Hs2

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Government signs up Labour’s Andrew Adonis to oversee HS2 delivery

In an impressive cross-party signing, the government has appointed Lord Adonis, the former Labour transport secretary, to oversee delivery of the HS2 railway. Lord Adonis gave birth to the idea of HS2 prior to the 2010 election and has remained a vocal advocate for the project ever since. The transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said in a statement he was ‘extremely pleased’ that Adonis is joining the board of HS2 Ltd as a non-executive director. Adonis himself described HS2 as a project of ‘national significance’: ‘Patrick McLoughlin has been a powerful advocate for the project and the government has risen to the challenge of thinking about the long-term by putting in place a

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Remember when Britain could build stuff?

Heathrow. The whole British story is there. Reading up around that debacle last week, I came across the eye-watering — and I think true — claim that, over the course of the second world war, Britain built 444 airfields. Four hundred and forty four. Although not all in the United Kingdom, probably. Some will have been in far-off lands, where Johnny Foreigner could be bought off in exchange for a pretty goat, or just shouted at, at gunpoint, until he went away. Hundreds, though, will have been here, on British soil — where it has now taken us over half an actual century to not quite build a new runway

Thursday

Ross Clark

Rail investment reflects how ministers like to travel

No matter how desperate the banana republic, the international airport is always a shimmering palace of perfume and croissants. It is only when you get out onto the dirt roads that you realise where you are. The government seems determined to take the same approach to our own transport system: all the money gets sucked into vanity projects while transport used by the rest of us remains creaking.  Yesterday transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin announced a sharp contraction of a programme which last year the government described as ‘the largest modernisation of the railways since Victorian times’. Election safely over, projects to be dropped from the promised £38.5 billion upgrade include

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

George Osborne’s cynical grab for northern votes (and why I’m for it)

When John Prescott used to wax garrulous about a ‘superhighway’ from Hull to Liverpool, everyone assumed it was a wheeze to spray southern taxpayers’ money across the region he saw as his power base. When George Osborne decided to ‘start a conversation’ this week about a super-city along the same route, an English equivalent of Germany’s Ruhr valley connected by yet another decades-away high-speed rail project, everyone assumed it was about recapturing votes in northern conurbations where Tory MPs and councillors are an endangered species. But on past form you’d still expect me — ardent northerner and rail buff that I am — to embrace this back-of-a-Downing-Street-envelope concept, however cynical

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 May 2015

The ‘I’m Voting For Chuka’ posters in my rich neighbours’ front windows pushed me over the edge. There is nothing so likely to galvanise one’s inner Tory than the sight of the biggest, poshest houses in the neighbourhood displaying left-wing conceitedness. ‘Of course they’re voting Labour, they’re the only ones who can afford to,’ said the builder (boy)friend, who had popped round to my house for supper. I know, I know. It’s confusing. But we are always going to be on-off, so everyone is going to just have to deal with it. And he is a beacon of common sense at election time, I can tell you. Just the sort

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

I’m not voting on Thursday — but don’t you dare call me apathetic

With just 48 hours to go before we get to vote in officially the most boring election in history, the great and good are fretting over the apathy of the little people. We’ve seen the emergence of Poets Against Apathy — a group of northern scribes keen to shake the public out of its anti-political stupor — and numerous newspaper articles bemoaning the apathy of the masses. A whole section of the Guardian website is devoted to ‘Voter apathy’, featuring Owen Jones, Polly Toynbee, Charlie Brooker and others shaking their liberal heads over the disengaged. Brooker even refers to them as ‘idiots’ who say ‘Bah to everything. BAH BAH BAH.’ This

Thursday

Nigel Lawson

Diary – 30 April 2015

I have escaped this rather depressing election campaign by retreating to my home in la France profonde — to be precise, in Armagnac, in the heart of Gascony. My only outing, from which I have just returned, was a brief visit to New York, travelling there and back in the giant Airbus 380. The purpose of the trip was to drum up US support for the thinktank I founded in 2009, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and its campaigning arm, the Global Warming Policy Forum, in the company of our outstanding director, Benny Peiser. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the GWPF has a global reach, and its international

