Leading article

David Cameron visited Scotland only once during the battle for its parliament’s elections. David Cameron visited Scotland only once during the battle for its parliament’s elections. Hadrian’s Wall is becoming a forbidding obstacle for the Conservatives: a boundary with an unfamiliar, inhospitable land redeemed only by opportunities for deer stalking and trout fishing. Ed Miliband ventured north a fortnight ago, in an attempt to save Labour’s Scottish campaign — but as The Spectator went to press it seemed that this, too, had proved fruitless. The Scottish Nationalist leader, Alex Salmond, has found to his delight that his opposition has crumbled.

It suits a great many people to blame the banks for the financial crisis. It gets everyone else off the hook. How, asks Gordon Brown, was a mere Prime Minister to know that banks were doing such fiendishly complicated things? How, asks George Osborne, was an opposition expected to detect what the government could not? How, asks Mervyn King, was the Bank of England governor supposed to know that these bankers had been so wicked? For all of them, the bankers have been the perfect scapegoat. In truth, all of them failed to spot the massive asset bubble that had deformed the British economy by 2007, a bubble blown by dangerously underpriced debt. Yet even now there is a worrying reluctance to admit that a bubble ever existed.

Anyone who has recently bought a house next to a good school — they typically command a £20,000 premium — has good reason to loathe Michael Gove. Anyone who has recently bought a house next to a good school — they typically command a £20,000 premium — has good reason to loathe Michael Gove. The Education Secretary may well be about to bring the whole catchment area game to an end. Quietly, but at a surprising rate, schools are fleeing the control of local councils and becoming academies: independent, but within the state sector. What was a trickle under the Labour years is turning into a flood. This time last year, just one in 16 state secondaries had this ‘academy’ status. Now, it is one in eight. By Christmas, it should be one in four.

How the paparazzi must have groaned about Prince William’s low-key stag do, which took place in secret last weekend. Last weekend, a relatively peaceful anti-cuts march through the capital was infiltrated by a small number of criminals armed with crowbars and intent on destruction. Their handiwork defined the march. All it took were a few iconic photographs — Santander’s windows being smashed, the occupation of Fortnum & Mason — and London looked to the world like a city under siege. The Metropolitan police could have and should have dealt with these disruptive thugs, but instead, as they wielded their weapons, they were surrounded not by police officers but by a throng of excited photographers.

Fostering liberty If David Cameron were looking for a couple to symbolise the spirit of his Big Society, Eunice and Owen Johns of Derby would be ideal. At an age when many are settling down to retirement, they want nothing more than to carry on fostering, taking in troubled and abandoned children in return for modest financial reward but a huge sense of fulfilment. Described in one assessment by Derby City Council as ‘kind and hospitable people who would always do their best to make a child welcome and comfortable’, they are perfect role models, it might be imagined, at a time when there is a national shortage of 10,000 foster parents. Yet the Johns will foster no more.

To turn an army on one’s own people is bad enough. But to call in foreign mercenaries, as Colonel Gaddafi did this week in Libya, is a rare form of savagery, one which offers a chilling glimpse into the real nature of his dictatorship. He should be stopped. We have heard this week the familiar calls for Britain to sit back and watch what is an internal matter for the countries involved. But like it or not, Britain is involved in Libya. Quite apart from the various oil contracts, the last government granted licences to export £8 million of arms to Libya. The SAS have even been training Libyan forces, as part of the deal which Tony Blair personally agreed with Gaddafi in a tent outside Tripoli eight years ago.

In Britain, surging grocery prices are painful, but not life-threatening. For much of the rest of the world, by contrast, food prices are a matter of life or death. China, the world’s largest wheat producer, is suffering a severe winter drought which looks likely to devastate this year’s harvest. It is setting aside a billion dollars to snap up supplies in the market, with the inevitable result that other, poorer countries will lose out. When global food costs surge, starvation usually follows. At times like this, it is harder than ever to justify why we in the West are encouraging farmers to grow crops to fill car petrol tanks, rather than people’s stomachs.

It is a curious fact about modern Britain that while we romanticise marriage and stable families as never before, our government still bribes us to split up. There has been much nonsense talked this week of the perils of introducing a ‘marriage bias’ into the tax system. But the truth is that a distinct and deplorable bias already exists — against couples. Families on low incomes are usually financially better off apart than they are together — in terms of various state hand-outs and housing benefit. The payments offered by the welfare state have robbed the low-income family of its economic function. Although one hesitates to say so on the eve of St Valentine’s day, this can often be a deciding factor in whether a couple stays together.

Does it matter if prisoners are allowed to vote or not? Save for in the odd council ward in Brixton or on Dartmoor, some 84,000 prisoners — among an electorate of 46 million — are unlikely to have a material effect on the outcome of British elections. Does it matter if prisoners are allowed to vote or not? Save for in the odd council ward in Brixton or on Dartmoor, some 84,000 prisoners — among an electorate of 46 million — are unlikely to have a material effect on the outcome of British elections. But there is a good reason why David Cameron this week did not even attempt to whip his MPs into supporting prisoners’ votes: such a move would have prompted a fierce rebellion among Tory backbenchers.

The plot thickens It is as if we are stuck in a hideous loop. The plot thickens It is as if we are stuck in a hideous loop. Every few months, it seems, Tony Blair is once again hauled up to give evidence to the never-ending Iraq inquiry. Each time he is dragged from a luxury hotel in some distant land to London, where he gives the younger political generation a masterclass in how to evade direct questioning. The questioning always proceeds along the same lines: why did we go to war? But the real scandal is the British army was defeated in Basra, and the Iraqi people abandoned to death squads. The question that should be asked is ‘why did we lose?

Every day of this new year, some 200,000 people are likely to be lifted out of what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty: living on $1.25 a day or less. Every day of this new year, some 200,000 people are likely to be lifted out of what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty: living on $1.25 a day or less. This remarkable pace of improvement will probably quicken over the rest of the decade. This is not due to any government development goal or charity outreach programme. It is driven by global capitalism, just like the transformation of India, China and other emerging markets. We are living in a golden age of poverty reduction, yet we seldom hear about it. Politicians and the media tend, for good reason, to focus on the world’s problems.

For children who have been naughty this year, Simon & Schuster have just produced the perfect punitive Christmas present: a new book from Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash. It would be a mistake to write off our former prime minister’s musings on the financial crisis as an irrelevance, to be read only by Tories with a taste for schadenfreude. It provides a compendium of the dangerous thinking which brought such economic calamity to Britain, and threatens us still. Brown claims, preposterously, that the crash would have been much less severe if only senior bankers had paid themselves 10 per cent less. He speaks darkly of ‘unchecked greed’, when the root problem lay with unchecked incompetence at the Treasury.