Leading article

Saturday

The Spectator

Beyond bathplugs

First parliament, now the BBC. Steadily, the public is seeing details of the kind of lifestyles that have been funded by the taxpayer for all these years. To the tawdry parliamentarians’ list — duck houses, porn films, Kit Kat bars — we can now add the £638 taxi bills for BBC executives and the £3 which cash machines charge them to take out money. As the Freedom of Information requests are steadily lodged with the legion of quangos, we can expect another tranche of horrors — and this is before anyone moves on to the local authorities. As David Cameron says, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The more we see, the more taxpayer anger is focused.

The Spectator

Character building

This magazine salutes Robert Fidler, the Surrey farmer who built a family castle in secret and is now fighting a court order that it should be demolished. Mr Fidler had hoped, ingeniously, to foil local authorities by concealing his building behind a 40-foot enclosure of hay bales. He believed that, thanks to a legal loophole, if a house attracted no planning objection for four years after completion, it acquired immunity from demolition. Reigate and Banstead Borough Council thought otherwise, though, and a judge ruled that the removal of the bales in 2006 constituted part of the building work, so the council was right to demand its destruction. Undeterred, Mr Fidler says he will appeal his case, if necessary, in the European Court of Human Rights.

Saturday

The Spectator

Bad sport

Should John Terry be stripped of his captain’s armband for conducting an extramarital affair with a teammate’s girlfriend, getting her pregnant, and then paying for her to have an abortion? Of course not. Should John Terry be stripped of his captain’s armband for conducting an extramarital affair with a teammate’s girlfriend, getting her pregnant, and then paying for her to have an abortion? Of course not. England expects that sort of behaviour from its football stars: it’s a part of our national sport. Newspapers play the game too.

The Spectator

The false promise of ‘equality’’

The Pope certainly knows how to make an entrance. As he prepares for his visit to Britain, the Holy Father has not sent the usual diplomatic advance party but an Exocet missile aimed at the government — and specifically at Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill. It is a worthy target. The Bill itself is an appalling piece of legislation, but most of all it is based on one of the most pernicious ideas in modern politics: that equality should be pursued for its own sake. It is hard not be outraged by the examples of inequality in Britain: the drug-addled sink estates next door to opulent mansions; the fact that more Eton boys leave school with three As at A-level than do all the boys who qualify for free school meals in the country.

Saturday

The Spectator

Lies, and damned lies

Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. On the not-rare-enough occasions when he returns to our television screens, one feels an instinctive revulsion. Here is the Prime Minister who was as uninterested in economics as he was in the conduct of warfare. He ceded domestic power to an incompetent and reckless Chancellor and he is now accepting £200,000-a-year jobs with the banks with whom his government worked hand-in-glove. No, there is no pleasure in seeing him again. Especially as Britain starts to focus on the mess which he bequeathed.

Saturday

The Spectator

Charitable misgivings

The Haiti earthquake story has moved from a straightforward human tragedy to one of recrimination over the delay in channelling humanitarian aid. Reports from the ground suggest that so far only a few trucks carrying food and water have managed to reach the victims. It is deeply frustrating to see emergency supplies and equipment held up through a lack of organisation. There should be nothing surprising, however, in what has happened since the earthquake. Haiti is not a country thrown into anarchy by a natural disaster; it had no functioning government before the tremors struck. It has not been reduced to poverty; it was already the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

The Spectator

A conservative revival?

It is likely that David Cameron regards this week’s stunning Republican victory in Massachusetts with a mixture of excitement and terror. It is likely that David Cameron regards this week’s stunning Republican victory in Massachusetts with a mixture of excitement and terror. It marks an incredible conservative comeback. For the Republicans to take the seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy is impressive; that their candidate, Scott Brown, was only strengthened by the Democrat’s vicious attack ads — the very type that Labour has in mind for Mr Cameron — is extraordinary. Massachusetts was once seen as the most dependably Democratic state in the union; now the left has turned on its own.

