As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left?

By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office. George Osborne claimed that inequality had fallen in his budget speech and the Institute of Fiscal Studies confirmed this, if you assume everyone has faced the same rate of inflation since he became Chancellor.

The fact that Labour’s track record on tackling income inequality is worse than the coalition’s doesn’t mean present levels are acceptable, of course. The median income of the highest-earning 10 per cent of couples with two children is roughly eight times larger than the median income of their equivalents in the bottom 10 per cent. Is that too high?

Few conservatives would object to income inequality on principle. Rather, it is regarded as the inevitable consequence of the fact that talents are distributed unequally, with some being able to charge more for their labour than others. For the most part, conservatives have the same attitude towards wealth inequality (which has grown over the course of the last parliament, thanks mainly to rising property prices). Like Peter Mandelson, we’re intensely relaxed about the rich.

We might be more troubled by in-equality if it was leading to more crime, but it isn’t. According to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales, crime has fallen to its lowest level since the surveyors started collecting data in 1981. Violent crimes and sexual offences have increased by a small amount since 2002/3, but that’s due to changes in the way they’re recorded. The murder rate in London has fallen to its lowest since the 1960s.

The big issue for conservatives is not inequality per se, but the condition of the poor — sometimes referred to as ‘the long tail’. Did they suffer more under the coalition than under Labour, as the proliferation of food banks would suggest? In fact, poverty has fallen in the last parliament, provided you define it in relative terms, i.e. those households earning less than 60 per cent of the median income. Again, figures aren’t available for the last two years, but in 2012/13 relative poverty (before housing costs are factored in) was at its lowest point since 1985.

Broadly speaking, relative poverty is declining for the same reasons that income inequality is. The rich are paying more in tax than they were five years ago and the coalition cut tax for 26 million people and took three million out of tax altogether. In addition, almost two million new jobs have been created and the unemployment rate has fallen significantly since Labour left office. To claim that those who’ve found jobs in the last five years are all on zero-hours contracts, as Owen Jones would have us believe, is false. Fewer than 700,000 people are on zero-hours contracts in the labour force, a mere 2.3 per cent of the total.

True, social mobility isn’t what it might be and that’s a real issue for conservatives. But defenders of the last government can point to Michael Gove’s education reforms and the record numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university, where ‘disadvantaged’ is defined as those living in households in the bottom income quintile. They comprised 18.3 per cent of the total last year, the highest percentage on record. So much for the argument that the rise in tuition fees would deter children from low-income families from applying to university.

What about the children from disadvantaged families who don’t go to university? The coalition created over two million apprenticeships and the Conservatives have pledged to create an additional three million in the next parliament.

All in all, I don’t think supporters of the last government have too much to be ashamed of when it comes to income inequality and relative poverty — and the Conservatives have the best policy when it comes to tackling wealth inequality, which is extending home ownership. Try to remember that over the next five weeks when angry lefties try to shame you into voting Labour.

Politicians should leave the wealthy alone– they already contribute more than their fair share

Join us on 22 April for a Spectator debate on wealth and politics. Are wealth taxes the answer? Or is it wrong to squeeze the rich? Chaired by Andrew Neil.For the motion: Toby Young, William Cash and Fraser Nelson. Against the motion: Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Molly Scott Cato MEP. For tickets and further information click here.

The post Lefty myths about inequality appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve been trying to think of a good football analogy to describe the battle between the two main parties as the general election approaches. One suggestion is the second leg of a Champions League game, with the Conservatives having won the first leg by one goal to nil. If we assume that the Tories are playing at home, that means Labour have to score two goals to win, whereas all the Tories have to do is not concede. Last week’s debate certainly felt like that, with Cameron playing a tight, defensive game and Miliband trying to score at every opportunity. The Conservative leader ended up winning on aggregate because the Labour leader failed to find the back of the net.

But a Champions League match suggests two teams of real quality, which is where the analogy breaks down. The past few weeks have felt more like a game in the bottom half of the Championship, something I’m all too familiar with as a QPR supporter. In these games you rarely see any quality. Rather, the team that wins is the one that makes the fewest unforced errors. Forget about Real Madrid versus Bayern Munich. This is Millwall versus Brighton on a rainy Tuesday night in April.

So far Labour seem to be making more mistakes than the Tories, although I’m biased. After the first televised clash, I was worried that Cameron might have made a tactical blunder in agreeing to the ‘debates’ — generally regarded as the biggest unforced error of the 2010 campaign. But watching Miliband struggling to stand out from the crowd in the seven-way debate was reassuring. That one also produced a marvellous own-goal in the form of Miliband’s revision notes, which he left behind in the green room.

