Society

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Why Time’s Person of the Year should be Pope … Benedict

It seems that everyone agrees Pope Francis should be Time’s ‘Person of the Year 2013’. Better him than Miley Cyrus, at any rate, or Bashar al-Assad, and Francis deserves it, too. This year he has — forgive the media-speak — changed the narrative about Christianity in the liberal world. He’s spreading the Good News, not just reacting to the bad. But Catholics have mixed feelings about all this acclaim for their new Pope. Peggy Noonan put her finger on the key point in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, when she suggested that Time would choose Francis because he is different ‘in ways Time’s editors and reporters find congenial’. It was

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Times are changing at the Taxpayers’ Alliance

Those tortured souls who study the Kremlinology of Westminster think-tanks had some rare excitement last night. Out went Matthew Sinclair as the Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), the tax cutting campaigners, and up stepped Jonathan Isaby, once of the Telegraph and ConservativeHome, to replace him. Isaby was political director at the TPA. John O’Connell, who is fresh from the TPA’s successful lobbying campaign against fuel duty and beer taxes, becomes overall director. Matthew Elliott, the group’s founder, announced the news this morning. ‘The next election is shaping up to be one of the closest in living memory, and I’m pleased that the TPA will be in good hands over

Sebastian Payne

Universal Credit is turning into an IT project disaster

Universal Credit has replaced Labour’s NHS supercomputer as the ABC of how not to manage an IT project. Just six months after the hip Government Data Service outpost was brought in to take over enhance the project, they’ve been pushed aside. According to the Cabinet Office,’a team within DWP will now take the digital solution forward’— again. According to some sources, the tensions between the GDS and the Whitehall mandarins arose when Francis Maude sided with the GDS by wanting to bin all the existing work and start from scratch. Writing off three years of work is not to be taken lightly. When faced with such a decision, IT project managers

Gabriel Heller

The psychosis of the PISA report and best practices

The enemies of school reform have something of a champion in Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg. In a recent comment piece for the Guardian, he discusses his self-invented bogeyman, the ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ with the evil-sounding acronym ‘GERM’. GERM has failed, he says. In his story, choice, competition, and accountability have spread like a virus around the world, infecting education system after education system. But, according to Sahlberg, there’s no evidence the policies work! Only that they increase school segregation, which in turn may have a negative effect on equality in outcomes. He tries to quote the latest 2012 PISA survey to prove his point. Except there’s a problem: the OECD

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

David Cameron interview: tax, ‘green crap’ and #TeamNigella

A sneak preview from The Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, out this Thursday… It’s 9.30 a.m. on a Friday and David Cameron is about to head for his Oxfordshire constituency and work from home. This is precisely the habit that his Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, is trying to beat out of the civil service, but the Prime Minister has a reasonable claim to some downtime. In the past five days he has met 150 businessmen and toured Chinese cities. This morning, he has paid a visit to Tech City, London’s answer to Silicon Valley, and travelled to South Africa House to pass on his condolences following Nelson Mandela’s death. His

Rian Malan

What did you do in the struggle, daddy? The real story of Nelson Mandela and the communists

Reading the obituaries last Friday, one was left with impression that Nelson Mandela’s only flaws were fastidiousness and a tendency to flirt with every pretty girl he met. Otherwise, he was exemplary in every respect, and of course a human right activist in the exactly the sense that Western liberals find winsome and cuddly. ‘Flawless,’ said Archbishop Tutu. ‘One of the true giants,’ said Blair.  Even the Tory Cameron could barely contain himself, describing Mandela as ‘the embodiment of grace.’  You had to have sharp ears to hear the discordant note struck by Johannesburg’s Business Day, which a ran a front-page story headlined, ‘South African Communist Party admits Mandela was

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Pathfindering and lobster pots: IDS defends Universal credit

