Society

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Meanwhile, in Scotland…

Sometimes Scottish politics is far too exciting for its own good… An SNP pledge to give children free access to swimming pools is not being delivered, according to Labour. Scottish Labour sport spokesman Frank McAveety said only two councils provided school children with free, year-round access to pools… Mr McAveety said: “The SNP have been in power for 18 months now and we have seen absolutely no progress on their pledge to ensure that youngsters have free access to council swimming pools.” No wonder the Scottish parliament’s dealings are, quite reasonably, characterised as “Hamster Wars”.

Peter Hoskin

Is Cameron a born-again waste cutter?

I’ve only just round to watching Cameron’s interview with Marr earlier (on iPlayer here).  ‘Tis a shame it was interrupted by so many technical problems, as it was shaping up to be one of the Tory leader’s most engaging performances of recent months.  Still, plenty of noteworthy points in there; perhaps none more so than this admission from Cameron: “I see how unaffordable Labour’s spending plans are – perhaps we could have seen that earlier.” It is one of the great, missed political opportunities of the past decade that the Government didn’t come to fear a “Labour waste” attack from the Tories as much as the Tories came to fear

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Obama’s stimulus looks nothing like Brown’s – whatever our PM might say

Gordon Brown’s trick is setting the parameters of debate, and fooling the opposition into accepting them. And in the next few weeks, he has a mission: to define the Obama bailout for the British media. He must teach them to see it as a Brown-style stimulus – thus allowing him to be quoted, without criticism, saying “this is almost exactly line by line what we are doing”. He wants to present himself as the master, and Obama as the young pupil. It’s not true, of course. Obama is focusing far more on tax cuts than many sceptics (including myself) would have predicted – the scale of them is at least

Peter Hoskin

Milburn’s return highlights the “big beast” conundrum

Alan Milburn’s return to Labour’s “senior team” is another arresting punctuation mark in Gordon Brown’s premiership.  Sure, he may not have been brought back into the Cabinet as Peter Mandelson was.  But his role as the head of a new commission looking into social mobility – which James commented upon earlier – shows that the Dear Leader is smiling down on yet another of his former enemies.  The party politics are clear: bridges are being built, and New Labour is reuniting for the sake of a (still unlikely) Fourth Term. It also highlights the “big beast” conundrum that more or less all of the parties are facing at the moment. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

School reforms will bring real social mobility

Labour is right to want to do more to bring working class children into the professions. It is undeniable that middle-class children derive a considerable advantage from the social capital of their parents and the fact that their families can support them in low-paying or unpaid internships. Schemes that can offer those from deprived backgrounds access to these social networks should be welcomed; Chris Grayling is quite wrong to call it ‘class war’ and is playing into the worst perceptions of the party by doing so. But far more important to making Britain a more meritocratic country is school reform; making a good education available to everyone will do far

Peter Hoskin

The recession-proof civil servants

A recession is a time for belt-tightening.  But, going off the the Sunday Times’s cover story this morning, some leading civil servants didn’t get that memo.  They’re engaging in exactly the same sort of snout-in-trough-ery that we normally see coming from Parliament – and all courtesy of taxpayers’ money.  Here’s the case of David Nicholson: “David Nicholson, the head of the NHS, claims an annual £37,600 allowance for working away from home – yet he was already working and living in London when he took the job three years ago, so did not have to relocate. Nicholson was head of NHS London, and had a flat in the centre of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama’s Iran calculation

The New York Times reports this morning that President Bush rejected an Israeli request for bunker-busting bombs, refuelling capacity and over-flight rights that would have allowed it to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is unclear whether the Israelis were actually planning a strike or whether they merely wanted to emphasise to the Americans that they would act if Washington would not. Tehran’s rate of progress towards nuclear status means that Iran will probably be a nuclear power, or at least nuclear-ready, by the end of Obama’s first term unless action—whether military, diplomatic, or economic—is taken to stop it. The New York Times says that US covert-ops against Iran’s nuclear programme

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 10 January 2009

A coherent story Sir: Douglas Murray says (‘Studying Islam made me an atheist’, 3 January) that what killed the Bible was not Darwin but ‘German biblical criticism… the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts’. It’s a pity he didn’t pursue his investigation further and discover that those dated theories proposed by the ‘higher critics’ now have no scholarly standing. Over the second half of the 20th century they were steadily demolished. Historical and textual research has changed the picture completely. The consensus of scholarly opinion (among both historians and textual experts) is that the New Testament is pretty much exactly what the older view said

Alex James

Slow Life | 10 January 2009

There were four brothers. They’d just been left their uncle’s farm in his will, a few dozen acres of Leicestershire. It was a fairly standard small-farm package. They’d all grown up with the place, working there through the summers: a red-brick farmhouse, pretty but practically derelict with a mixed bag of cute, lopsided outbuildings — some of these vast in terms of garden sheds or domestic garages but still far too small to be practical for the austere, superhuman scale of modern agriculture. There were a good couple of acres of old-fashioned orchard: apples, pears; a bit of nice pasture; a couple of chunks of woodland with busy streams running

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 10 January 2009

It was minus four degrees, dampness hung in the air, and visibility was down to about 120 yards. As I drove up on to Dartmoor with fog lamps on, wipers going, and heater and blower at full blast, I didn’t anticipate that this year’s New Year’s Day ‘Get Fit For 2009’ guided walk on Dartmoor would be as well attended as it was. But about 30 people were milling about in the grid-referenced car park at two minutes to noon as I pulled in. It looked like an outdoor clothing and equipment fashion show. Labels of all the major outdoor clothing fashion houses were on conspicuous display, stitched on the