The biggest unforced error to date has been committed by one of the smaller party leaders, and I don’t mean Natalie Bennett’s car-crash interview on LBC. I’m talking about Nicola Sturgeon telling the French ambassador that she didn’t rate Miliband and would prefer Cameron to remain as Prime Minister. That’s assuming she actually said it, of course, which she’s denied. As a Tory who doesn’t want Labour to recover in Scotland, I’d love to believe the memo was some sort of Zinoviev letter but I think it’s probably correct. After all, it’s no secret that it would suit the SNP’s purpose to have a Tory bogeyman in No. 10 rather than Ed Miliband. The likeliest explanation is that Sturgeon was more honest than she should have been with the French ambassador, not realising that the French embassy in London would, as a matter of diplomatic convention, relay the contents of the conversation back to the Foreign Office.

Michael Kinsley, the veteran American political commentator, defined a ‘gaffe’ as ‘when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say’ and Sturgeon’s mistake falls into that category. So too did Cameron’s admission in a television interview with James Landale that he doesn’t want to remain in office for a third term. That proved to be a distraction from the Conservatives’ main campaign theme, which was unhelpful, but I don’t think the mistake was as grave as some political pundits maintained. Their claim that it ‘fired the starting gun’ in the Conservative leadership battle and licensed them to speculate about Cameron’s successor should be taken with a pinch of salt. Since when did they need an excuse?

It’s hard to know what impact these mistakes will have. Turned out the public thought better of Cameron after his third-term ‘gaffe’ than they did before, and the fact that Miliband was over-prepared for the second debate won’t have registered outside Westminster. In Sturgeon’s case, she and her allies won’t have any trouble convincing the SNP’s supporters that she’s the victim of some fiendish Tory plot, even if the memo actually helps Labour. True, fewer than 20,000 people have to change their minds in fewer than 20 seats for the Conservatives to win an overall majority, but there’s no evidence these key voters are paying any attention. In general, floating voters are less interested in politics than committed partisans.

That’s where my Millwall-Brighton analogy collapses. Yes, both main parties will commit some absolute howlers, but they’ll go largely unnoticed. In the end, the party that wins will be the one that most resembles Manchester United under Alex Ferguson — that is, the team that can grind out a result even when it’s playing badly. My money’s still on the Conservatives.

The post Miliband vs Millwall appeared first on The Spectator.

I’m disappointed that Ed Balls’s suggestion that the Office of Budget Responsibility should audit the parties’ manifestos was never taken up, not least because we will never know what Robert Chote thinks of the Green party’s claim that all its proposals are ‘fully costed’. Believe it or not, this includes the commitment to spend £45 billion on loft insulation in the next parliament.

It’s quite something, the Greens’ manifesto. No doubt you’ll have already read about some of their more reasonable measures — such as the ‘complete ban on cages for hens and rabbits’ and the insistence that ‘UK taxpayers’ money is not used for bullfighting’. But the sheer scale of their financial profligacy is breathtaking.

In total, the party estimates its proposals — which include doubling child benefit, jacking up the state pension to £180 a week and an extra £12 billion for the NHS — would increase public expenditure by £177 billion a year by 2020. But don’t be alarmed because, according to Natalie Bennett, a Green government would be raising an additional £198 billion a year in taxes by then. That’s right, the Greens are predicting a budget surplus by the end of the next parliament. They believe that their entire suite of measures can be more than paid for by a few simple tax increases. These are listed in a chapter of the manifesto called ‘It does all add up’.

For instance, they’d impose a 2 per cent annual levy on the net worth of anyone with assets valued at over £3 million, so if you own a house worth £10 million you’d have to hand over £200,000 to HMRC. This ‘wealth tax’ would generate £25 billion a year, apparently. The party also thinks it can raise £6.7 billion from an ‘unhealthy food tax’, £12.5 billion from raising corporation tax and £20 billion from a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ on financial transactions. (Shouldn’t it be called a ‘King John Tax’?)

But that only gets you so far, so the Greens would raise a further £80 billion a year from ‘other’ measures, such as abolishing capital gains tax allowances (£3.3 billion), increasing duty on alcohol and tobacco (£5.7 billion) and — of course — clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion, otherwise known as the Magic Money Tree. That last measure is good for a whopping £30 billion a year.

Far be it from me to predict how a sober-minded economist might react to this ‘costed plan’, but I imagine he or she would ask whether the Greens have factored in the ‘behavioural effect’ these measures would in all likelihood give rise to. For instance, the party estimates that raising the top rate of tax to 60 per cent would generate an additional £2.3 billion a year in revenue. But that seems unlikely, to put it mildly. According to the Treasury’s analysis, Alistair Darling’s decision to raise the top rate from 40 to 50 per cent in his 2010 budget yielded much less than the anticipated amount because of the ‘considerable behavioural response to the rate change’. The Treasury concluded that it was ‘quite possible’ that the overall impact on tax revenues in 2010/11 was ‘negative’.

It’s not hard to imagine the ‘behavioural response’ of high-net-worth individuals to taxing their assets by 2 per cent a year, or of investment banks to a ‘Robin Hood Tax’, or of some businesses to the hike in corporation tax. They’d relocate offshore just as soon as possible, notwithstanding the new Green tariff on air travel (£16 billion). As with Darling’s rate change, the effect of all these taxes could quite easily be ‘negative’.

