The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: My cuts are real, says Francis Maude

We’ve only just begun Sir: In Ross Clark’s article ‘Cuts, what cuts?’ (22 June), he suggested that I was boasting about saving the taxpayer £5.5 billion. It’s true: I’m proud of my department’s Efficiency and Reform Group and the work of civil servants across Whitehall who have sliced out wasteful spending. But the figures he used were 12 months out of date. Last year we saved the public purse £10 billion — 80 per cent up on the figure he quoted. That increase — which doesn’t include the savings from tackling fraud, error and uncollected debt — rather put pay to the Audit Office’s concern that our earlier savings might not have been sustainable.

The Spectator

Barometer | 27 June 2013

Field reports The Glastonbury Festival is once again being held at Michael Eavis’s dairy farm at Pilton, just outside the Somerset town. The venues of some other famous festivals: — Monterey: the festival most associated with the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’ was held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, previously used for jazz festivals. — Woodstock: the 1969 festival was to have been held on an industrial park, but the local council placed a restriction limiting attendance to 5,000, so it moved to a dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur. He was paid $50,000 but was barred from the local shop. — Isle of Wight: the third Isle of Wight festival became the largest festival ever staged, with 600,000 attending.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 27 June 2013

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined cuts of £11.5 billion from departmental spending for the tax-year beginning in 2015. David Gauke, a Treasury minister, gave a ‘firm commitment’ in a letter to backbenchers to introduce a transferable tax allowance of £750 between spouses and civil partners paying tax at the basic rate. This would benefit them by £150 a year at most, and not before the next election. Sir Mervyn King, retiring after ten years as governor of the Bank of England, was to be created a life peer. Mark Harper, the minister for immigration, broke his foot by falling off a table while dancing with his wife in a bar in Soho.

The Spectator

Spending Review: Has George Osborne’s caution condemned Britain to a lost decade?

The Labour party used to joke that the Tories would act as their cleaners: win, take the political pain, abolish the deficit by 2015 and then hand over a balanced budget when they lost the election. George Osborne has, at the very least, put paid to that. His Spending Review this week made it clear how painfully little progress is being made. Whoever wins the next election could close every school, open every prison, cede Northern Ireland, close every embassy and sack every soldier, sailor and airman — and it would still not be enough to put the government back in the black. Britain is a terrifyingly long way from fiscal sanity. If the Chancellor had actually cut the government machine when voters expected him to, the pain would be almost over by now.

The Spectator

Summer reading

Mary Killen Gone Girl by the American writer Gillian Flynn comes recommended by both high- and middle-brow readers (Orion, £7.99). I want the reported total absorption from the off and the welcome relief from thinking about anything other than what’s on the next page. The Blue Riband, Peter York’s anecdotal history of the Piccadilly Line (Penguin, £4.99) is ideal for lounger life as almost every sentence is interesting, stylish and witty, and you can read it aloud at random to pool mates too lazy to hold a book up themselves. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems and Prose (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, £9.99). Just focus on learning by heart, say, three poems per holiday.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Ed Balls’ spending review response: full text

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

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

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