The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Alan Sked on party politics, and how to win a pony show

From our UK edition

Party politics Sir: I don’t think it is true that I would be unhappy in any party, as Ross Clark suggests (‘The end of the party’ 14 September). I was very happy in the old Liberal party, which I joined as a 14-year-old and did not leave for almost 20 years. I then became a Eurorealist so could not join any major party. Having taken a leading role in the Bruges Group I then set up the Anti-Federalist League, which subsequently became Ukip. Between 1988 and 1997 I spent a huge amount of time writing pamphlets, fighting by-elections, fighting general and European elections, leading parties and campaigns — while all the time teaching and researching at LSE, my only salaried post. So again, I remained consistently in one camp.

The Spectator

Barometer | 19 September 2013

From our UK edition

Vitamins and the veil A judge at Blackfriars Crown Court allowed a niqab-wearing defendant to identify herself only to a policewoman, and a Birmingham college reversed a ban on students wearing veils on the campus. While the debate rages, the Jordanian Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Genetics has identified a hazard associated with the garments: vitamin D deficiency. A study of 5,600 Jordanians revealed that 36.5% of niqab-wearers and 37.9% of hijab-wearers suffered from low levels of vitamin D, compared with 29.5% of women who wore no head covering. Just 5% of men suffered from low levels of vitamin D.

The Spectator

Finally, the IPCC has toned down its climate change alarm. Can rational discussion now begin?

From our UK edition

Next week, those who made dire predictions of ruinous climate change face their own inconvenient truth.  The summary of the fifth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be published, showing that global temperatures are refusing to follow the path which was predicted for them by almost all climatic models. Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has been predicting that global temperatures would be rising at an average of 0.2° Celsius per decade. Now, the IPCC acknowledges that there has been no statistically significant rise at all over the past 16 years. It is difficult to over-emphasise the significance of this report. The IPCC is not simply a research body making reports and declarations which are merely absorbed into political debate.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 September 2013

From our UK edition

Home The government sold 6 per cent of Lloyds Banking Group to big investors for £3.2 billion. It still owns 32.7 per cent of the bank. Barclays published details of plans to raise £5.95 billion by issuing new shares. The Financial Conduct Authority warned Barclays of a £50 million fine for a deal with Qatari investors in 2008, in which it failed to ‘act with integrity’ towards shareholders; Barclays contests this. Blitz Games of Leamington, a computer games designers, closed its doors after 23 years. Inflation measured by the consumer prices index fell from 2.8 per cent to 2.7 per cent, but by the retail prices index rose from 3.1 to 3.3 per cent.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Lib Dem conference: Nick Clegg’s speech – full text and audio

From our UK edition

listen to ‘Nick Clegg: 'We want to get in to government next time around'’ on Audioboo Three years ago – nearly three and a half – I walked into the Cabinet Office for my first day as Deputy Prime Minister. Picture it: history in the making as a Liberal Democrat leader entered, finally, into the corridors of power, preparing to unshackle Britain after years of Labour and Conservative rule. Only to arrive and find an empty room and one shell-shocked civil servant promising me we’d get on with things shortly – but first he had to get us some desks. You saw the calm bit in the rose garden. What you didn’t see was the utter chaos indoors. To say the Coalition caught Whitehall off guard is a massive understatement.