Of course the reason no serious economist has subjected the Green party’s policies to a forensic analysis is because no one expects Natalie Bennett to be the next Prime Minister. The nearest we got to that was Nick Ferrari’s cross-examination of her on LBC, an interview that produced the now-famous ‘brain fade’ moment in which she was unable to answer a single question abouthow any of her proposals would be funded.

Yet, incredibly, some 5 per cent of the population say they’re going to vote Green on 7 May. Until recently I assumed that these people were complete nutjobs, but I sat next to a level-headed Oxford graduate at a dinner party the other day who told me she was a member of the party. Politics really does make otherwise sensible people behave very oddly. Will she change her mind after reading the Green manifesto? I’d love to think so, but I doubt it.

The post The extraordinary Green manifesto appeared first on The Spectator.

Not a day passes when I don’t look on my father’s record with shock and awe. I’m not talking about his authorship of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, his invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ or his creation of the Open University. I’m talking about the fact that he fathered a child at the age of 80. How on earth did he cope?

My eldest was born when I was 40, with three more following in quick succession, and I already think of myself as an old dad. The problem is, they want to play with me all the time — rough, competitive, physical games — and it’s completely debilitating. The boys, aged six, seven and ten, are particularly demanding. I’m just not up to it. God knows how my father managed to stay alive until he was 86.

Until recently, I was required to play on the trampoline for at least 30 minutes a day. Put aside the issue of just how undignified it is for an overweight 51-year-old male with ‘man boobs’ to bounce up and down. If you’re over 40, dignity goes out the window the moment your first child appears. No, the issue was that my children invented a game called ‘trampoline dodgeball’ — or ‘incoming’ for short — that is almost guaranteed to produce cardiac arrest in anyone above the age of 25. After ten minutes of vigorous play I would be gasping for breath like a trout at the bottom of a bucket.

Salvation appeared in the form of a rag-and-bone man who turned up on my doorstep in January. Did I have any scrap metal I wanted to get rid of? As a matter of fact, I did! I led him down to the bottom of the garden, pointed at the trampoline and told him that if he could dismantle it before the children got home from school he was welcome to it. ‘No problem, squire,’ he said.

I was expecting them to be furious, but no. The three boys took one look at the empty garden and started hopping around with joy. Unbeknownst to me they’d been having a long-running argument with their sister about whether to keep the trampoline and now, it seemed, I’d inadvertently sided with them. ‘That’s brilliant, Dad,’ said six-year-old Charlie. ‘Now we can play football.’

Seconds later I was being dragged into the garden for a game of ‘three-and-in’, which would have been OK if I’d been allowed to be in goal. Instead, I had to compete with Charlie and the seven-year-old to try and get three goals past the ten-year-old. Given that the ‘goal’ consisted of a small cardboard box on its side, this was nigh-on impossible. It didn’t help that we were playing with a ball so small — a squash ball, I think — that I couldn’t see it without my bifocals.

Needless to say, they now insist that I play football with them every evening. I’ve invested in a proper ball and a couple of pop-up goals, but that hasn’t helped much. Instead of ‘three-and-in’ we play ‘two-a-side’ — and, again, I’m not allowed to be in goal. Rather, the boys take it in turns to be on my team, knowing full well that whoever plays with me will lose. Not that it’s a quick death. The standard rule is ‘first to 15’, which can take up to 45 minutes given the goalkeeping athleticism of my sons. The sessions end with me humiliated and drenched in sweat, often nursing a pulled muscle or ligament injury.

Later, when the children have gone to bed, Caroline commiserates with me, but with barely concealed sadistic glee. Her favourite trick after listening to me reel off a list of symptoms — ‘My left arm has gone numb! D’you think I’m having a heart attack?’ — is to suggest we hire a ‘manny’, i.e. a male nanny who could play with the boys without collapsing from exhaustion. She isn’t completely joking, either. One of her friends managed to find a 21-year-old German man on an au pair website who looks like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brad Pitt. She flew him over the following day and this Adonis is now installed in the spare bedroom. Her two sons absolutely adore him, while her husband says he feels like an abandoned motor car waiting to be carted off to the junkyard.

I daren’t risk having a ‘manny’ in the house so I’m going to soldier on. I suppose I should be grateful that my children still want to play football with me. But my chances of living until I’m 86 are vanishing-to-zero.

The post The hazards of being a good sport appeared first on The Spectator.

A couple of weeks ago I returned to my old Oxford college for a ‘gaudy’ — posh, Oxford-speak for a reunion. This one was for those of us who came up to Brasenose in 1983, 1984 and 1985. That group includes the Prime Minister but, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. I imagine he didn’t want to risk being photographed at a black-tie dinner with a bunch of his Oxford pals in the middle of a general election campaign — or maybe he just finds these occasions a bit of a bore.

