The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Ed Balls’ spending review response: full text

From our UK edition

listen to ‘Spending review 2013: the Coffee House analysis’ on Audioboo The Chancellor spoke for over 50 minutes - but not once did he mention the real reason for this Spending Review today: his comprehensive failure on living standards, growth and on the deficit too. Prices rising faster than wages. Families worse off. Long-term unemployment up. Welfare spending soaring. The economy flatlining. The slowest recovery for over 100 years. And the result of this failure? For all the Budget boasts, borrowing last year not down but up. Not balancing the books as he promised, but in 2015 a deficit of £96 billion. More borrowing to pay for his economic failure.

The Spectator

The demise of Julia Gillard

From our UK edition

Following Julia Gillard's ousting as Prime Minister of Australia, here is the leading article from this week's Spectator Australia examining her political demise. In recent weeks, authority and credibility had been draining away from Julia Gillard as if from an open wound. The effect of three years of mounting mistrust in the country and her party over any number of missteps, setbacks and policy debacles, coupled with pathetically low opinion polls, finally undermined Australia’s first female prime minister. Those who rallied around her did so with little more than fatalism. Theirs was a contemporary Charge of the Light Brigade.

Monday

The Spectator

The week in books | 24 June 2013

From our UK edition

This week’s issue of the Spectator is packed with book reviews. Here’s a selection of quotes to whet your appetite. Old China hand Jonathan Mirsky finds much to applaud in Rana Mitter’s history of the Sino-Japanese war. ‘Into the Fifties, as Mitter outlines, a storm gathered in the US over ‘who lost China’; and those Americans who had praised Mao and had urged Washington to deal seriously with him were vilified — chiefly by Senator McCarthy — as ‘Comsymps’ who had engineered the ‘loss’. All this is well handled by Mitter. But he appears not to know that one significant figure, John Service, a China-born foreign service officer, more than admired the Communist side.

Thursday