Fraser Nelson

There’s a social crisis coming, says Iain Duncan Smith, and we must act now to avert it Most politicians who hang pictures of battle scenes in their office do so from a sense of nostalgia. For Iain Duncan Smith, it is about militaristic feng shui. Since becoming Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the former soldier has approached his job as he would a battle. The abstract pictures he inherited from his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, have been replaced with scenes of the Duke of Malborough’s victories. When a group of officials came to visit him just after he changed the decor, they told him it felt like the Ministry of Defence. ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘I want you to know that from now on, this is the war room.

There’s a lot of bad news around, but some things are going right in Britain. Sales of The Spectator are on the rise again, for the first time in four years. Pretty soon, if the trend (and our luck) holds, more people will be buying the magazine than at any point in our 183-year history. I thought CoffeeHousers might like to know a bit more about the forces behind this, and what we at The Spectator are up too. The market for print is murderous right now. We’re mid-way through what is, for the media, an industrial revolution. A massive migration is underway, from print to online.

"Inflation destroys nations and societies as surely as invading nations do. Inflation is the parent of unemployment. It is the unseen robber of those who have saved. No policy which puts at risk the defeat of inflation - however great the short-term attraction - can be justified". That was Margaret Thatcher, speaking in 1980 when inflation was much higher but British politicians actually cared about it. You won't even hear the Governor of the Bank of England denounce today's figures: CPI at 4.4 per cent and the traditional measure of inflation, RPI, at 5.0 per cent. It is seen as just another statistic. The government has also chosen to announce that rail fares will be rising by 8 per cent. George Osborne is in charge of getting inflation right.

CoffeeHousers have been generous in their response to my post on the need for an inquiry. I thought I’d respond in a post, rather than the comments. 1) Why rush to think that poverty is the problem? Rhoda Klapp raises this very good point. In 1996, American academics looked at various riots round the world since the war – I’d urge CoffeeHousers with a serious interest to read the report here). They found “little evidence that poverty in the community matters” – ie, there are much poorer cities, where people don’t riot. Other factors matter, mainly risk versus reward. I used this study as when writing the leader for this week’s magazine.

Today we learnt that David Cameron is looking at the experience of Los Angeles’ recovery from the 1992 riots. The first lesson he should learn is the value of an inquiry, as Ed Miliband suggests. Californian policymakers held an inquiry, and it taught them plenty about the nature of modern poverty, urban unrest — and how to tackle it. Part of the reason that poverty in Britain is so ingrained is because so few politicians look at it in any detail, and even mentioning the word ‘underclass’ solicits squeals of disapproval. We remain aloof. As I argued in the magazine last month, we like harmless sketches about British poverty (Rab C Nesbitt, Little Britain etc.) but think that The Wire represents an American malaise that could never take root in Britain.

The revolution may not be televised, but the riot was tweeted pretty well last night. I was up at 3am (don't ask), and BBC News hadn't even interrupted their normal programming. But turning to Twitter, it was all there. Specifically, via two reporters: Paul Lewis from the Guardian and Ravi Somaiya from the New York Times. They behaved like instinctive reporters: picked up (on the news or, more likely, on Twitter) that a riot was underway, then went out and reported it. And they did so with pictures and observations that were well-judged and informative, never hysterical or futile. The presence of a TV camera, with the bright lights, have a certain effect on a crowd — so the blogger with his mobile is better able to take and broadcast truer images of what's going on.

The humbling of America — the cover theme of this week’s Spectator — continues with S&P stripping Uncle Sam of his AAA credit rating. The debt downgrade, it says, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” In other words: Obama’s still addicted to debt, and it’s time to stop pretending that his government’s IOU notes rank among the safest investments on earth. Its analysis seems to be pretty much that made by Christopher Caldwell in his brilliant cover story.

By now, George Osborne will have seen tomorrow's GDP figures and I suspect will be having a mid-afternoon whisky. Ed Balls will be warming up for his demands for a Plan B. "Austerity isn't working," he'll say — and will doubtless tour TV studios with his usual bunch of dodgy assumptions which he hopes broadcasters won't challenge. Here, as a counterweight, are a few facts and figures about austerity, how harsh it is, etc. — and the case for a Plan A+. 1. Where are the "deep, harsh" cuts? The Q2 GDP data will complete the economic picture for the first year of George Osborne's time in the Treasury. But where are the cuts? The Treasury produces figures for current spending each month. Here they are below, in cash terms and adjusted for CPI inflation.

  British newspapers are haemorrhaging readers and influence, and next Sunday we will see just how much this process has accelerated. That day's newspapers will — I'm sure — all be making some kind of pitch to orphaned News of the World readers. When Today closed, there was a similar scramble ("Welcome to your place in The Sun," screamed its main rival), but this time they could be in for a shock. American experience suggests that when newspapers close, their readers just disappear — they liked their former paper, saw it as an old friend and didn't feel compelled to find a new one. Preliminary research, picked up by my old colleague Will Heaven, suggests that two-thirds of the News of the World's readers just won't pick up another newspaper again.

It’s The Spectator’s summer party today, and in a rather important year. It was exactly 300 years ago that Joseph Addison & Richard Steele first published the earliest incarnation The Spectator. This blog is named for the coffee houses that had sprung up all over London at that time — the original destinations for The Spectator. It had gossip, opinion, character assassinations, literary review (it hyped up Paradise Lost), theatre and the arts. It was a huge success, without about one in ten Londoners reading it at the time. Were Addison alive now, there are a few characteristics he’d recognise in this virtual coffee house. He wrote using a pseudonym, just as most CoffeeHousers use a nom-de-blog.