When I attended my first gaudy about 15 years ago, I assumed that the only people who’d bother to turn up would be those who’d made a success of their lives and they’d spend the entire time bragging about it. In fact, it was much more random than that. The successful and the unsuccessful were mixed up together and if their different career trajectories were a source of tension, it soon disappeared after the first drink. I was expecting my Oxford contemporaries to have become more status-conscious with age, but it wasn’t apparent on that night. It was as if they were able to shed their personal histories and return to a more innocent period in their lives when they still had everything before them.

It was the same on this occasion. The experiences we’d had since leaving Brasenose 30 years ago seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke and we were transported back in time to the mid-1980s. Looking at all the familiar faces sitting in the dining hall, I felt like I was in an Oxford version of Back to the Future. Except in this case the Hollywood special effects wizards had used their magic to make everyone look 30 years older. When I was talking to the people I’d been closest to, I had to suppress the impulse to grab them and pull the pillows out from under their shirts and wipe the ageing make-up from their faces.

This through-the-looking-glass feeling was partly due to everyone reverting to type — falling back into the roles and routines that had defined them 30 years ago. Take the after-dinner speech given by Jim Hawkins, now the headmaster of Harrow. Jim had been part of a group of down-to-earth undergraduates who, after a few pints in the college bar, liked nothing more than to take the mickey out of another group of students known as ‘the left caucus’. Needless to say, the privileged status of these left-wing firebrands, many of whom had been to Eton, was often a source of merriment — and so it proved two weeks ago.

‘Life was not all about dining clubs and carousing,’ said Jim. ‘There was political awareness too: anti-Thatcher demos, the Monday Club visit, the “Why assume I’m a heterosexual” campaign. We even had our own left caucus. Some flirted with it — some embraced the cactus wholeheartedly. Incidentally, it has been good to see so many members of the left caucus at Harrow open mornings in recent years…’

That brought the house down and made me think what a shame it was the Prime Minister wasn’t there. He would have enjoyed that joke.

Afterwards, in the bar, I fell into conversation with some of my old friends and, as I learned what they’d been doing in the intervening 30 years, their present-day selves began to eclipse their student selves. The stories they told were almost all tales of woe — career burnout, divorce, the indescribable horrors of teenage children. No doubt this was partly just good manners, with no one wanting to make anyone else feel bad because they’d had a less happy life than them. But it was also because most of them had genuinely messed up their lives. The striking thing was how much nicer they’d become as a result. Their experiences hadn’t left them embittered, but had enlarged and deepened them, made them more human.

Another thing that took me by surprise was how much sentimental attachment I felt to my old college. Not just to the people I’d been there with and the dons who’d taught us 30 years ago, some of whom were still there. But to the bricks and mortar — the old quadrangle and the porters’ lodge. That’s part of the point of these occasions, of course — to get you to donate to the college fund — and, by golly, it works. A few more gaudies like this one and I’ll be redrafting my will, leaving all my goods and chattels to Brasenose. My children better watch out, particularly during their horrible teenage years.

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I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is dead. I don’t think it is, but it has lost a good deal of vitality in recent years and the role of satire in the general election campaign is a case in point. There has been no shortage of ‘satirical’ television programmes, but none of them have cut through. The only sign of life has been the flurry of photoshopped images on Twitter that have followed each misstep of the parties’ campaigns, such as Ed Miliband’s decision to carve Labour’s election pledges on to an eight-foot stone slab. If Stanley Kubrick was still alive he’d be suing people for illegally reproducing images from the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What accounts for satire’s declining health? I don’t hold with the textbook explanation, which is that standards in public life have sunk so low that nothing a satirist could come up with could be as bad as the reality. This was what Tom Lehrer had in mind when he said political satire died when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. The trouble is, every generation thinks politics has hit rock bottom, but it just keeps on getting worse. In 2012, the Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union.

A more plausible theory is that political correctness has made satire much more dangerous. There’s no shortage of big fat targets for satirists to take aim at, but most of them are protected by a praetorian guard of professional offence-takers, ready to take to the airwaves at the slightest sign of disrespect and demand the arrest of the miscreant in question. Or if that doesn’t work, they come round to your place of work and shoot you. If Spitting Image was still on, would anyone involved dare to broadcast a sketch called ‘Miss Arab World’ in which the religious leader of Iran had to judge a parade of Muslim women in full burkas? I doubt it.

But I’m not sure you can blame the decline of political satire on these attacks on free speech. After all, some of the most celebrated works of satire have been produced under the most brutal, oppressive regimes. A case in point is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, an indictment of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Admittedly, it wasn’t published until 33 years after Bulgakov’s death, but the fact that satire was considered so subversive by the Soviet authorities gave it a power and importance that it lacks in liberal democracies. Forcing satire underground keeps it alive.

No, I think the reason political satire has lost so much of its bite is because the status of politicians had declined in the past 50 years or so. Back in 1961, when the Establishment first opened its doors, the sight of Peter Cook on stage doing an impression of Harold Macmillan was genuinely shocking because the political class was still looked up to.

