Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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The Muslim Council of France, and of Britain, have denounced today’s attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The imam of the mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, has said: “This is a thunderous declaration of war. The times have changed. We’re entering a new phase of this confrontation… we are horrified by the brutality and the
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Another day, another poster – and this time, it’s Labour stretching the truth. The above is the same trick as George Osborne was playing with the deficit. The reader is invited to believe that the Tories would cut state spending back to 1930s levels ‘when there was no NHS’ – or much of a welfare
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So – how did it go? Yesterday, Tory HQ yesterday issued a poster with the misleading claim that the deficit had been ‘halved’ where in fact the reduction has been closer to a third (see below). In election campaigns, a ‘porkie*’ is introduced in stages. It debuts when dropped into a speech or article. If
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New year, new porkies from Conservative HQ. It has opened 2015 with a poster that involves a deception (above): ‘the defict halved’. It’s a relatively small deception: the deficit has been reduced by a third (see graph below) just as David Cameron was saying only a few weeks ago. But this poster makes a more important,
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An email arrives from Grant Shapps, chairman of the Tory Party, listing the things the Coalition has achieved in four years. Here they are:- Our economy has grown faster than any other major advanced nation (True – since last year) There are more people in work than ever before (True – and amazing) We’ve continued to
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Will Sir John Major be asked to lead Britain’s Europe renegotiations? The Telegraph diary raises this prospect – and it makes sense. As a former PM with clout and credibility he would be well-suited to the job, and has made the case for such an external negotiator in the past. His recent speeches about Britain’s
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Journalism usually focuses on what’s going wrong, not what’s going right. As a result, newspapers can give an unduly negative view of the world. I try to remedy this in my Daily Telegraph column today by pointing out that 2014 has been the best year ever – just as 2013 was, and just as 2015
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Division and reconciliation were the themes of the Queen’s Christmas Message this year (full text below). She started mentioning the Josefina de Vasconcellos‘s 1977 statue Reconciliation, which is now in Coventry Cathedral. She then went on to other examples of conflict and reunion from the First World War to Northern Ireland. And then the unfinished business of the Scottish independence referendum… “In
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Channel 4 has The Snowman, the BBC has the Queen’s Message. And we at Coffee House have another tradition: publishing the above video released in 1941. It was made by British Ministry of Information, narrated by an American for Americans in hope of enlisting American support in the war. There are so many wonderful lines that it
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Déjà lu is a symptom that affects all Spectator subscribers after a while: the feeling that, when reading the newspapers, that you have read the story before. Long before. Four months ago, The Spectator ran a cover story about a crisis that hadn’t then hit the news: the meltdown in our ambulance service. Mary Wakefield’s investigation revealed
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Joe Cocker died yesterday, just 70 years old, from lung cancer. He was one of a handful of rock singers whose voice was instantly recognisable, adding a new dimension to any song he sang. And perhaps this is why his cover versions worked so well – they did sound completely different, and yet still thrilling and
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‘What kind of message are you guys trying to send with that brutal Christmas card?’ asked my friend in the bar last night. He’s referring to the above card, an image created by ‘Castro’ for the Christmas special edition of the Spectator (which you can download here) to run alongside Paul Wood’s stunning diary from Lebanon.
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The Daily Mirror has today splashed on the fact that Rupert Harrison, chief economic adviser to the British government, has had a pay increase and is now on £95,000. Outrageous, says Kevin Maguire of the Mirror. I agree: he should be on far more. The British government is in the most almighty financial mess and
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Can the Tories really be planning to fight the next election lying about the deficit? I ask because in his speech today, David Cameron has just repeated an untrue claim which made its debut in a George Osborne newspaper article a few days ago: that they have ‘halved’ the deficit*. Here’s what the Prime Minister
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Those who complain about the BBC (myself included) usually only refer to a small part of a massive and divergent operation. Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 is just superb – not a hint of bias in any of his breakfast show. Jeremy Vine, too, is pretty fair and balanced. He has just ran a report on
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Mark Pritchard, MP for the Wrekin in Shropshire, was arrested on Tuesday following an allegation of rape. The Metropolitan Police said in a statement: ‘We can confirm that a 48-year-old man voluntarily attended a north London police station on Tuesday, 2 December where he was arrested, following an allegation of rape in central London. He has
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George Osborne had dismal figures today, and still managed to present them as a triumph. He even presented his failure on the deficit (below) as a success, and got away with it because Labour really doesn’t have an alternative plan. The Chancellor did have some genuine boasts: the job-creation miracle continues and corporation tax revenue is
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If you’re buying a house, or thinking about it, there’s only one fact you need to know about today’s Budget: stamp duty is changing. Gone is the old system of thresholds, and instead it will be a percentage chunk of the value. And no, this ist a disguised tax graph – the Chancellor expects to
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The Swedish government has just collapsed, not even three months after being formed, and new elections are being called for March. The problem is one that Britain may well soon experience: none of the main parties did well in the election. The only winners were minority protest parties – the feminists and the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats (a
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I have just been on Adam Boulton’s Sky News show, talking about the forthcoming Autumn Statement with Ann Pettifor, a left-wing economist. “I bet you didn’t expect me to defend George Osborne,” she told me, after our discussion finished. The UK economy is doing well, she argued, because Osborne has been borrowing like a drunken Keynesian (a good thing, in
