Next week’s Budget marks George Osborne’s last chance to make a game-changing reform before the next election. The Chancellor will have his boasts ready: he’ll say that Britain has the fastest growth of any developed country. What he won’t say is that no developed country has needed to pile so much debt onto its citizens
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum, Matthew Parris and John O’Sullivan discuss Ukraine”] Listen [/audioplayer]For the first time in many years, the eyes of the world are on Crimea. As Russian troops violated Ukrainian sovereignty, the question swiftly became, ‘What can we do?’ If the answer is ‘not very much’, then we ought at least to consider
The last time Viktor Yanukovych was removed from power in Ukraine, following a corrupt election nearly a decade ago, it was called the Orange Revolution. This time around it should be called the Golden Revolution. Never has an episode of political upheaval been followed quite so sharply by offers of riches from abroad. The past
The Duke of Cambridge deserves credit for bringing his influence to bear on the growing tragedy of the elephant, whose population is being decimated by poaching. But his advisers should have been quicker to dissuade him from one aspect of his campaign: the threat to dispose of his grandmother’s ivory collection. That Africa’s elephant population
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Christopher Booker discusses the failures behind the floods” startat=61] Listen [/audioplayer]There is nothing inevitable about the by now familiar sight of residents being towed away from flooded homes, of shops and businesses submerged, and all the misery and economic turmoil which follows. A short hop across the North Sea is a country which
[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Fraser Nelson discusses the Environment Agency:’ startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]When Prince Charles arrived in Somerset to meet some of those caught up in the disaster which in five weeks has drowned 50 square miles of that county in floodwater, a reporter asked him whether he blamed the Environment Agency. Judiciously, he replied, ‘You may
[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Douglas Carswell MP explain why he now agrees with this article’ startat=518] Listen [/audioplayer]Things could scarcely be going better for the Conservatives. Every week seems to bring more news of the recovery. High street tills are ringing, employment is at an all-time high and Britain’s economy is growing faster than that of any
Four bishops and a retired civil servant shut away in a palace, talking about human sexuality — it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But the resulting Pilling Report is, in spite of 200 pages’ worth of double entendres, neither funny nor enlightening. It has been clear ever since the Lambeth conference in 1998,
This week, Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street opened and the Office of National Statistics reported that house prices are up by 12 per cent in London and by 5 per cent across the UK as a whole. While the former represents the cocaine-fuelled greed of bankers, which many like to think caused
George Osborne is refreshingly uninterested in his public image, believing that he will be judged by the success (or otherwise) of his economic policies. So when the Chancellor pops up to give a speech, he spends little time trying to mask his underlying aim — which is usually to sock it to Ed Balls, his
In one sense David Cameron is lucky that the Conservatives do not enter 2014 with a lead in the polls. If they did, the Prime Minister would be under pressure for stitching up the Fixed Term Parliaments Act with Nick Clegg, thereby denying himself the chance of doing what all strong governments have done over
Pessimism sells. It shifts books and newspapers, sends ratings soaring. It fills lecture halls, wins research grants, makes political careers. We are fed this constant diet of doom, predicting anything from meteorological Armageddon to a tyranny of austerity, and so it is little wonder that we tend to miss the bigger story. A cold, dispassionate look
George Osborne has not been a complete disappointment as Chancellor. He has, it is depressing to note, ended up giving Britain a leisurely ten years to get back in the black while the national debt soars. He has a worrying enthusiasm for finding new ways of hawking underpriced debt to business and homebuyers. But the
Fanciful predictions of all the deaths that will result from climate change, decades into the future, are regularly thrown into public debate. Less attention has been given to a real statistic from the here and now, released by the Office of National Statistics this week, which shows the effects of one of the policies designed
Within the white paper on economic policy in an independent Scotland that was published by Alex Salmond’s government this week there is a liberal economic manifesto trying to get out. The First Minister speaks about using new ‘levers and instruments’ to revive Scotland and that, freed from Westminster control, he might lure businesses by slashing
President Obama’s flagship foreign policy of ‘leading from behind’ has had some surprising consequences. Not least among them is that France now appears to be leading the free world. During the current set of negotiations in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 countries, America, Russia, Britain, China and Germany seem eager to declare a breakthrough.
One remarkable fact of recent years is that even as the veterans of the first world war have died and as those who served in the second world war have headed through their eighties and beyond, the memory of the 20th century’s two most devastating wars has continued to be honoured with thoughtfulness and devotion.
A year ago the electoral strategies of the two main parties seemed set. The Conservatives would stand as the party of prudence, claiming to have saved Britain from a Greek-style meltdown through austerity measures which, though painful at the time, had eventually borne fruit in the shape of a private sector-led recovery. Labour, meanwhile, would stand
In February, an NHS surgeon came to The Spectator’s offices to discuss a piece he felt it was time to write. He wanted to blow the whistle on health tourism. Professor J. Meirion Thomas knew he was taking a tough decision, given the hostile reaction of the doctors’ unions and civil servants to anyone who
Trade missions are almost comically pointless nowadays, as George Osborne’s visit demonstrated this week in Beijing. He is right that there are serious problems in our trade relations with China — an emerging economic superpower that buys more from Switzerland than it does from Britain. In fact, we export depressingly little to any major emerging
