Matthew Parris

Here’s something that continues to perplex me. Here’s something that continues to perplex me. How is it that the best of American cinema and theatre is so often simultaneously sharp, sophisticated — and trite? I’ve just been to see a tremendous new play at the Almeida in Islington, whose run ends this week. Becky Shaw has been a hit on Broadway and has enjoyed instant appeal in London too. It certainly appealed to me. Gina Gionfriddo has written a mordant, mostly cruel comedy of modern American manners, and the action and the repartee rattle along, intense, quickfire and merciless, with a brutality that leaves you breathless.

I enjoy BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions and feel privileged when I am asked to join Jonathan Dimbleby’s panel. I enjoy BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions and feel privileged when I am asked to join Jonathan Dimbleby’s panel. But like (I suspect) any other panellist when the On Air light goes on, I’m conscious of a temptation to play to the gallery and adjust my opinions and the force with which I express them to maximise either cheers or boos — or at least elicit a strong reaction. The reaction one most fears is the bored or baffled silence that may follow too nuanced or uncertain an answer. This is not a modern tendency, or the peculiar influence of Any Questions. It’s the way an open democracy pushes those who seek public approval.

The presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was doing a quick round-up of the weather on a freezing December morning, just before signing off at 9 a.m. Very cold all over Britain, he said. Later there would be ‘snow in the north of the country’. ‘Which country?’ I thought. It was an immediate and unconsidered reaction; and of course on reflection context often does make clear. But not in this case. I still don’t know which country Today meant. If the country they were referring to was Great Britain then they must have meant snow in Scotland. If it was England they were talking about then we in the north Midlands were due for snow too. A small confusion, and slight enough. But faintly it troubled me.

Paradoxical I know, but I must first explain that there’s little point in my writing this, and somebody else should. Paradoxical I know, but I must first explain that there’s little point in my writing this, and somebody else should. The column it’s futile for me to write sounds a warning about the mess we’re making of MPs’ pay and allowances; and the danger not only that we discourage capable men and women from considering a political career, but that we relegate the status of politics and its practitioners in a way that may reverberate through generations to come. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), paralysed by the hysteria over MPs’ expenses that gave birth to it, is behaving with bone-headed insensitivity.

Two words have been everywhere touted during this political season: ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’. Two words have been everywhere touted during this political season: ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’. By the time you read this, after Wednesday’s comprehensive spending review, occurrences of the first will have reached epidemic proportions. Let us examine both. Among Western nations an understanding has dawned that our long-established global economic preponderance is floundering; so we can afford less of the luxury of concern for the weakest in society, a drag on economic competitiveness. From the French revolution’s trio of goals, égalité is being quietly dropped.

Matthew Parris offers Another Voice It so happened that last Friday, before my partner and I set off from Derbyshire for the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool, he drove over to Cannock, to report a meeting called to discuss the consequences for South Staffordshire of looming spending cuts. He (his name is Julian Glover) writes for the Guardian and wanted to describe the meeting for his column that Monday. This, inter alia, was what he wrote: ‘Education spending in Staffordshire this year is £805 million, or £4,078 per pupil — 63 per cent up on the level of 2003 to 2004. In just three years, South Staffordshire Primary Care Trust’s resources limit has risen from £663 million to £888 million: up 44 per cent.’ Great Scot.

The Blairite ‘Respect agenda’ is bunkum. We must all be free to insult each other or else only bullies will prevail Stealthily, an idea which was born under New Labour has wormed itself into the imagination of post-millennial Britain. It is the concept of Respect, not least as applied to how we talk or write about each other. The implications of the ‘Respect agenda’ for free speech are perilous, and subterranean — the more insidious for imposing self-censorship by means of a model of supposed 21st-century good manners backed by laws which ‘send a message’ and chill the climate in which ‘hate-speech’ might otherwise occur.