The Spectator
Thursday
Missiles
Letters | 4 April 2013
Quantitative ease Sir: Unlike Louise Cooper (‘The great savings robbery’, 30 March), I don’t have a problem with inflation or quantitative easing. It’s the perfect tax: painless, easy to collect and fair. It’s painless because after having been collected you still have the proverbial pound in your pocket. OK, it’s worth less — but as Louise points out, we don’t really notice. Easy to collect, just order a new batch of twenties from the printers and put the prices up in the shop. And everybody pays exactly the same percentage, and so the relative difference between rich and poor remains the same. Tom Roberts Derby Sir: According to the legend, Fortunatus (he of the bottomless purse) was born in Famagusta. How times change!
Googling the NUT
Googling lessons Delegates at the National Union of Teachers conference complained about Michael Gove’s ‘pub quiz’ curriculum and suggested that children didn’t need to learn facts any more because they could Google them. Some things you can Google about the NUT: — The union was formed on 25 June 1870 as the National Union of Elementary Teachers, and was renamed the NUT in 1889. — It has had only 11 general secretaries since 1870. The current general secretary, Christine Blower, began her career as a French teacher at the ‘socialist Eton’, Holland Park Comprehensive, in 1973. She is reported to earn £142,000 a year.
Portrait of the week | 4 April 2013
Home Housing benefit for council and housing association tenants was reduced by 14 per cent for those deemed to have one spare bedroom and by 25 per cent for those with two or more spare bedrooms. Council Tax Benefit, claimed by 5.9 million families, was transformed into Council Tax Support, supplied by local authority schemes. The Financial Services Authority was replaced by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. In the National Health Service, GP-led groups took control of local budgets and a new board called NHS England began to oversee day-to-day running of services. The introduction of a 111 health helpline throughout England was delayed after some pilot schemes proved unsatisfactory, with callers holding on for hours.
George Osborne’s relish over welfare reform risks recontaminating the Tory brand
For the past few weeks Ed Miliband has repeated the words ‘bedroom tax’ ad nauseum. The average voter may think that such a thing exists. His obsession makes little sense without historic context. The last time a Labour opposition succeeded in attaching the word ‘tax’ to something which a Conservative government preferred to call something else was in 1990 when the Community Charge became almost universally known as the Poll Tax. Labour’s strategy then, depicting the Conservatives as taking sadistic pleasure in trampling upon the poor and weak, had a devastating effect. In those days, Labour posed as the party of compassion — and portrayed the Tories as economic obsessives who would crush the poor through the blackness of their hearts.
Books and Arts – 4 April 2013
45 years ago: The death of Martin Luther King
45 years ago tonight, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was shot and killed as he stood on a motel balcony, aged just 39. Here is the leader from the following week's Spectator: The agony of America, The Spectator, 12 April 1968 The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King at Memphis, Tennessee, on Thursday 4 April has brutally reminded America and the world of the existence of a cancer that is even more menacing than the Vietnam war itself. For the well-intentioned but horribly mistaken imperialist adventure in Vietnam will eventually be ended by American withdrawal. What the conditions of that withdrawal will be, when it will occur, and what political regime will exist in the South after it has been completed, are matters for speculation — and for negotiation.
Sunday
Happy Easter | 31 March 2013
It is a glorious morning, suitable weather to mark this joyous day in the Christian calendar. The leading column in this week’s issue of the magazine considers the Easter story in humanity’s past, present and future, from perspective of non-believers as well as believers. Here’s a short excerpt: ‘Unlike Christmas, it’s a story that doesn’t lend itself to much commercial fuss: no kings or presents. Easter is a story of sacrifice, torture, abandonment and death — and, through it all, triumph over that death. Even in the 21st century; despite all the chocolate eggs, Easter gives us pause. And it’s Easter, not Christmas, that makes Christianity such a radical religion.