Taki

High Life | 10 January 2009

Gstaad When Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet committed suicide just before Christmas, I hoped against hope that others would do the same. No such luck. Villehuchet was an aristocrat, a gentleman and an honest man. He felt responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion and he took the honourable way out. I did not know Villehuchet but people who did have spoken very highly of him. The rest of Madoff’s gang I do know, and they are as likely to do the honourable thing as I am to emigrate to Israel. Most of these friends of Madoff own chalets in Gstaad, or visit regularly. I have warned personnel at the

Alan Judd

Motoring | 10 January 2009

Eos is a word I struggled with, presuming it to derive from the Greek prefix, eo-, meaning dawn or beginning, particularly in relation to plant or animal life. Then I discovered Eos was goddess of the dawn, beloved by (rather too) many Titans, though it could also refer to a bankrupt airline or the European Orthodontic Society. None of these is an obvious name for a car, but it works. Its Greek origins suggest sunlight, appropriately for a convertible, there’s the ever-helpful misreading for Eros, it’s easy, memorable and effortlessly crosses linguistic boundaries. In fact, the VW Eos is technically not a convertible, as the company points out. They call

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 10 January 2009

When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by word of mouth or email.) One viral which appealed to me was an entry in February 2008 in a Bulgarian television pop music talent competition. Valentina Hasan sang, in the manner of Mariah Carey, a song that she called Ken Lee. The judges suggested it might be Without You. Miss Hasan, knowing little English, had

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 10 January 2009

The recession is not a ‘much-needed reality check’ — it’s a source of great suffering Puritans love disasters. No sooner has some calamity befallen mankind than some hair-shirted scold emerges from his priest hole and starts wagging his finger. The message is always the same: ‘You are being punished for your immoral lifestyle.’ The latest grist to the puritan mill is, of course, the credit crunch. George Monbiot, the Guardian’s very own Oliver Cromwell, has been looking forward to this moment for years. ‘I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises,’ he wrote in 2007. Now that it is upon us, he and his colleagues can

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 10 January 2009

Q. A friend from university invited my boyfriend and me to stay with her parents in a very grand house over New Year. We were made very welcome, but my boyfriend felt out of his depth in at least one instance and wonders what you would have advised. On New Year’s Day there was a large number of people for lunch. The butler went round the table with a tray of roast beef, offering it to each person in turn to help themselves. The piece my boyfriend tried to take was attached by gristle to a sort of concertina of other slices and when he tried to cut through the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 January 2009

Although television coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza is extensive, it is uninformative. The BBC, in particular its reporter Jeremy Bowen, seems to be in thrall to the images it can project. But, by its Charter, the BBC has a duty to educate, and what is missing in so much of the coverage is context. What is Hamas? What does it believe? Why is it not reported that the Arab press carries numerous attacks on Hamas for exposing the Palestinian people to suffering? Why is Hamas, despite being a Sunni organisation, close to Shi’ite Iran? What are the politics of the situation on both sides? Why, in short, is

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 10 January 2009

Monday Mr Clarke on the phone again, v crabby. He says it’s taking a lot of hours out of his day having to answer questions about the economy and can’t we stop people calling him so he can get on with counting sparrows. ‘At this rate the only way I’ll get my RSPB garden-watch sheet filled in is by taking that blasted job Dave’s banging on about. At least then I won’t be allowed to say anything.’ Told Jed and he said this meant the strategy was working. Am under strict orders to tell everyone who rings for Gids that they’re to phone Mr Clarke. ‘We’ll smoke him back into

James Forsyth James Forsyth

America is changing and so must the Republicans

There is a deep divide in Republican circles about how to think about the 2008 election result. Some argue that the results show just how close to becoming a rump party of the Deep South the GOP is. Others say that considering the economic crisis, the drag on the ticket that was the Bush presidency, the failings of the McCain campaign and Obama’s skills as a candidate to lose 53-46 in the popular vote was not that bad a result. I think the former group have the more convincing argument because of the ways in which America is changing. Just consider this from Ron Brownstein: “To grasp how powerfully demographic

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Derek Draper’s web offering will be no match for Conservative Home

Iain Dale points us towards Gaby Hinsliff’s scoop in The Observer that Derek Draper’s Labour List website will launch next week. Comparisons are being made to Conservative Home but looking at the contributors list which includes Peter Mandelson, Charlie Whelan, Philip Gould and Douglas Alexander it seems more like the Conservative Party’s Blue Blog. It is hard to imagine that these people are going to want to say things that could cause the Labour Party political problems. (To be fair, part of the problem is that the media and the blogs will jump on anything on the site that can be spun as an attack on Gordon Brown).  The genius

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What worries voters most

The unemployment numbers are expected to be grim by the end of this year. But Bagehot notes in this column this week that the Brown circle believes that rising unemployment might not be as big a political deal as it has been in past recessions: “But, in private, some of his associates argue that redundancies may prove less politically toxic for the government than was the case in past recessions—because they will not be concentrated, as they previously were, among low-skilled industrial workers ill-equipped to find alternative employment. These days, the argument runs, few workers expect to spend their careers in a single job, and the labour market is flexible