Selena Gray

Toby Young’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator magazine captures one of the problems facing the Big Society. It’s not that people don’t want to donate their time to fill in the cracks left by the cuts – it’s that they’re often blocked from doing so. Toby highlights the case of Kensal Rise Library, which a local group of volunteers had hoped to save from the axe. But local council chiefs have hardly greeted their plan for running the library with enthusiasm. As Toby puts it: “On Monday, the council produced its considered response in the form of a 178-page ‘supplement’ to … well, it doesn’t say. In addition to having no table of contents and no index, it has no title.

For the last fortnight, I've been doing an internship at The Spectator. And having seen the furore over Nick Clegg's announcement today, I thought I'd give CoffeeHousers my take. Until I was 22, I'd never heard of internships: no one at my school (Aylwin Girls' School in Bermondsey) went on them. Most of us left school at sixteen, and the jobs we were aiming for were admin, hairdressing, childcare — or, in some cases, motherhood (and welfare). The idea of pupils spending summers doing internships to beef up their CVs was alien to me. If you wanted to work at the head office of a high street bank — which was my first job — then you just applied to a recruitment agency.