Not any more. Today, a satirist expressing a modicum of respect for a politician — Steve Coogan endorsing Ed Miliband, for instance — is front-page news, whereas a comedian showering the Prime Minister with insults goes unnoticed.

In terms of prestige, politicians and satirists have switched places. A successful satirist like Armando Iannucci is respected in a way that no current political leader is. As a result, he enjoys a degree of soft, cultural power that politicians can only dream of. He probably lives in a bigger house, drives a nicer car and earns a higher annual income than most of them, too. Hardly surprising, then, that The Thick of It ran out of steam. What gives a really good satire its seditious power is that it’s an attack of the weak against the strong. The Thick of It, by contrast, was an assault by a clique of rich and powerful satirists on an already beleaguered political class. Not so much slaying giants as tripping dwarves.

Yet I don’t think political satire is dead. I’m sure that it will blossom in the most unlikely of places — Isis-controlled Syria, for instance, or in an American Ivy League university, where any criticism of a protected minority is instant career suicide. The book I’m most looking forward to reading this year is Michel Houellebecq Submission,which is set in a dystopian future in which France has become an Islamic state. Great satire, like great journalism, speaks truth to power, and that means taking on the truly powerful, not mocking an already despised group of white middle-aged men.

The post Is satire a dying art? appeared first on The Spectator.

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself.

I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’. It was a particularly dank and mouldy affair, with no mod cons save for an ancient, battery-operated radio. As we sat there for hours, waiting for the all-clear, our only comfort was listening to the BBC World Service.

This was in the run-up to the 1982 Lebanon war and over the next few weeks these attacks became a regular occurrence. Take it from me, if you’re squeezed into a hole in the ground, worried about taking a direct hit from a Katyusha missile, there’s something deeply reassuring about hearing ‘Lilli-burlero’, followed by the words ‘This is London.’ It wasn’t just that it was a source of news we could depend on — literally the only source at that time. It was the sense that, in spite of the chaos and savagery all about us, there was still an island of sanity somewhere out there. The World Service was an umbilical cord connecting us with civilisation. In those hours I caught a glimpse of what it must have been like for the citizens of occupied Europe to tune into the BBC Overseas Service.

Ever since then I have always felt an emotional attachment to the BBC. I am not one of those Tories who believes there is something inherently left-of-centre about a public broadcast organisation and the only solution is to abolish the licence fee. Rather, I think of the BBC as a precious piece of our heritage that has been captured by the enemy. The task facing the present Conservative government is how to prise it from their grasp without destroying it at the same time.

It would be an exaggeration to call the people who now run the organisation as ‘Marxists’, obediently following Gramsci’s advice to complete the long march through the institutions. Rather, they are, for the most part, metropolitan liberals who think of their left-of-centre views on issues like Europe and immigration as politically uncontroversial. They don’t regard themselves as biased because they never encounter anyone in their day-to-day lives who doesn’t hold the same opinions. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just expressing the commonsense wisdom that everybody shares, whether left or right.

I could give countless examples of this. There was the BBC’s involvement in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, accurately described as a £27 million party political broadcast for the Labour party; the fact that members of the far left are regularly employed as ‘comedians’ on Radio 4, while no BBC commissioning editor would ever dream of employing anyone on the far right; and the wholly one-sided coverage the Corporation has given to free schools, something I’m particularly sensitive about. But there’s no need for any examples because those who run it wouldn’t dispute this accusation. As Mark Thompson, the former director-general, told the New Statesman, the BBC suffers from ‘a massive bias to the left’.

So what can John Whittingdale, the new Culture Secretary, do to restore the BBC’s reputation for political impartiality? Everyone agrees that the BBC has grown too big and in many respects is just mimicking a commercial organisation. So separate off the drama and light entertainment, the music and the sport, and invite all those inessential bits to become self-funding entities. That would leave only the news and current affairs division to be financed by the licence fee, which could be much reduced. I would then make the BBC Trust responsible for appointing all the members of the executive board, not just the director-general, and, crucially, I would remove the power to appoint members of the trust from the Prime Minister and transfer it to a politically neutral body, such as the Privy Council or some other institution created for the task.

That should do it. And for the sake of all those beleaguered souls out there, cowering in the dark, it must be done or it will surely perish.

The post Why I still have a deep attachment to the BBC appeared first on The Spectator.

I was disappointed to hear Andy Burnham on Marr last Sunday declare his opposition to free schools. He put plenty of distance between himself and Ed Miliband, even admitting Labour spent too much in the run-up to the recession, which is quite something given that he was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time. But Miliband was spot on, apparently, when it came to free schools. He then reeled off all the usual guff about ‘experimenting with children’s education’, ‘surplus places’, ‘unqualified teachers’, etc.

