The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: James Whitaker’s widow answers Toby Young

From our UK edition

Absent friends Sir: Alec Marsh (‘Welcome to Big Venice’, 10 August) accurately observes that Londoners are priced out of central London by largely foreign buyers of second homes. Wealthy foreigners not only buy, they also rent, often living in London for a few years, during which they frequently return to their first home for weeks or months at a time. In Marylebone, where I have lived for 43 years, an average earner can neither buy nor rent. Moreover, rentals are only short hold. This contributes to the death of communities: it is not their foreignness which makes the new residents bad neighbours, nor their love of the convenient transport and vastly expensive shops and restaurants, but their transience and consequent lack of interest in local people, history and customs.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 August 2013

From our UK edition

Home The population of the United Kingdom rose by 420,000, to 63.7 million, by the middle of last year, with the number of births, 813,000 (more than a quarter to mothers born abroad), being the highest since 1972. Thames Water asked the regulator Ofwat to allow it to impose a 12 per cent increase on bills. Unemployment fell by 4,000 to 2.51 million in the second quarter. Regulated rail fares will rise by 4.1 per cent, a percentage point higher than the rate of inflation in July, which, measured by the Retail Prices Index, fell from 3.3 to 3.1 per cent, and, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, from 2.9 to 2.8 per cent. The rate of house price inflation rose from 2.9 per cent to 3.1 per cent. Jeremy Paxman appeared on Newsnight with a beard.

The Spectator

Barometer | 15 August 2013

From our UK edition

Ward ceremony There have been 29 health secretaries since 1948. How many have wards that — though not necessarily named after them — bear their surname? NYE BEVAN Hillingdon, Harlow, Ealing, East London, Princess Alexandra, Stepping Hall (Stockport) ENOCH POWELL Lewisham Hospital KENNETH ROBINSON Mile End, Lewes, Chesterfield, St Andrews BARBARA CASTLE Warwick, Royal Berkshire, Worthing PATRICK JENKIN West Cumbria KEN CLARKE Kent and Canterbury, Northwick Park, Royal Hampshire STEPHEN DORRELL Royal Berkshire ALAN JOHNSON Lincoln, Bridling, Buxton (closing) ANDY BURNHAM Nottingham City The price of progress NHS funding has trebled since 1997. Some performance indicators over that period VISITS TO A&E Total number Q2 2003 3.21m Q2 2005 3.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Interns, stop whingeing!

From our UK edition

In this week's Spectator, Brendan O'Neill turns on unpaid interns who complain about their lot, arguing that they should instead be paying their employers for the opportunity. He attacks the argument that unpaid internships hit working class young people the hardest, when these placements will encourage self-drive, rather than self pity. O'Neill writes: It speaks volumes about the parlous state of modern history teaching that these interns so liberally refer to themselves as ‘slaves’. Anyone who had been taught properly about the Roman era, or about black slavery in early America, or about the Holocaust, would know that there’s rather more to being a slave than being asked by a gruff boss to buy him a hazelnut latte.

Friday

The Spectator

The week in books – Tudors, thinkers, dreamers and boozers

From our UK edition

The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them. The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins. ‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir.

The Spectator

Being uncharitable

From our UK edition

William Shawcross’s comments earlier in the week, following the disclosure that the number of staff at foreign aid charities earning salaries greater than £100,000 a year has grown from 19 to 30 since 2010, caused consternation. The leading article in this week’s Spectator makes two points on the subject. 1). The expansion of the DfID budget has coincided with the growth of executive pay at charities, just as the expansion of the health budget under Blair and Brown coincided with the growth of staff pay in the NHS. Criticism of salaries should never be motivated by envy, but neither the charitable sector nor the NHS has provided adequate results to justify such salaries. HIV and malaria are yet to be eradicated.

Thursday