Interconnect

Thursday

Interconnect

Too much government meddling undermines the energy market

From our UK edition

Pity Ed Davey. At some point in the next few months, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary is going to have to sit down and decide how much nuclear power is going to cost for the next few decades. It is not an easy decision. On one side are nuclear firms threatening to pull out of building new power plants if they do not get the price they want. All those jobs not created. All that low carbon energy not generated. All those windfarms that will have to be built instead, with all their protest groups and angry backbench Tories. On the other side are households and business, already worried about rising energy bills. And don't forget those greens, many of whom are hostile to nuclear power and ready to protest to prove it. It is not as though it is the only decision in his in-tray.

Monday

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The Libor mud-slinging makes things murkier

From our UK edition

As the inquiry into Libor-fixing by the Treasury Select Committee rolls on, two things become apparent - one, as the muck spreads across the financial community it actually becomes harder to tell exactly where the buck stops, and two, the toothlessness of such inquiries themselves. As more bankers and officials are hauled before the TSC, the criss-crossing blame game that’s going on looks like it may serve only to obfuscate, rather than illuminate, matters. Today, Barclays ex-chief operating officer Jerry del Missier said it was his former boss Bob Diamond who told him to submit lower Libor rates, as a counter to Diamond’s testimony last week that del Missier misinterpreted an email.

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A crowded island – but mainly in the South East

From our UK edition

By Matt Cavanagh The 2011 Census, published today, shows that the population of England and Wales reached 56.1 million, up by 3.7 million since 2001, and slightly higher than previous estimates. The three facts which are likely to make the headlines are: that this is the largest ten-year increase since the Census began in 1801; that over half (55 per cent) of the increase was due to net migration; and that the population density of England, at just over 400 people per square kilometre, is higher than G8 countries and all major EU countries except the Netherlands. But there is more to the Census than these headlines suggest.

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MPs should move their money from big banks

From our UK edition

by Stephen Williams MP The Libor scandal has shown the UK’s banking sector in its worst light. The public has lost trust in the big banks and are concerned that their politicians are more interested in political point scoring than the urgent task of fixing our broken banking system. That is why, last year, I joined the Move Your Money campaign, which urges the public to use their consumer power to change the behaviour of the big banks by moving their money, or at least some of it, to ethical, local or mutual financial institutions. The stats show that we are more likely to go through a couple of divorces than move away from our bank.  But moving our money would make them sit up.  So why not open an account with an ethical bank?

Saturday

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Competition: Decalogue

From our UK edition

In Competition No. 2740 you were invited to submit the ten work Commandments of the writer of your choice, living or dead. There were some cracking entries this week — far more winners than there is space to print. Here is a taste of Brian Murdoch’s Tolkien: ‘1. If a book’s worth writing, it’s worth spinning out to three volumes ... 4. You don’t need many women; it’s a man’s world in Middle Earth and 1930s Oxford colleges’; G.M. Davis’s Patience Strong: ‘Why dwell on thoughts that might give pain?/ Bring joy, like sunshine after rain.’ And J. Seery’s Hemingway: ‘if the writing is not running like a properly punched nose 1. Punch somebody. 2. If that fails, shoot a big, dangerous animal. Try a lion.

Saturday

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Competition: Unauthorised versions

From our UK edition

In Competition No. 2736 you were invited to submit bible stories as retold by modern authors. There were plenty of eager contenders, and unsurprisingly so. Works of heavyweight literary scholarship have documented the all-pervasive influence of the King James Bible on British and American literature. The rhythms of its language are clearly discernible in the work of writers as diverse as Wodehouse, Hemingway and Kipling, who mined not only its style but its content too. Kipling’s phrase ‘dark places of the earth’ (from Psalm 74:20) is also borrowed by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. You clearly had great fun with this assignment, letting the likes of Jilly Cooper, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling loose on Sunday School favourites. I was especially entertained by E.

Saturday

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A traitor’s tale

From our UK edition

Leaving the Labour party is uniquely traumatic, as Luke Bozier has just discovered – and I know all too well Even now, exactly 17 years later, I can still remember the sense of anxiety gripping me on that fateful morning. The storm was about to break. I had taken a step that would irrevocably change my life. It was a damp, drizzly Thursday in late January 1995 and the latest edition of The Spectator had just come out, carrying an explosive article by me in which I savaged Labour’s record in local government and warned that the same addiction to waste, bureaucracy and politically correct ideology would be followed at a national level if Tony Blair gained power at the next election. This was the first piece I had ever had published.

Saturday

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Travel Extra: Blue Danube – Cruising for Christmas

From our UK edition

How was it for you? Christmas, I mean. Was it a week of joy and revelry? Or was it, like mine, a rather miserable few days of pretending not to be bored stiff? The solution may be to take a year off — take a cruise: somewhere that matches the character of the season. There is no place on earth more beautiful than the banks of the Danube in December. Fire scorches the mantelpieces of ancient schlosses, snow covers the forests, the lights glimmer in the waters below Budapest, and songs resonate around the drinking halls of Salzburg. What more magical way of spending Christmas?

Saturday

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Competition: Two bridges

From our UK edition

In Competition No. 2723 you were invited to supply an updated version of Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’. A reading of the sonnet on Westminster Bridge in September 2002, to commemorate its 200th anniversary, was all but drowned out by the roar of the rush hour. A far cry, then, from Wordsworth’s view of a slumbering city, ‘silent, bare’, dominated by St Paul’s, with fields to the south. It was described thus in a diary entry by the poet’s sister: ‘The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand Spectacles.

Saturday

Thursday

Saturday