It’s tempting to take Burnham to task over this, since he’s the favourite to become the next Labour leader. What could be clearer evidence that he’s in the pocket of Len McCluskey than siding with the teaching unions? But I’m going to rise above it. Burnham is like one of those Japanese soldiers who emerges from the Burmese jungle, bayonet at the ready, after the war has ended. Newsflash Andy: your side lost. David Cameron has pledged to open 500 new free schools. If you add those to the 250 or so that have opened already, that brings the total to 750. Like it or not, free schools are now a permanent feature of England’s educational landscape. If and when Labour ever gets back in, they won’t be able to do anything about them.

It doesn’t come naturally to me to be magnanimous in victory, particularly when I think about the misery Labour would have inflicted on the parents and teachers who’ve devoted their lives to setting up new schools over the past five years. But magnanimous our side must be. To quote my father, the author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, we’ve won the war and now we must win the peace. We need to disabuse our opponents of the notion that we are softening up England’s public education system so it can be sold off to billionaire robber barons, and persuade them that we are in the same business as them, namely, creating good local schools so all children can realise their potential, particularly the least well-off.

A good opening salvo in this campaign has been fired by Robert Peal, head of history at the West London Free School. He’s just edited a collection of essays for John Catt called Changing Schools: Perspectives on Five Years of Education Reform. It includes contributions from some of the most important voices in the reform movement, including James O’Shaugh-nessy, Katharine Birbalsingh, Daisy Christodoulou, Andrew Old, Jonathan Simons and Tom Bennett. In the introduction, Peal argues that the main impact of increased school autonomy has been to empower teachers, handing them more control over what’s taught in their classrooms and, just as importantly, how it’s taught. This revolution is far from complete — politicians and bureaucrats still hold too much power — but it’s likely to continue under Nicky Morgan. That’s a good argument for why all teachers should embrace the government’s reform programme, not just shy Tories lurking at the back of the staff room.

But the really striking thing about Changing Schools is not the substance of the essays, but the tone. Flicking through its pages, it’s clear that most of the contributors believed we were heading for a period of Labour government and they do their best to make a bipartisan case for the improvements they’ve made over the past five years. Gone is the shrill, embattled note of the warrior in full cry — my own preferred register — and in its place is a calm, measured voice. Imagine the curator of a museum in Iraq trying to reason with the local Isis commander, surrounded by troglodytes clutching hammers and power drills, and you have the general idea.

Had the barbarian horde actually made it as far as Downing Street on 8 May, I have no doubt these pleas would have fallen on deaf ears. Tristram Hunt would not have been entrusted with the task of dismantling free schools and academies — too soft. No, it would have been given to some knuckle-dragging Brownite. Within months, people like James O’Shaughnessy, Katherine Birbal-singh and Jonathan Simons would have been hauled before some quasi-judicial House of Commons committee, where the show trials would have begun. I shudder to think about it.

But given that Labour and its allies in the teaching unions have been vanquished, the contributors to this excellent collection of essays have, almost by accident, hit upon exactly the right note. Henceforth, I will try my best to mimic their reasonable, consensual tone. The insurgents have won and we must do our best to treat our former masters with dignity and respect.

The post Freedom for free schools appeared first on The Spectator.

I couldn’t believe it when Nicola Sturgeon called for the resignation of Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary, over his role in the leaked memo affair.

As readers will recall, the Daily Telegraph published a confidential document during the election campaign that purported to be an account of a conversation between Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador, in which Sturgeon said she’d prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Carmichael has now owned up to leaking the document, which originated in the Scottish Office, but this isn’t the cause of Sturgeon’s outrage. No, Carmichael’s sin was denying all knowledge of the leak when asked about it at the time. For this, apparently, he should ‘consider his position’.

Politicians pretend to be shocked by each other’s behaviour all the time, but this is a particularly shameless example. There’s more than a smidgen of cold calculation behind the white heat of Sturgeon’s indignation. The reason she singled out Carmichael’s alleged dishonesty, rather than his breach of confidentiality, is because she doesn’t want anyone to focus on the substance of the memo. Why? Because it was almost certainly an accurate account of what she said to the French ambassador. More fundamentally, it’s hypocritical of the SNP leader to complain about duplicity, given her party’s conduct in the run-up to the referendum.

I’m thinking of Alex Salmond in particular. On almost every critical point raised during the debate about Scotland’s future, Salmond was deliberately misleading. I’m not just thinking of his claim that he’d received legal advice reassuring him that an independent Scotland wouldn’t need to reapply for membership of the European Union. When the Information Commissioner ordered the Scottish government to respond to an FOI request to disclose the advice it had received, Salmond’s ministers spent £19,452.92 of public money appealing the decision, only to admit later that the ‘advice’ was a figment of Salmond’s imagination. So the First Minister misled the Scottish people on this point and spent taxpayers’ money to try to conceal the fact.

Then there were the SNP’s fictitious claims about the economic impact of independence — and I’m indebted here to the blogger Kevin Hague, who has devoted years to unpicking the SNP’s rhetoric. For instance, there was the assertion that Scotland sends more money to Westminster than it gets back, thanks to North Sea oil.

