childcare costs – so why do headlines suggest they’re rising?

You may have heard about the Family and Childcare Trust’s survey today, about the costs of childcare. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines but it actually found that in England, costs have fallen for the first time since the survey started 12 years ago. The figures in the report show that, after inflation, the cost of nurseries fell by two per cent, the cost of after-school clubs fell by five per cent, and the cost of a child-minder’s after-school pickup fell by a full 13 per cent. There is now mounting evidence that childcare costs have at last stabilised after more than a decade of rising prices. The health

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ipsa’s costly pursuit of one MP undermines its purpose

Ipsa, never popular with MPs anyway, has done itself a disservice with its pursuit of Conservative MP Stewart Jackson over its demand that he hand over £54,000 to the expenses watchdog to reflect the increased value of his property that he had claimed mortgage interest support for. On Friday, Jackson, who had refused to pay, revealed that Ipsa had dropped the case after an independent valuer said there had been no rise in his property’s value. Jackson said: ‘The application of commonsense and some compromise on Ipsa’s part may have resolved the dispute much more expeditiously and without the cost to the taxpayer of more than £25,000 in legal fees,

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Why shouldn’t people have a flutter on the Pistorius trial?

You can bet on all manner of scummy things on Paddy Power: when Fergie and Andrew will remarry; how Julian Assange will leave the Ecuadorian embassy (odds for him leaving in a diplomatic bag are currently 20/1). Now you can also bet on the outcome of the Pistorius trial. I’ve got a fiver on the Blade Runner getting off. I jest. But given the extensive coverage lavished on the trial so far, is it any wonder that people are starting to have a flutter. The scrutiny has been astonishing – with live television and radio broadcasts available for anyone who cares. South Africa even has a 24-hour TV channel devoted to coverage

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Noam Chomsky in the Crimea

Go to London or of any other Western capital and here is what you will not see. You will not see mass demonstrations against the Russian invasion of the Ukraine swaying down the same streets in which the liberal-left marched against the invasion of Iraq. You will not hear prominent left-wing voices emphasizing that Putin is attempting more than an invasion; that the Russian Federation – and what a benign word ‘federation’ is for a revived Tsarist autocracy – is the last of the European empires, and is seeking to expand its borders, as empires always do. In short, the activist left will not tell its followers that we are

Charlotte Leslie

Wales is a nightmare vision of Ed Miliband’s Britain

If politics was science, you would call Wales the ‘control’ group, for public service reform. Here is a country where Labour are the only game in town and a socialist philosophy which places a monopolistic state provider at the centre of health care and education reigns supreme – yes, even more supreme than the pupils and patients this system is designed to serve. In fact, in devolved Wales, Labour are running the public services as Ed Milliband would like to see them; a Labourite utopia of State supremacy, with none of the so-called evils of alternative providers getting in the way of the tight grip of the State. So how

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Lord Owen’s backing for Labour reforms rounds off good weekend for Miliband

Lord Owen’s announcement that he backs Ed Miliband’s union reforms and is donating £7,500 to the party rounds off a good weekend for the Labour leader. Owen quit the party in 1981 to set up the SDP, but last night announced that he wanted to support Labour campaigns to reverse the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. He said: ‘This is a brave and bold reform by Ed Miliband and one I strenuously argued for as a Labour MP at the special conference on Saturday, 25 January 1981. This very desirable change, nevertheless, threatens to weaken Labour’s financial support at a critical time when I and many others are hoping

Niall Ferguson

The rise of the BRICs and the fall of the JUUGs

It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’, short for Brazil, Russia, India, China. These were the emerging markets that were going to surpass the developed economies. And so they have. Well, nearly. I, too, am partial to a good acronym and it has always seemed to me very unfortunate that there isn’t a matching one for the four biggest established economies. According to the International Monetary Fund, these are currently the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom (based on last year’s GDP figures). I therefore propose ‘Juugs’. The rise of the Brics and the fall of the

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

If this picture puts your toddler off his lunch, he should consider vegetarianism

How can we encourage children to be closer to nature, when 80% of Britons live in urban areas? This is the question that Michael Gove attempts to answer in his contribution to a recent pamphlet entitled ‘What the Environment means to Conservatives’. He writes, ‘One way we all interact with the natural world is through the food we eat.’ As a result, he wants to apply this thinking to education. He has already made cooking compulsory in schools for all children up to the age of 14 from next September. And his ‘School Food Plan’ aims both to improve the standard of school food, and to teach pupils about where ingredients

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How to repair a free school – the next stage of Michael Gove’s reforms

Any government can set out on a journey of reform – the question is whether they can stay on course upon hitting turbulence. The coalition is entering this phase now. Its flagship reforms, universal credit and free schools, are encountering difficulty. We all know about the welfare problems, but not much attention has yet fallen on the nature of Michael Gove’s impending headache. I looked at this in my Telegraph column. There are now 174 free schools in England, and by this time next year it’ll be almost 300. Statistically, some of these are going to have problems – and this is the test for the government. If you were a

