The Spectator

Friday

The Spectator

Save on your energy bills with The Spectator – and help fix the broken market

In a healthy, competitive market, prices go down when costs go down. Not in the energy market. As Ofgem announced this week, the wholesale cost of gas and electricity has dropped by more than a third since this time last year, but our bills have increased. Wholesale power is the cheapest it's been since 2010, so why haven’t the savings been passed onto consumers? The energy industry usually blames price rises on increasing wholesale costs, so the announcement those costs are going down is tricky for them. This week Energy UK, the Big Six trade body, said: ‘Wholesale energy is just one of a number of costs outside of an energy company’s control, which make up a household bill’.

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: The trouble with religion, alternatives to HS2, and whisky-drinking dogs

A history of persecution Sir: Colin Brown (Letters, 7 June) ignores some good reasons for keeping religion out of society. Small groups of believers are fine, but not totalitarian dictatorships. The early Christians were treated as heretics until 313 ad, when Constantine made what became the Roman Catholic Church the official religion of the Roman Empire. The church promptly started persecuting all other religious groups. In the Middle Ages the Church let loose the Inquisition and decimated civilised communities such as the Albigensians. As for his statement that ‘all religions have provided society with ethical and moral rules’, how ethical were the laws and morals that subjugated women and slaves and persecuted anyone who questioned the authority and dogma of the Church?

The Spectator

If you thought this World Cup was weird, take a look at Brazil 1950

Old world Brazil has struggled to get ready for the World Cup, even though it hosted it before, in 1950. Some oddities of that tournament: — There was no final, as such. The winner was to be decided by a second group stage. But it came down to the last match, Brazil vs Uruguay, in which Brazil needed a draw and Uruguay a win. Uruguay won 2-1. — That match, at Rio do Janeiro’s Maracana stadium, still holds the record of the best-attended match in World Cup history, with 199,954 spectators. — Only 13 out of 16 teams who qualified turned up. Scotland could have gone but stuck to their manager’s promise that they would only attend if they beat England in qualifying. India withdrew supposedly because banned from playing barefoot.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 June 2014

Home After an Ofsted inspection of 21 schools in Birmingham (none of them faith schools), against the background of allegations of attempts of a Muslim takeover in a so-called Operation Trojan Horse, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, joined Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, in seizing upon an observation by Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, that ‘all maintained schools and academies, including faith and non-faith schools, must promote the values of wider British society’. Five of the schools were put under ‘special measures’.