If you factor in its share of oil revenue, Scotland has been a net contributor to Britain’s coffers in three of the last 15 years. For the other 12, oil hasn’t been sufficient to offset the fact that the Scottish government spends £1,450 more and raises £250 less per person than the rest of the UK. This makes Salmond’s claim, repeated ad infinitum, that ‘oil is just a bonus’ and Scotland could get along perfectly well without it, even more absurd. If you add the £1,450 and £250 together, you get a per capita gap of £1,700, which means that, without North Sea oil, its deficit would be £9.1 billion higher than it is as part of the UK. It turns out that oil revenue is critical to offsetting the deficit gap, which is presumably why Salmond wildly over-estimated it in the SNP’s white paper on Scotland’s future. In it, he claimed that revenue from North Sea oil in 2016/17 — the first year of Scotland’s independence — would be between £6.8 billion and £7.9 billion. In fact, it’s likely to be around £600 million.

If you deduct the £600 million from the £9.1 billion, that means Scotland would be facing an annual deficit gap of £8.5 billion in its first year of independence and there’s no reason to think that would change over the next ten to 15 years. In order for Scotland to be better off out of the UK, oil revenue would have to increase by several thousand per cent, or the Scottish economy would have to grow by a faster amount than the rest of the UK — around 15 per cent faster. For Scotland to wash its own face would mean massive public spending cuts. Far from imposing austerity on Scotland, the British government is saving Nicola Sturgeon from having to find Greek levels of savings. Who would have thunk it?

The SNP is, by some margin, the most dishonest party in Britain. For its leader to call for Alistair Carmichael’s resignation because he leaked a memo is laughable.

The post Sturgeon doth protest too much, me thinks appeared first on The Spectator.

In his Memoirs, Kingsley Amis includes a story about meeting Roald Dahl at a party in the 1970s. Dahl advises him to write a children’s book — ‘That’s where the money is’ — and brushes aside his objection that he doesn’t think it would be any good. ‘Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it,’ he says. Then, a few minutes later, Dahl raises himself to his full height and, with the air of a man asserting his integrity in the face of an outrageous slur, says: ‘If you do decide to have a crack, let me give you one word of warning. Unless you put everything you’ve got into it, unless you write it from the heart, the kids’ll have no use for it. They’ll see you’re having them on… Just you bear that in mind as a word of friendly advice.’

I was reminded of this anecdote last Saturday while watching The Twits, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel at the Royal Court. As a production, it was a peculiar combination of cynicism and sincerity — condescendingly didactic and painfully earnest at the same time.

Like every play I’ve ever seen at the Royal Court, The Twits is a thinly disguised solicitation to vote Labour. That’s quite a feat since the book is a ferociously snobbish indictment of England’s petit bourgeoisie. The malignancy of the two central characters, Mr and Mrs Twit, is inseparable from their lowly class origins. They are curtain-twitchers who live in a suburban semi and Dahl, who lived in a large country house in Great Missenden, clearly thought that all such people are venal and mean-spirited.

In the stage adaptation, Mr and Mrs Twit behave just as unpleasantly, but Dahl’s snobbery has been inverted and they have become members of the nobility. In this version, their mistreatment of animals — the main vice of the Twits — is just typical upper-class behaviour. Not only that, but the writer has invented a whole new cast of characters for these two villains to exploit — a group of poor, benighted travellers who take up residence on their land. Towards the end of the play, one of these gypsies, who not coincidentally is black, makes a speech in favour of equality and solidarity and, soon afterwards, a revolution occurs in which the animals and workers rise up and put the Twits to the sword. As the lights go down, a Welsh men’s choir give a stirring rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ and a flickering image of Ed Miliband is projected on to the curtain.

Okay, I made that last part up, but you get the general idea. Somehow, Dahl’s children’s book about a couple of lower-middle-class misanthropes has been turned into a Labour party pledge card. It’s cynical and condescending in that the writer and director clearly think the audience is dim-witted enough to be influenced by their cack-handed propaganda, but also sincere. They passionately believe that if more people vote Labour, the world will become a better place.

It will be interesting to see what effect last month’s election result will have on Labour’s fifth columnists who have infiltrated the arts and media establishments — institutions like the Royal Court. I had lunch with a senior Conservative party figure a week before polling day and he was concerned about the impact of the long march through Britain’s institutions. He thought the cultural Marxists might have succeeded in creating a climate of opinion in which far-left policies like price controls, a wealth tax, the seizure of private property by the state and so on, were now politically acceptable. ‘I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he said, the anxiety visible in his eyes.

Turns out he needn’t have worried. The electorate took a long, hard look at Ed Miliband and his loony-left agenda and decided to throw him under a bus. If I was a ‘worker by brain’ who’d been toiling away in the BBC or the British Council for decades, doing my best to demonise the Conservative party and its supporters, I would have found the election result quite disillusioning. I would have drawn succour from the absence of a Tory majority since 1992 — ‘It’s working! I’m making a difference!’ — only to have my hopes dashed when David Dimbleby unveiled the exit poll at 10 p.m. on 7 May. I might now think about doing something else.