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The danger of victimhood

It is 15 years since the publication of the Macpherson Report into the investigation of the death of Stephen Lawrence. The report may have done some good by making the police take crime against black people more seriously, but its main legacy is bad. Macpherson promulgated the doctrine that ‘A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’ If the incident is thus defined then there is literally no end to racist incidents; and if the (self-defining) victims — or anyone else — can define a racist incident thus then the person alleged by them to be guilty is automatically convicted. This

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Toast to a young gun

Three of us, old friends, were meeting to arrange a marriage. The young couple have never actually met. Indeed, they are still unaware of one other’s existence. But it is so obviously a union endorsed by the heavens. Young Florence King has already been heralded in this column. At least since the infancy — did she have one? — of Diana, Huntress and Goddess, no four-year-old girl has ever shown so much interest in field sports. In Ireland, Florence is a bisexual name. One feels that our Florry must be a kinswoman of the immortal Flurry Knox. The bridegroom will be Charlie. At the age of seven, he climbed a

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

What the O.J. Simpson jury didn’t know (and schools should teach)

During the O.J. Simpson trial, the prosecution made much of the fact that Simpson had a record of violence towards his wife. In response, Simpson’s legal team argued that, of all women subjected to spousal abuse, only one in 2,500 was subsequently killed by the abusive husband. It was hence implied that, since the ratio of abusers to killers was so high, any evidence about the accused’s prior violent behaviour was insignificant. This sounds plausible. However, there is another way to consider the statistics. According to the German academic Gerd Gigerenzer, we are not trying to predict whether a husband will murder his wife: Simpson’s wife inarguably had been murdered,

Toby Young Toby Young

What’s happened to Harriet Harman?

Watching Harriet Harman being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg on Newsnight earlier this week was a strange experience. I felt as if I’d entered a political twilight zone where nothing was quite as it seemed. Was the deputy leader of the Labour party really saying these things? I knew she was, but it seemed so miscalculated — so unwise — it was as if Harman’s body had been taken over by someone else. A mischievous political demon, perhaps. Or Lynton Crosby. The entire interview was like a nine-minute party political broadcast for the Conservative party. By my count, Kuenssberg gave Harman five chances to admit that it had been a mistake

Alexander Chancellor

I was forced on to the internet in the 1980s. I still don’t belong there

With regard to modern technology, I find that people of around my age — by which I mean people in their seventies or over — are divided into two camps. There are those who have embraced the digital revolution with embarrassing enthusiasm, knowing much more about it than it is decent to know; and then there are those who, almost as embarrassingly, take pride in knowing nothing about it whatsoever. The former seem determined to show that they are not past it, that they are in tune with the modern world, and, like teenagers, are never parted from their computers, emailing and tweeting as the day is long. The latter

Melissa Kite

My friend Denise doesn’t know where London ends – just when it ends

The look on her face said it all. I can always tell my friend Denise is upset about something when she is sporting an especially wide grin. Denise is from Jamaica and is a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She takes most catastrophes by being alarmingly cheerful about them because they just go to prove that the end is nigh. Whenever I am with her and something goes wrong, she invariably laughs and exclaims: ‘No good, Mey-lissah!’ She then treats me to a lecture about how wicked the world is and how the day of judgment is coming any day now. I’m inclined to agree with her most of the time. And

Taki

The week that tripled the size of my liver

 Gstaad Walking into a dinner party for 50 chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbour, but then added, ‘No, you’re not my neighbour what’s your name?’ No cunning linguist I, nor used to being barked at by nouveaux-riches whippersnappers, I turned my back on him and told him to ‘look it up in the Almanach de Gotha, asshole!’ He wasn’t best pleased, especially as I also called him a dickhead. Now please don’t think for a moment that I approve of my bad manners. But nor do I accept some haemorrhoid

Paul Binding

From frankness to obsession – the novels of Francis King

Gide wrote to Simenon: ‘You are living on a false reputation — just like Baudelaire and Chopin. … You are much more important than is commonly supposed.’ Something of the kind could, I feel, be said about Francis King (1923–2011), who was prolific, like Simenon (his last book, Cold Snap published in 2009 was his 50th), an active, sociable member of the British literary community, conservative but beguilingly tolerant, and an internationally respected professional. But now that Macmillan Bello have reissued 24 titles from his large output, of commendably equal artistic quality, we are better placed to appreciate just how unflinchingly penetrative was the gaze he turned on individuals and

Colin Maccabe

Want Hollywood’s conventional wisdom? Then read Blockbusters

You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend more on advertising than small ones. Maria Sharapova is attractive. Given that the book is written in the dullest of academic prose, there may even have been a paragraph I missed about how there is a Tuesday in next week. I’ve often wondered what they taught in business schools and if this book, which has Harvard Business School plastered all over it, is a guide then the main subject is the stunningly obvious. On 20 June 1975 Universal released Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws with a spend on television advertising and