If you’d judged the success of universal credit purely on Iain Duncan Smith’s tone at the Work and Pensions select committee this afternoon, you might conclude that things weren’t going very well at all. IDS was in a fabulously grumpy mood this morning on the Today programme, muttering about the presenters trying to find fault, and he didn’t seem to have cheered up by the time he arrived in the Wilson Room for his select committee grilling, accusing Labour MP Debbie Abrahams of ‘moaning’ and Glenda Jackson of ‘conflating so many issues here, it’s almost becoming risible’. So what did we learn? IDS insisted that ‘in essence it will be

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A crucifixion in the City of Churches

Here we go again. Time for another round of that perennial game so wearily familiar to England cricket supporters: Hunt the Positives. It is a mean game because, most of the time, there aren’t any. Certainly not today. England were abject in Adelaide. Scarcely any better than they had been in Brisbane. If, borrowing from Evelyn Waugh, we classify sides as Leading team, First-Rate team, Good Team and Team we must acknowledge that England, at present, rank as Team. And as Mr Waugh would have put it, Frankly, Team is pretty bad. Less a team, in fact, and more a rabble. With the exception of Joe Root’s second-innings knock England can take nothing but

Steerpike Steerpike

Regal austerity

These are troubled times for Princess Michael of Kent. Austerity has hit Kensington Palace. ‘We’ve cut back dramatically,’ she tells the Times. ‘I mean we never go out to dinner unless we go to somebody’s house. We never go to restaurants. That’s too extravagant.’ It sounds just ghastly. And, I regret to say, that the princess travels in less style than she used to: ‘I love Easyjet. It’s the only direct route to Biarritz. We always fly tourist-class anyway in Europe.’ Although it may sound like the Baroness Marie Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida is enduring Dickensian privations, she does say: ‘for long-haul, we go club.’ Phew! I was about to call for a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Number 10 defends IDS and universal credit

It’s a bit pointless asking whether the Prime Minister has confidence in Iain Duncan Smith, so this morning his spokesman was asked a slightly different question: why does the Prime Minister have confidence in Iain Duncan Smith? The spokesman replied: ‘Because the Secretary of State is leading this very important programme of welfare reform, which is so important to the economy and is the right thing to do on the grounds of fairness as well.’ He argued that the delay to the rollout of the credit was ‘absolutely the right thing’ because ‘the Universal Credit rollout was designed to be a gradual process that enables the project to take on

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The spite and vindictiveness of the British state

Good luck to Trenton Oldfield, his wife Deepa Naik and their newborn baby today: it’s Oldfield’s day of judgement. He will find out if he is to be kicked out of the country, as Theresa May apparently wants. The tribunal hearing is at 1400. Oldfield, if you remember, disrupted the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a couple of years back and served a bizarrely lengthy prison sentence as a consequence. I did not – and still don’t – agree with his protest. But it hurt nobody, endangered nobody apart from himself and the boat race was concluded. It seems to me to have been a rather grandly eccentric protest in a great

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Iain Duncan Smith: Universal credit plan is different

Iain Duncan Smith is up before the Work and Pensions Committee this afternoon to talk about his department’s annual report. Doubtless the latest bad news on universal credit will crop up, which is a line in the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook which says there will only be a handful of claimants on universal credit by 2014/15, rather than 1.7million, and just 400,000 claiming the benefit in 2015/16 rather than 4.5million. Duncan Smith had a trial run of this afternoon’s grilling on the Today programme, where he seemed particularly grumpy, muttering about the presenters trying to find fault while insisting that the programme was still on budget. He argued that

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Larkin’s take on Hull as City of Culture

Spectator literary competition No. 2829 Peter Porter called Hull ‘the most poetic city in England’ but would Philip Larkin have agreed? What would he have made of his adopted home city being named 2017’s City of Culture? Answers, please, in verse of up to 16 lines, to be emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 January. The recent invitation to confound logic and expectation, and submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme was taken up with gusto, producing a large and lively entry. Honourable mentions to Alanna Blake, Sylvia Fairley, Martin Elster and G.M. Davis, who were unlucky losers. The winners below pocket £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

‘Not misleading’ = ‘we’re right!’