Saturday

The Spectator

Our real supreme court

It is tempting to cheer the European Court of Human Rights’s ruling in the case of Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton. They have been awarded £30,000 in compensation on the grounds that the powers used by the police to detain them at a protest outside an arms fair in Docklands six years ago were illiberal. It is a depressing little tale of how legislation passed by Parliament to fight terrorism has been hijacked by the police for everyday policing. But also a depressing reminder of where legal sovereignty in Britain now lies. We have, in Parliament Square, a new building entitled the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. A lawyer looking for a wheeze should consider instigating an action under the Trade Description Act, because supreme it isn’t.

The Spectator

Cold hearts

Perhaps the least fashionable cause in Britain is the welfare of our elderly. At least 35,000 old men and women will die from the cold this winter: a staggering, scandalous figure. We are a rich country, there are many ingenious and inexpensive ways to heat a house, yet every August, when the number of ‘excess winter deaths’ are disclosed, the extent of our national incompetence or indifference becomes clear. No one asks why so many more pensioners die each winter in Britain than in Norway. The winter cull of our elderly has become accepted as part of national life. Had 35,000 died from the heat, there would have been an outcry. Seven years ago, a heatwave was blamed for 2,000 deaths across the country — and it was regarded as the most urgent political priority.

Saturday

The Spectator

Leave Brown to the voters

One must almost admire the optimism of Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. Their call to arms — asking Labour members to rise up and topple their leader — is entirely logical. Gordon Brown is easily the Tories’ biggest asset: without saying ‘no more Brown’, their message on the doorsteps would lose much of its impact. A party determined to preserve itself would, indeed, find someone — anyone — else. But if Mr Hoon and Ms Hewitt are so concerned about their party, why did they not speak out last June? Why did they not back Mr Purnell, who sacrificed his political future? The answer is that they were both hoping Mr Brown would send them to Brussels to be EU High Representative: a job which eventually went to the hapless Baroness Ashton.

The Spectator

A golden age for fascism

The re-emergence of fascism in Britain is highly inconvenient for our political parties, it is a distraction from the election campaigns they are all so overly keen to begin. They deal with the BNP by ignoring it, by banning MEPs from parliament to make sure no one has to pass Nick Griffin in a corridor. They pretend the BNP is a strange anomaly, too small to be dangerous with ‘only’ a million voters, and they claim to be baffled as to how such support could emerge. The events of this week left two large clues. The first is the fascist march being called in Wiltshire. No one describes Islam4UK’s proposed anti-war protest in Wootton Bassett as a fascist march — but as Melanie Phillips argued here recently, it is. It’s the reverse side of the fascist coin.

Saturday

The Spectator

Jet-set jihadi

A Nigerian Islamic fanatic flies to the Netherlands and tries to blow up a plane bound for Detroit in Michigan — and yet there was something grimly inevitable about the fact that it was Britain where police were scrambled and London where the fanatic’s accommodation was searched. A Nigerian Islamic fanatic flies to the Netherlands and tries to blow up a plane bound for Detroit in Michigan — and yet there was something grimly inevitable about the fact that it was Britain where police were scrambled and London where the fanatic’s accommodation was searched. As Gordon Brown’s Cabinet plodded into the underground bunker after being summoned for an emergency meeting on Boxing Day, they might well have asked: why is it always us?

Saturday

The Spectator

A simple solution

There is something deeply unfashionable about British poverty. We worry endlessly about melting glaciers, and wear wristbands to demand an end to hardship in faraway lands. Christmas cards are sold in aid of dogs, birds and children in other countries. But we prefer to avert our eyes from the British poor. They’re looked after by the welfare state, aren’t they? Problem solved, now let’s get on with enjoying Christmas. It might be easier to ignore problems at home, but that won’t make them disappear. This Christmas one in six British people will be jobless — and even this horrific figure masks a far worse picture regionally. A quarter of Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Middlesbrough are now living on benefits.