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Why Ofsted should be disbanded

Disband Ofsted Sir: Dennis Sewell’s damning indictment of Ofsted (‘Ofsted in the dock’, 13 December) stopped short of the logical conclusion of disbanding it, arguing instead that the chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, should be supported in his efforts to purge inspectors promoting the progressive educational agenda that the coalition inherited. We’ve been here before. Chris Woodhead was chief inspector for six years, and despite his best efforts concluded that his organisation had ‘become a part of the [progressive] establishment, and arguably the most lethal part…’. Wilshaw has been chief inspector for almost three years, and apparently is only just discovering the extent to which his inspectors are still promoting

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Let’s appoint a Ministry of Scandalous Ideas

My children have a phrase called ‘fomo’ — which stands for ‘fear of missing out’. It is a constant, mildly paranoid anxiety, exacerbated by social media, that all your friends are having a much better time than you are. There is a related problem in government, I suspect, called FODM — or ‘fear of Daily Mail’. The effect of FODM is to limit the range of political discussion and opinion to a narrow range of predictable, non–controversial possibilities for fear anything more interesting might allow the media to manufacture a scandal. This is where, unexpectedly, I sympathise with Russell Brand. In fact it was from a Brand podcast that I

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Here’s what I’ve learned in 2014

The countryside is all very well so long as you know you can leave it. Funnily enough, exactly the same can be said for the town. I realise I have spent the entire year trying to decide whether to sell up and move from London to the wilds of Surrey. Or stay put in Balham. I’ve spent more evenings on Zoopla than can possibly be healthy. And now I think about it, I guess the reason I have struggled so hard to make a choice is that town and country are dependent on each other to produce their own special magic. I cannot enjoy the country unless I know I

Thursday

Melissa Kite

How HS2 has blighted my parents’ lives

Waiting to appear before a Commons select committee, my father turned to me. ‘This was not on my bucket list,’ he said. My father should be enjoying his retirement. Instead, he and my mother are still working full time in their seventies because they cannot sell their home due to the blight of HS2. And here they were now, about to present themselves to Parliament to petition the High Speed Rail Bill. Theirs is one of more than 1,900 petitions brought by people whose lives have been so adversely affected by the planned rail link that they will need to be heard in person by MPs before the Bill can

Thursday

The Spectator

Rochester’s special qualities, and the price of Ebola.com

What’s special about Rochester What is special about Rochester and Strood? — Rochester has the second oldest cathedral and school in Britain, after Canterbury. — Medway, the unitary authority area in which the constituency is situated, has one of the highest rates of private home-ownership in Britain, with 92 per cent of homes in private hands. — Rochester has one of the few remaining airports in Britain with only grass runways – though it has filed a planning application to build a paved runway. — Morrisons in Strood was Gordon Brown’s first engagement after announcing the date of the 2010 general election. — Strood was once the largest producer of

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Human shields, the leadership vacuum, and why HS2 must go ahead

Hamas’s human shields Sir: Unlike the rockets fired at Basra air base by Iraqi fighters (Tom Drife, Letters, 9 August), rockets from Gaza aim to kill Israeli civilians. A more accurate analogy would be if English cities were under attack by thousands of rockets from Scotland. Any country under such attack would try to destroy the aggressor’s rocket launch capability. Since Hamas deliberately sites its rockets amongst Gaza’s civilians, it is impossible to do so without civilian casualties. Israel goes to great lengths to avoid these, but with an enemy determined to sacrifice its own people this is not always achievable. Human shields are not ‘less immoral’ than Israel’s defensive

Stephen Bayley

My addiction to the bullet train

In 1963, Dr Richard Beeching, an ICI director with a PhD in physics, a qualification that clearly boondoggled his credulous political patrons, published a government report called ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’. It identified 8,000km of painstakingly created track for closure. At the time, road transport seemed just the thing. Lorries? Bring them on! Commuting by car? What could possibly be the objection? Beeching was a tragic case-study in mandarin myopia. It was not so much that he did not hit the target. He couldn’t even see it. The year after Beeching, Japan inaugurated its Shinkansen, the world’s greatest high-speed railway. The year after the Shinkansen, work began in Bristol

Thursday

The Spectator

Sorry, but trains can’t really replace welfare lines

George Osborne proposed an attractive idea this week: that spending on state benefits should be diverted into new infrastructure in the North. His conceit was that while welfare spending produces no economic return, spending public money on new high-speed railways and the like will inevitably boost the economy. We can’t fault the former assertion: that paying people to be idle is a drain on the public purse. But we take issue with the notion that infrastructure will always serve to boost the economy. The Chancellor made his remarks while in Manchester helping to promote the idea of a new 125mph railway across the Pennines, a little brother for the yet-to-be-started

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Adam Smith is the father of more than one sort of economics

Gandhi would test his resolve by sleeping between two naked virgins, an avenue not really open to me, as my wife is an Anglican vicar: though Anglicanism imposes almost no constraints on your behaviour or beliefs nowadays, it still frowns on sleeping with naked virgins, especially if they are of the opposite sex. So my equivalent of this exercise is to try to go into certain shops for half an hour and emerge without buying anything. Lakeland is an especially tough challenge here, but the real Matterhorn for me is an airport branch of Dixons. Last time I tried this, I found myself having to resist buying one of the

Wednesday

Steerpike

Pinstripes and shorts – Tim Montgomerie vs the Institute of Directors

There is a nice little spat brewing between Tim Montgomerie and the Institute of Directors, after the former Times comment editor and founder of ConservativeHome ‘unloaded both barrels on Britain’s business trade bodies.’ According to Public Affairs News: ‘He argued that the CBI and IoD were losing the air war with consumer pressure groups, partly through presentation (he effectively ordered a Taliban-esk ban on pinstripes on telly) but principally by not explaining how an open free market brings societal benefits’. What Montgomerie actually said was a little more nuanced, rather than the reported ‘Jihad’: ‘Friends of business need to change the way they’re organised. The CBI, FSB, IoD model –

Saturday

Neil Obrien

Could a northern ‘supercity’ rebalance Britain’s economy?

George Osborne is drawing up plans for a northern ‘supercity’, in the hope that it might rival London and rebalance Britain’s economy. Neil O’Brien discussed the idea of a supercity in The Spectator in December 2012, before going off to advise Osborne. My career in politics nearly ended the day it began, when I was almost run over by a gang of Nazis in a Mini-Metro. Not a very butch car to be hit by, I know, and a rather pathetic substitute for a Panzer tank. But it was the early 1990s, and supporters of fascist government in Britain had seen their resources dwindle a bit over the decades. I

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: The trouble with religion, alternatives to HS2, and whisky-drinking dogs

A history of persecution Sir: Colin Brown (Letters, 7 June) ignores some good reasons for keeping religion out of society. Small groups of believers are fine, but not totalitarian dictatorships. The early Christians were treated as heretics until 313 ad, when Constantine made what became the Roman Catholic Church the official religion of the Roman Empire. The church promptly started persecuting all other religious groups. In the Middle Ages the Church let loose the Inquisition and decimated civilised communities such as the Albigensians. As for his statement that ‘all religions have provided society with ethical and moral rules’, how ethical were the laws and morals that subjugated women and slaves

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 May 2014

Home The British economy grew by 0.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2014, disappointing hotheads who’d expected 1 per cent. It was 3.1 per cent bigger than a year earlier, but 0.6 per cent smaller than in 2008. Pfizer, the American pharmaceutical company, said it wanted to take over AstraZeneca, with a £60 billion bid that would make it the biggest ever foreign takeover of a British-based company. The Labour party said it was leaving the Co-op Bank and taking its £1.2 million overdraft elsewhere. UK Financial Investments, which manages the Treasury’s 81 per cent stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland, blocked a plan for 200 per cent bonuses. A film version of Dad’s