Ed Balls didn’t have a good day yesterday with his poor Autumn Statement performance, but he’s had a slightly better day today, with an analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that confirms families will be ‘substantially’ worse off in 2015/16 than they were in 2009/10. Balls wants to keep talking about the cost of living: now he’s got the IFS’ analysis on his side too. Except the IFS didn’t quite back him to the hilt. The analysis of the parties’ approaches to the living standards question concluded that while the measure Balls used to calculate that working people are £1,600 a year worse off under the Coalition was ‘incomplete’, it is

Matthew Sinclair

How corporation tax cuts are helping wages

Yesterday’s autumn statement included the results of the Treasury’s study of the dynamic impacts of the cuts to Corporation Tax, which George Osborne is down from 28 per cent to 20 per cent. This study used the new HMRC Computable General Equilibrium model – as Fraser reported on Wednesday – and the results are impressive. The cuts will increase investment by 2.5-4.5% (£3.6-£6.2 billion in today’s prices). They will increase GDP by 0.6-0.8% (equivalent to £9.6-£12.2 billion). Given the share that we can expect to go to labour, that equates to an increase in wages of £405-£515 a household. As a result of higher profits, wages and consumption, we can

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Nelson Mandela gave us the greatest gift of all: Hope

Sometimes when a significant public figure dies, even, perhaps especially, when that death comes as no surprise and may, indeed, be considered some form of release there is a natural tendency to wonder if the blanket media coverage that invariably follows is altogether appropriate or even seemly. Is it not all too much? A man is merely a man; a woman merely a woman. Sometimes too, it is natural to react to the endless parade of tributes and wonder how genuine they really are. Is there not something vainglorious about them? Is there not something a little ridiculous about all these attempts to cling to the coat-tails of greatness? Perhaps

Thursday

Taki

Taki: the wisdom of 12-year-olds

 New York I’m in an extremely happy state as I write this because a young Englishman flew over the ocean just to have lunch with me and ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage. This is how things used to be done, but alas no longer. I will not reveal his name until it happens — I am very superstitious — but suffice it to say he went to Eton and Oxford, comes from a fine and very old English family and has a beautiful sister, who unfortunately is happily married. (But not to me.) So, in this pleasant state of mind, I’m only going to write about nice things.

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: it’s 3 a.m. in London’s bohemian quarter and not a reasonably priced drink in sight

It’s a disgrace! I went up to London from Devon, a hick up from the sticks, to Annabel’s in Berkeley Square to a ‘party to start the Christmas party season’, it said on the invitation. ‘Eight till late.’ ‘Champagne, cocktails and old school fun.’ I’d never been to Annabel’s. I’d never dreamed of going to Annabel’s. I was always fairly certain that if I did go to Annabel’s I wouldn’t be allowed in. They’d just laugh. I took a cab from Paddington to Mayfair. It curvetted smoothly to a halt two pavement-slab widths from the discreet entrance. As I searched my pockets for cash, a volunteer from among the paparazzi

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite’s inventory of life (the ex-boyfriends’ possessions they left behind)

Emmylou Harris and the McGarrigle sisters wrote a song called ‘All I left Behind’. My version is called ‘All They Left Behind’ and is a sort of inventory of my life, according to the items left in my flat when relationships have ended. Tea cups from Tim, a coffee bean grinder from Jim, T-shirts from Francesco, and a goose-down pillow from Ed. It doesn’t scan very well, but I’m sure Emmylou could make something of it. Some might call it sad that my romantic history comes down to the reverse of a wedding list. But actually, it’s not that sad. The bean grinder is terrific, although, to be strictly accurate,

Alexander Chancellor

Remembering the journalist John Thompson, who turned down the editorship of The Spectator

John Thompson, who died last week at the age of 93, could have been editor of The Spectator if he had wanted. He was offered the job in 1970 by its then proprietor, Harry Creighton, but with typically good judgment he declined. Creighton, a jovial, rumbustious manufacturer of machine tools, fired two editors, Nigel Lawson and George Gale, before making himself editor in their place. One of his reasons for doing this was almost certainly to save money; for the magazine was in steep decline and its losses were growing. An editor’s salary was a useful saving. So if John Thompson had taken the job, he would doubtless have eventually