But of course it won’t make a jot of difference. The comrades will continue to peddle the same old snake oil and, please God, the great British public will continue to ignore them.

The post Are the cultural Marxists in retreat, or lying low? appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve been reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff’s account of his disastrous foray into politics, in an attempt to understand where it all went wrong for Ed Miliband. In combination with the election postmortems and interviews with the people in Miliband’s inner circle, it’s extremely illuminating.

For those unfamiliar with his story, Ignatieff is a left-wing Harvard professor who in 2004 received a surprise visit by three ‘men in black’ — high-ups in the Liberal party of Canada who sounded him out about making a run for the leadership. Beyond working on Pierre Trudeau’s campaign as a student in 1968, Ignatieff was a political virgin, but the three fixers thought that might be an asset because he wasn’t tainted by the party’s infighting or financial scandals. Ignatieff said yes and, after being elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 2006, became the leader of the opposition two years later.

He was a disaster. In the 2011 general election his party lost 43 of its 77 seats, finishing in third place, while Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won an overall majority. It was the worst result the Liberals had ever recorded and Ignatieff was the first Canadian leader of the opposition to lose his seat since 1878.

Some of his unpopularity was due to positions he’d taken before entering politics, such as supporting the Iraq war, and his status as an ‘outsider’ was less of an advantage than the three fixers had imagined, enabling his opponents to brand him as a carpetbagger who was ‘just visiting’. But his failure was also due to a series of blunders he made after he’d been installed as leader — a cack-handedness that was at odds with his reputation as a brilliant intellectual. It’s in this respect that he most closely resembles Ed Miliband.

For instance, he had no aptitude for the showmanship that is the stock in trade of democratic politics. When meeting prospective voters, he had a tendency to look at his feet and on the night he was elected to parliament he recited an obscure Hungarian poem called ‘By the Danube’. This was in spite of being told to ‘lose the poem’ by one of the men in black.

He writes: ‘It was an odd thing to read out in that noisy basement discotheque, packed with waving supporters and journalists, and almost certain to confirm the impression that I was an intellectual landed from outer space, but I didn’t mind.’ Like Miliband, Ignatieff failed to grasp the importance of first impressions in politics and how fatal it was to be branded an ‘intellectual’.

He is eventually persuaded that these trivialities matter and duly agrees to a makeover. But he doesn’t feel comfortable in his new skin. ‘I had never been so well-dressed in my life and had never felt so hollow,’ he says. Echoes there of Miliband’s awkward self-consciousness.

More importantly, Ignatieff is unable to turn the daily flow of unforeseeable events to his advantage. ‘Practical politics is no science, but rather the ceaseless attempt of wily humans to adapt to what Fortuna throws in their paths,’ he writes. ‘What we call luck in politics is actually a gift for timing, for knowing when to strike and when to bide your time and wait for a better opportunity.’

Miliband’s timing wasn’t quite as hopeless as Ignatieff’s. He leapt on the opportunity provided by the hacking scandal and some of his policy announcements, such as the ‘energy price freeze’, struck a chord. But reading accounts of Labour’s campaign, it’s astonishing how often Miliband’s timing was off. A case in point is how slow he was to categorically rule out any sort of electoral deal with the SNP, in spite of being urged to do so. Even after this became the central issue of the campaign, he continued to drag his feet, not wanting to commit to a position that might restrict his room for manoeuvre in a hung parliament. By the time he eventually shut the stable door, during the Question Time debate a week before the election, the horse had long since bolted.

Ignatieff was more inexperienced than Miliband, who has spent his entire career in politics, so his failure is more understandable. Yet that doesn’t stop him wallowing in self-pity. ‘Defeat invalidated me as a politician but also as a writer and thinker,’ he says. I expect Miliband is being even tougher on himself. Like Ignatieff, he should never have gone into politics.

The post The Canadian Ed Miliband appeared first on The Spectator.

There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on why top companies employ so few applicants from comprehensive schools: ‘Though this study provides valuable insights into barriers to the elite professions, there are nevertheless some limitations associated with the chosen research methodology. As a small-scale qualitative study, the aim is to explore issues and generalisability is limited.’

But most pundits who’ve commented so far missed this caveat. ‘New research… reveals the privileged choose and look after their own,’ wrote Owen Jones in the Guardian. ‘They don’t like accents that sound a bit, well, “common”.’ Grace Dent made the same point in the Independent: ‘Elite financial services and legal firms are reportedly operating a “poshness test” that systematically locks out talented working-class people.’

I’ve read the report and it contains little hard evidence that high-paying professions are discriminating against applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. The researchers interviewed people involved in recruitment at 14 top law, accountancy and financial services firms and found what, at best, could be called anecdotal evidence that they apply an informal ