Police

If you want to picture Rupert Murdoch imagine an old man on a tight rope. On the one hand, his newspapers must pursue his interests – say that everyone but the rich must pay the price of austerity, for instance. But as he wobbles over the void, Murdoch must also balance his rather brutal class interest with populist attacks on ‘the elite’ to assure readers of modest means that he is, despite everything, ‘on their side’. Normally the Murdoch press can stay upright by confining itself to savaging the liberal elite, which to be fair, never fails to provide him with a rich choice of targets. But every now again

This column nearly didn’t appear. Another 24 hours and I would have trumped the late Jeffrey Bernard with the single sentence ‘Rory Sutherland is in prison.’ Having just spent a day in jail or police cells in Qatar for using an electronic cigarette on a plane, I thought I would just write one piece of technological advice for any Spectator readers who might find themselves in a similar situation. Sit down today, take out your mobile phone, and memorise four or five important phone numbers. Better still, delete those few important numbers from your phone so you are forced to dial them from memory. Because when you’ve been arrested and

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that English local authorities would be allowed to receive all the business rates collected from shale gas schemes, not just the 50 per cent they’d expect. Total, a French company, said it would invest about £30 million in drilling two exploratory wells in Lincolnshire. To head off higher borrowing rates, the government announced that ‘in the event of Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, the continuing UK government would in all circumstances honour the contractual terms of the debt issued by the UK government’. The annual rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, met the target set by the government for

The police have been complaining a lot lately about frivolous calls to the emergency services. All over the country people in their thousands are calling 999 for the weirdest or silliest reasons. In Gloucestershire one man called to say that his wife was a werewolf, and another that he was being poisoned by a satellite controlled by witches. In Scotland someone rang to complain about the service he had received at a hamburger joint; another to ask where he could buy some milk. The police have been publicising such incidents in the hope that we will stop wasting their time in this way, but it seems most unlikely that we

Are the police wasting too much time on Twitter instead of catching criminals? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick Cohen looks at what Britain’s fall in crime has done to policing methods. Is the fall responsible for the police’s heightened in what people say on social media? What does this mean for our civil liberties and freedom of speech? Consultant NHS surgeon J. Meirion Thomas also joins to explain how The Spectator helped blow the whistle on health tourism abuses. Will the government’s plans to tackle systematic abuses by migrants work? How much effect will the levy on students and temporary visitors have? Are the figures quoted by the Department of

Freedom of speech is alive and well in Scotland, then. Pastor Josh Williamson took the Christian gospel to the streets of Perth last week, before he was arrested by the old bill for a ‘breach of the peace’. Asked why he was being arrested, Plod No 1 said because you’re too loud, pointing to the electrical device the clergyman was carrying. That’s an MP3 recorder, he replied, it’s not an amplifier. Then Plod No 2 claimed it was the content of his sermon, although he could not put his finger on what it was exactly. Hauled down the nick, refused the right of a lawyer, Williamson was eventually released with

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it

Another of this blog’s occasional hobby-horses is the increasing use by police of Tasers (see here, here and here, for instance). It is remarkable how often these “non-lethal” weapons turn out to be pretty damn lethal. Last week Jordan Begley, a 23 year old with a heart condition, died after being tasered by Greater Manchester Police. As a senior police officer described the incident in which police were called to a domestic dispute between neighbours, “it is unclear what happened but the man suffered a medical episode”. Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police added delicately: “Our sympathies are with the family and friends of the man who are going

Caroline and I were watching The Fall in our front room when the intruder entered our house. Not great timing on his part, considering The Fall is a BBC drama series about a serial killer who breaks into people’s homes, then tortures and murders them. Thankfully, we never actually set eyes on him. We only discovered we’d been burgled when we returned to the kitchen to load the dishwasher and found various items missing. But still. Caroline was probably more upset than she would have been if we’d been watching Eat, Pray, Love — which we wouldn’t have been, obviously, because it’s complete drek. I was up most of the