Fraser Nelson

It’s great to see Newsnight once again nominated for an award for its coverage of the Kids Company scandal, and I hope that it wins this time. When Miles Goslett broke the story in The Spectator in February last year, he had all of the details: the full horror of Camila Batmanghelidjh and her bizarre modus operandi, her dodgy finances and – crucially – how No10 overrode concerns from civil servants who had wanted to pull the plug on the venture. The story was there, on a plate: Miles Goslett had written the scoop of the year. He and Mary Wakefield, our commissioning editor, made sure it was bombproof - she sent her lawyers after us, but even they could find no specific complaint. But still, no one managed to follow up Miles's scoop.

Things are pretty good in Britain right now: poverty rates are at a record low, employment is at a record high with rising wages and zero inflation. But for the young, there’s a problem: property prices are still sky high and the basic dream of home ownership (especially in London) looks cruelly unobtainable. The above graph might help explain why. The construction of new houses has been falling steadily, while the population has been rising steadily. At the same time families have been fracturing, increasing the need for more dwellings. In the last 15 years, net immigration has gone from zero to 350,000 a year. The new Brits need somewhere to live, especially as they tend to have more children.

For years, I’ve wondered why so many clever people go to Davos to discuss topics as meaningless as ‘the new global context’ or ‘shared norms for the new reality’. It has always struck me like a massive game of Just A Minute, in which contestants compete on how long they can talk about a theme that makes no sense at all. But as I found out when I visited last week, the real game is far more sophisticated. No one at Davos cares too much about the gabfest. The debates are, in effect, a front for the biggest networking event in the capitalist world. For one week, this ski resort becomes a fortress guarded by the Swiss army. Venture capitalists chase chief executives, who chase the politicians while the journalists chase everyone.

It’s hard to recognise Sweden from the news reports we're reading nowadays. Yesterday, a 15-year-old at an immigration centre stabbed and killed one of its female employees in Mölndal, near Gothenburg. It’s the kind of story that shakes the country to its core. Sweden has taken a staggering number of unaccompanied children - some 20,000 in the past four months - so the government has to act in loco parentis. To keep them out of trouble, as well as educate and accommodate then. It’s a very tough ask, a job that many Swedes fear is simply beyond the competence of government. In such circumstances, appalling things can happen. A police spokesman had this to say: 'It was messy, of course, a crime scene with blood.

If Google hoped for some good PR in offering £130 million to settle UK tax claims dating back to the Labour years, it was a miscalculation: Labour regards the offer as "derisory" and the BBC is leading its news bulletins the better to sock it to its rival. Why did Google bother? It has run up against the standard anti-business narrative: that the social worth of businesses can be measured only by how much cash they give to the government. In fact, Google provides its services to millions of Britons (worth at least £11 billion, by some estimates) at no cost at all: this is its contribution to society. As for its contribution to the government's coffers, Google has - from the offset - been following the rules. And for this, it has been lambasted.

It's just as well that Mark Carney is Bank of England governor: he'd have made a lousy forecaster. In August 2013 he said he'd raise interest rates when unemployment fell below 7 per cent, expecting that to take three years. It took five months. Then last summer,  Carney informed us that the decision on when to make the first rate hike ‘will likely come into sharper relief around the turn of this year’. The year has turned, but the interest rate hasn't. So yet again, the expectation has been delayed. The below graph shows the story so far... And now? As Carney said in a speech at Queen Mary University of London: ‘In my view, the decision proved straightforward: now is not yet the time to raise interest rates.

Your average milkman has more wealth than the world's poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January. “Almost half of the world's wealth is owned by just 1% of the world's population” it said in 2014. It has done variants on that theme ever year, each time selling it as a new "big" story. All peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the expense of the poorest. This narrative (which is discredited as it is old) suits Oxfam’s fundraisers.

Today, one of the greatest political journalists of my lifetime retires: Phil Webster, former political editor of The Times,  is leaving the newspaper after 43 years. He has been overseeing its online political coverage for the last few years and (until a few days ago) getting up at the crack of dawn to write its morning political email. Now, he has finally called it a day. It’s the end of an era. When I joined the staff of The Times in the mid-90s, as a business reporter, I used to dream of being in Phil’s team (as did most young reporters that I knew). The closest I ever came was being made Scottish political correspondent – which, admittedly, is not very close.

Great progress has been made in open data over the last few years, with most important facts and figures now available online. The quality of the UK economic debate has been enhanced by the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which publishes forecasts in a non-tricksy way. The journalist is spoiled for choice. But, still, you don't tend to see such forecasts republished: the BBC doesn't share them and even the FT's 'economy at a glance' restricts itself to historic data – and static graphs, which you can't interrogate. At The Spectator, we've been using dynamic graphs for a while. Now, we're moving up to the next level using HighCharts, a more versatile Norwegian graph-making engine. The below graphs are part of it.

There are just six hours of 2015 to go – and it has, for The Spectator, been our best year ever. Sales of the magazine broke through their record high this year: more people are buying it now than any time in our 187-year long history. And that’s just if you count magazine sales: if you count the number of people actually reading our website and enjoying our writers, the picture is as above: an astonishing 20 million people reading over 60 million articles this year. You’ll see a dip a few years back: that’s when we introduced a full paywall. We the changed that to a metered paywall: if you read more than a certain number of magazine pieces per month, we ask you to subscribe.