Family

As James says, it’s been a day of high passions here at The Spectator. He feels strongly that many of the problems in Britain are societal, and require a cultural shift. Maybe so. I disagree with James when he says a Prime Minister’s role is to “lead society”. I disagree. We pay him to run the government, not offer his advice (or, worse, condemnation) on how society is running itself. Sure, society is shaped by government incentives. Cameron can fix these. But shaping society by exhortation is not what we expect of limited government. Fundamentally, it confuses what I see as the natural pecking order. In Britain, the people pass

Tomorrow sees the publication of the report David Cameron commissioned on how to address the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. Thanks to a leak we already know most of what’s in the report. It proposes, among other things, that sexualized advertisement shouldn’t be displayed in places near where children go, that the watershed should be more strictly enforced, that lads mags shouldn’t be displayed at eye level and that it should be easier for parents to block access from home computers to certain internet sites. There’ll be those that dismiss these proposals as gimmicks or as too small to make a difference. But making the public square more family friendly

I’m afraid that women have been faking it, having us men on. You see they understand the offside rule and always have done. How could they not? It’s so simple that even a brace of abject football pundits know that an actively involved player is offside when he is closer to the opponent’s goal line than both the ball and the second-to-last defender, but only if he is in his opponent’s half of the pitch. Messrs Keys and Gray may not be too sharp on interpretation – unlike the ‘young lady’ (£) they berated – but they’re smoking hot on the theory. So do me a favour love and drop

The birth of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John gave that of Christ a run for its money in the broadcast news over Christmas. In Ireland, where I was, the newsreader declared that the singer Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, had had their first child. Hang on, I thought. Not so. Some woman, and possibly two – bear with me – has had a baby with one of them. And as it turned out, the birth mother was a client of the Center for Surrogate Parenting based in Encino, California, which has been providing surrogacy arrangements for gay would-be parents since 1989. Elton John and David Furnish will, I’d have thought,

As Michael Gove said at the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto: “Britain in 2010 is a great place to live in many ways” (4:12 in on this video). Lord Young, The Spectator’s Peer of the Year, agrees: for many of us, we’ve never had it so good. He told the Telegraph: ‘For the vast majority of people in the country today, they have never had it so good ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started…Most people with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly started paying very little each month. That could make three, four, five, six hundred pounds a month

The Times has a spread on free schools (p20-p21) today (£), focusing on the model of Kunskapskolan, one of the largest Swedish chains, who are setting up shop in Britain. “Pupils set their own homework, decide their timetables, set themselves targets and work at their own speed – oh, and they clock off at 2pm,” says Greg Hurst, the paper’s education editor. He visits one of their schools in Twickenham. “At the heart of the personalised learning”, he says, lies a “one-on-one tutorial with a teacher for 15 minutes to review progress, weekly and long-term targets and timetables to meet them.” A pupil, Lisa, is quoted saying: “You talk to

Welfare is fast becoming this parliament’s Ypres Salient – strategically critical, it is constantly contested. £20bn on social housing, £100bn on out of work benefits and £billions on universal benefits: welfare reform is where spending cuts are most conspicuous. A rhetorical confrontation is building and various tactical dispositions are being made. The Staggers’ George Eaton has an analysis that assumes that Labour’s current wedge-strategy (which I critiqued here) is not working because it is avowedly sectional, privileging those who might be caricatured as ‘undeserving’. Eaton argues that Labour must ‘launch a defence of the hard pressed majority’; those who work but still stand to lose, particularly families. Indeed, Westminster’s number-crunchers

In the last few weeks, there has been much speculation that child benefit would be stopped when a child reaches 16. Today’s announcement suggests that this is not going to happen, although the Tories are refusing to rule it out. If there are to be changes to child benefit — and given the financial situation there need to be — then removing it from households with a higher rate taxpayer is a better move than stopping it at 16. Child benefit ending at 16 would send out a message that at 16 a child should start earning its way in the world. This would, for obvious reasons, have a negative