It would be all too easy this week to argue that the case for Scottish independence is falling apart. Alex Salmond is an able politician and a peerless mischief-maker, but he tends to fall mute when confronted with the myriad contradictions of his own policies. It happened this week, when George Osborne said that it
The runners who will gather for the London Marathon this weekend will converge on the greatest target in the world. Winston Churchill was the first to see the problem. ‘With our enormous metropolis here… [we are] a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey,’ he told
Soon after Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative party she came for lunch at The Spectator and our then proprietor, Henry Keswick, wanted to offer his congratulations — and his advice. It was time to crush the trades unions, he told her. ‘Mr Keswick,’ she replied. ‘You have spent the past 14 years
For the past few weeks Ed Miliband has repeated the words ‘bedroom tax’ ad nauseum. The average voter may think that such a thing exists. His obsession makes little sense without historic context. The last time a Labour opposition succeeded in attaching the word ‘tax’ to something which a Conservative government preferred to call something
‘Distracted from distraction by distraction’ was one way in which T.S. Eliot described the inhabitants of ‘this twittering world’ in his Four Quartets. Eliot’s words seem more accurate today than even he might have expected. With the apparently ceaseless intrusion into our lives of permanent media feeds, gossip reported as news and news reported as
Dangerous, unfair, verging on kleptomania: the bailout deal proposed by the EU at the weekend and rejected by Cyprus MPs on Tuesday is everything it has been described as over the past few days, and worse. Now it has been established that the EU views bank depositors as a potential piggy bank to be raided
From Robert Runcie’s attack on Tory Pharisees to Rowan Williams’s missives on the Iraq war, the ecclesiastical opposition housed in Lambeth Palace has in recent times been a frequent source of unease to the government of the day. If any ministers were hoping Justin Welby would be a quieter presence than his predecessor, they were
Twenty-five years ago, when he had left the Communist party and taken over as chief executive at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Sir David Nicholson made a point of promising his staff a ‘job for life’. He has certainly stuck to his ideology. This week he admitted his part in the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal, in which
The foreign news pages read increasingly like some terrible satire on western military decline. Two years ago French and British forces, with the help of the US Navy, managed to help Libyan rebels topple Colonel Gaddafi. This year, the French needed British support to go to war against some tribesmen in Mali. It was a
What have obesity, misbehaving banks, unaffordable London housing and farting cows all got in common? They are all problems which, according to various campaigners over the past week or so, can be cured through the imposition of new taxes. Those calling for fiscal therapy included the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which suggested a 20
In September 1955 The Spectator’s political commentator, Henry Fairlie, coined a term to describe the way in which Britain works which has been used ever since. The ‘Establishment’, he said, was the real mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. The elites of the business, political and media worlds wielded power via a ‘matrix
If the secret of success is to follow failure, then Justin Welby has had the perfect start as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was appointed at a time when the Church of England’s efforts to reach a conclusion on women bishops have collapsed and when its pews were emptying at the fastest rate in recorded history.
When the letters ‘NHS’ appeared to the world above the dancing nurses at the Olympic opening ceremony, many in Britain will have imagined two darker words hovering alongside: ‘Mid Staffs’. Few of those affected will have been able to forget what now seems to be one of the greatest scandals in the history of British
It was almost worth the wait. The substance of David Cameron’s speech on Europe was disclosed in this magazine a fortnight ago, but his delivery was excellent. He offered a clear-headed and almost touchingly optimistic vision of the type of union that the British public would find acceptable: one based on free trade, not bureaucratic
Kingsley Amis was never a fan of the Arts Council. Writing in this magazine almost 30 years ago, he described it as a ‘detestable and destructive body’ whose grants and bursaries ‘in effect pay producers, painters, writers and such in advance’. This, he wrote, ‘is a straight invitation to them to sod the public, whose
If the Belfast riots were happening in any other city in the United Kingdom, there would be uproar. For almost five weeks there have been violent clashes each night. Live rounds have been fired on city streets, politicians’ houses set ablaze, petrol bombs thrown at police and over 60 officers hurt. David Cameron seems to
There is something about the dying embers of a year which causes the world to concentrate on entirely the wrong story. In the last days of 1999 many were fixated on the so-called ‘millennium bug’ rather than on the real computing crisis: the absurd over-valuations of internet companies which was soon to lead to stock
To attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve in parts of Nigeria is to take your life in your hands. For the last three years, Islamist militants have been attacking churches but last week, when gunmen moved on a church in Potiskum, they found the military waiting. On their retreat, they came across a smaller unprotected
The below is from The Spectator, the best-written and most entertaining magazine in the English language. To read the whole magazine on iPad/iPhone, click here for a free trial. Or click here for a Kindle free trial. To listen to politicians is to be given the impression of a dangerous, cruel world where things are
It took Tony Blair about five years to work out what he wanted to do with his government and George Osborne appears to be on a similar, depressingly slow learning curve. It’s not that he lacks ideas. There were plenty of good ones in his mini-budget this week, including tax cuts for the low paid,