Saturday

The Spectator

Brown’s toxic farewell

The Pre-Budget Report was, like the Queen’s Speech that preceded it in November, an almost empty sideshow. The Pre-Budget Report was, like the Queen’s Speech that preceded it in November, an almost empty sideshow. The Chancellor’s threatened assault on bankers’ bonuses and Gordon Brown’s sudden diatribe against high public-sector salaries were feeble attempts to distract the public gallery by playing to its prejudices. Additional ‘efficiency savings’ were piffling in scale. All these gestures combined to emphasise the bare truth: that there is nothing for this dysfunctional government to do in its dying months aside from complete the ‘scorched earth’ policy by vandalising the public finances.

Saturday

The Spectator

Battle for the City

For years, the French have resented the success of the City of London. It has become the Rome of the globalised world, where the best financiers flock to do business, make money and pay tax. When Britain wisely stayed out of the eurozone, the City consolidated its lead as Europe’s only world-league financial centre. The best French financiers climbed aboard the Eurostar and headed north. Today, when you enter the quant trading division of firms like Barclays Capital, you hear the finest minds of the école Polytechnique speaking French to each other. It is fashionable, nowadays, to declare this to have been a fraud, the City little more than a casino and the wealth it created illusory. But however much Nicolas Sarkozy might like this to be true, he knows it is false.

Saturday

The Spectator

Think-tank battle

The concept of a ‘Red Tory’ is not an easy one to grasp. T he concept of a ‘Red Tory’ is not an easy one to grasp. Is it someone who believes in huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ for all, or is it an inversion of a champagne socialist: someone who preaches free markets from beneath a flat cap while sipping bitter in a boozer in Bolton? The phrase was invented by Philip Blond, a former lecturer who has attracted a million pounds to set up his own think-tank, ResPublica — launched this week with David Cameron in attendance. His particular beef is with monopolies, and their effect on community spirit. Much to the annoyance of Ken Clarke, the shadow business secretary, he advocates legislation to break up high-street shopping chains.

The Spectator

Troubled waters | 28 November 2009

Amid the wreckage of this week’s floods the most depressing comment came from a government scientist who called for a national register of bridges. If we had a register, he argued, the relevant authorities might in future be better able to predict which bridges are likely to go the same way as Workington’s two went this week. And this — as well as blaming climate change — is how the government machine avoids a glaringly obvious problem. Britain is not short of databases. On the contrary, the taxpayer is groaning under the weight of them. What the country is desperately short of, on the other hand, is decent roads, railways and bridges that will actually withstand the odd rainstorm.

Saturday

The Spectator

Waste of the day

Having been reprimanded by the broadcasting regulator Ofcom for a clutch of on-air errors, this report is just the most recent evidence that the Corporation is now form-filling when it should be programme-making. At times it is as if the viewers are receiving a service that incorporates all that is undesirable: a costly administration unable to stop the broadcasting of abuse but successfully stifling genuine creativity. Programme-makers have already protested: Stephen Poliakoff has stated that the BBC is suffering a ‘crisis of confidence’, presided over by a clutch of ‘Kafkaesque committees’. Their dramatists have even been sent to learn about ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

The Spectator

Speech failure

It is now 12 years since the Queen was first obliged to enter the Palace of Westminster and deliver a speech studded with the most awful New Labour clichés. Over the years, Her Majesty’s dismay during the state opening of parliament has become steadily more visible — and little wonder. As Labour ekes a fifth year out of this parliament, it is bowing out with perhaps the most fatuous and futile agenda of its 13 years in power. But one which, nonetheless, offers useful insights into why this government failed. It was, as a gleeful but unnamed minister said, ‘one of the most political Queen’s Speeches in history’ — this is not something to boast about. But to Gordon Brown, governing is an act of party political violence.

Saturday

The Spectator

Spelling it out

Sympathy for Gordon Brown is not a common emotion in Westminster, but this week only the coldest heart could fail to feel for the Prime Minister. It is mortifying to have misspelt the name of a fallen soldier, even if the mistake was minor. To have his misery played out in front of the national media, complete with a taped conversation of him being berated by the soldier’s mother, can only have been devastating. But the power of this sorry episode lies in the truths it represents. Jacqui Janes, whose Grenadier Guardsman son Jamie, 20, was killed last month, was richly entitled to berate the Prime Minister for the lack of equipment in Afghanistan. It was his decision to fight two wars on a peacetime military budget.