The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 September 2015

From our UK edition

Home The Government decided after all to retain the rules preventing ministers and their departments from publishing campaign material, ‘with some exceptions’, in the month before the referendum on membership of the European Union. The Electoral Commission said the planned wording for the referendum, ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’ could favour the status quo, and proposed adding the words ‘or leave the European Union?’ The government said it accepted the change, but Parliament must decide. Net migration to the UK had reached the unprecedented level of 330,000 in the year to March, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The Spectator

Muscular economics

From our UK edition

From ‘War bonuses’, The Spectator, 4 September 1915: War means a demand for human muscle… At the moment the brain-worker is at a discount. The demand for lawyers, for writers, for musicians, for painters has declined. The only brain-workers who are much wanted are the comparatively small number of people necessary to direct industrial and war operations. Therefore it is inevitable that the wages of manual workers should rise, and it is useless to oppose that upward movement even when it is based on excuses which will not bear examination.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 27 August 2015

From our UK edition

Trimming the ermine Sir: I am a new boy in the House of Lords compared with Viscount Astor — though I did hear Manny Shinwell speak — but he is right that it is bursting at the seams, and something needs to be done about it (‘Peer review’, 22 August). I detect signs of a consensus that the right number of peers is about 450. It is 782 at the moment. In the 16 divisions since the election, the largest number of peers voting was 459. The Lords values its crossbenchers and if their number were set at one fifth of the total, that would yield 90 on this figuring. The remaining 360 could then be proportioned out according to strength in the Commons, with each political grouping being given the freedom to decide how it got from here to there.

The Spectator

Barometer | 27 August 2015

From our UK edition

How many cheats? More data on members of extramarital dating site Ashley Madison were put online. How widespread is adultery? — The 2000 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles found 15% of men and 9% of women admitted an ‘overlapping relationship’ within the previous 12 months. — In 2010 an opinion poll for a dating site found 25% of men and 18% of women had ever cheated on their current partners. — In most cases, however, the cheat seems to get away with it. In 2012, adultery was cited as the reason for one in seven of 118,140 divorces. This accounts for just 0.07% of the UK’s 24 million marriages. Shock figures A man was tasered on an easyJet plane at Gatwick in a row over hand luggage. Which police forces tasered most people last year?

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 27 August 2015

From our UK edition

Home Harriet Harman, the acting leader of the Labour party, said that 3,000 people had had any votes they cast in the Labour leadership contest set aside. Voters for the contest had been reduced from 610,000 to 553,954, mostly because people could not be found on the electoral register, but 1,900 alleged sympathisers with the Greens and 400 Conservatives had been debarred, not to mention Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union. It was admitted that in mid-August the chimes of Big Ben were up to six seconds out. A 1950s Hawker Hunter jet in an air display at Shoreham in West Sussex crashed in a ball of fire on a main road, killing 11 people; the pilot was critically injured.

The Spectator

Gamblin’ man

From our UK edition

When George Osborne visited Sweden, Finland and Denmark  the stock markets of each country promptly fell by about 5 per cent. As soon as he left, they recovered. A coincidence, of course: Osborne’s tour coincided with stock-market jitters, but this nonetheless forced him to look over the precipice — and panic. Britain, he warned, was ‘not immune to what goes on in the world’. Not for the first time, we saw his lips moving but heard Gordon Brown’s voice. ‘We are much better prepared than we would have been a few years ago for this kind of shock,’ he added. If only this were true. As the Chancellor knows, we are far more vulnerable than we were last time.

The Spectator

Discovering Europe

From our UK edition

From ‘A Converted Peace-Man’, The Spectator, 28 August 1915: We have brought the present war upon ourselves in a great measure by the obstinate refusal of the great mass of English politicians to recognise that Europe is a fact, and a very momentous fact, and that to ignore it as they did was a piece of extraordinary folly. We have been cured of that folly now — by a very rough exercise of political surgery, and all that is left for us to do is to take care that we never blind our eyes in the same fashion again.