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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art critic Jonathan Jones. The term ‘renaissance’ is out of fashion among scholars these days, but in his new book Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance Jonathan argues that it points to something momentous in human history. On the podcast, Jonathan makes the case for what
There’s no avoiding the Britishness of British art. It hits me every time I walk outside and see dappled trees against a silver-grey cloud that looks like it was painted by Thomas Gainsborough, or look in the mirror and feel the same gooseflesh anxiety as I do when I see a portrait by Lucian Freud.
The UK seems to have avoided a triple-dip recession. According to today’s estimate from the Office for National Statistics, the economy grew by 0.3 per cent in the first three months of 2013. But it is important to remember that this is just a first estimate, with a margin of error of ±0.7 points. So
I’ve interviewed one of the heroes of last year’s US elections — forecasting expect Nate Silver — for the books blog, but I thought CoffeeHousers might be interested in what he had to say about UK elections. Silver’s attempt to predict the 2010 election didn’t fare so well (his model significantly underestimated Labour and overestimated
Nate Silver doesn’t suffer fools gladly — especially fools who pass themselves off as experts. In the second chapter of his book, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction, he describes just how bad most political pundits are. And in person, he goes even further. ‘I think some of them are
Today’s job statistics are, as usual, mixed — and even a touch confusing. Last month, the headline was that the unemployment had risen to 2.56 million. This month, we’re told that it’s risen again — to 2.52 million. How can both be right? Because the point of comparison is not the previous month, but the
Labour’s lead in the polls has been pretty steady at around 10 points for a little over a year now. So why does today’s Guardian carry an article with the headline ‘Outright election victory in 2015 looks a distant prospect, pollster tells Labour’? It’s based on two YouGov polls — commissioned by Progress and actually
Talk of a by-election in Portsmouth South has been growing, fuelled by allegations against MP Mike Hancock. And, in a speech to the parliamentary press gallery lunch yesterday, Nigel Farage claimed Ukip could win it. The reasoning is simple: Ukip are on the up, and they came within 2,000 votes and 5 percentage points of
George Osborne will be breathing a sigh of relief this morning. The boast he made in his Autumn Statement in December — ‘the deficit is coming down this year, and every year of this Parliament’ — appears to have held up. But only just. The figures from the ONS today show that the government borrowed
9 per cent of Brits say the Public Affairs Act 1975 should be repealed, and 9 per cent say it shouldn’t, according to a new poll by YouGov. If you’re wondering ‘What on Earth is the Public Affairs Act 1975?’, that’s probably because it doesn’t exist. And yet 18 per cent were willing to offer
The number of people in work in December to February was 29.698 million — lower than last month’s 29.732 million and representing a very slight 2,000 quarter-on-quarter fall — according to today’s figures from the Office for National Statistics. Of course, 2,000 is just a 0.008 per cent drop, and since the margin of error
With the debate swirling about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy and her government’s record, it’s worth taking a look at what the cold, hard economic data has to say about her time in office. Of course, growth rates and unemployment figures can’t tell us everything about a period, but they can at least provide a bit of
The Times’ Sam Coates picked up on a couple of discrepancies between the text of George Osborne’s Morrisons speech sent out by CCHQ, and the one published by the Treasury. Here’s the CCHQ text: ‘In 2010 alone, payments to working age families cost £75 billion. That means about one in every seven pounds of tax
YouGov have once again tested how a Boris-led Tory party would compare to a Cameron-led one in the polls. When they last did so in October, they found that Boris was worth a seven-point bump: with Cameron as leader, the Tories were nine points behind Labour; Boris narrowed the gap to just two. The results
We’ve got the first post-Budget polling from YouGov, and it brings mixed news for George Osborne. Certainly, this Budget doesn’t seem (so far) to have dented the Chancellor’s reputation the way last year’s did — but nor has it yet enhanced it as his 2011 Budget seemed to. And on the question of which would
A fascinating poll result from Ipsos MORI today. They ask, essentially, whether people agree with the government’s ‘Plan A’ or Labour’s ‘Plan B’. Specifically, they ask: ‘People have different ideas about the best way of dealing with Britain’s economic difficulties. Which of the following do you most agree with? A1: Britain has a debt problem,
Imagine if a Chancellor stood up and announced that those earning up to £100,000 would pay a 40p tax rate, those earning £100,000 to £112,950 will pay a 60p rate, and those earning above £112,950 will pay the 40p rate, and then the top earners will pay a 50p rate. That’d be crazy, right? But
1. The plan: To limit the bonuses that can be paid to bankers to the level of their salary. Any higher bonus would need the approval of shareholders (65 per cent of votes cast if a quorum of 50% of shareholders is reached; 75 per cent of votes cast otherwise) and a quarter of it would
Who are all these folk jumping on Nigel Farage’s bandwagon? Ukip — which received just 3 per cent of the vote in 2010 — is now averaging about 11 per cent in the polls. Its rise has fuelled all sorts of speculation about where its supporters are coming from and why they’re turning to the
This afternoon, Danny Alexander and Oliver Letwin launched something so sensible it’s astonishing governments haven’t been doing it before. They’re actually going to use evidence to determine which policies work. The idea is that a number of different centres in a new ‘What Works’ network will examine how effective policies really are, identifying which represent
