Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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 is David Cameron having such trouble persuading Jean-Claude Juncker to give in to his minimal demands for EU reform? The Prime Minister pledged, in a Tory manifesto, to restrict welfare for migrants for the first four years they’re in Britain: not as an ‘emergency’, but as a matter of routine. He was returned with a
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
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
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
David Cameron is giving a speech in Davos later today with a message for British business: he wants to enlist them in his campaign for Britain to stay in the EU. Not that he puts it in such terms. We’re still in a phoney war where, in theory, Cameron is still negotiating, and might very
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
For almost two decades, Britain has failed dismally at Eurovision – and deservedly. Our entries have been so bad as to represent a passive-aggressive insult to an entire continent. You can blame the BBC: it picks the song, and just doesn’t understand Eurovision. It seems to think it’s the equivalent of a musical bad taste
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.
If Britain were to vote to leave the EU, we’d promptly set about agreeing our own trade deals as a sovereign nation. But what about our new trade deal with the EU itself? What conditions would this wounded beast set, and might we end up accepting the diktats and red tape that drove us mad in the first place?
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
David Cameron has strong views about the family; often ones that ought to remain inside his head. He quite is keen on marriage and good parenting, but how to make this into a government policy? He offers some thoughts in his speech today. His words: ‘In the end, getting parenting and the early years right
Squeeze were at their best in the 1970s, and this morning demonstrated that their political ideas haven’t much evolved from that awful decade. Playing out the Andrew Marr show in front of the Prime Minister, Glenn Tilbrook changed the lyrics of this latest song to insert the line “I grew up in council houses, they’re
Liam Fox’s new year party at the Carlton Club has become the traditional start to the Tory Party’s year. This year there were 11 Cabinet members including the Chancellor, Home Secretary, Defence Secretary, Business Secretary and Boris Johnson. I’d say that most of the Tory MPs there are ‘leavers’, who have this week been given permission
In 2012 and 2013, The Spectator opened its Christmas special issue with a leading article counting the ways in which the world had never been a better place, and was set to get better still. We didn’t do so this year, as the list would have been a bit too similar to previous versions –
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
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
As soon as votes were counted in the race to be Tory candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith’s problem became clear. He had won comfortably, but just 9,200 party members bothered to vote — compared with the 80,000 who took part in Labour’s contest. Goldsmith praised his party for a ‘civilised and constructive’ debate, unlike
David Cameron is vulnerable on flood defences, having cut the budget while blowing huge amounts on green subsidies and overseas aid. But who will point this out? Certainly not the Labour Party. John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, was on the radio this morning claiming, bizarrely, that the Tories were quite right to spend so much
Was a political knighthood ever more deserved than Lynton Crosby’s? His personal involvement was the difference between defeat and victory – he kept Ed Miliband out of No10. As Tim Montgomerie observed earlier, a hereditary peerage would be in order for that alone. We saw, in 2010, what a Tory general election campaign looks like if left
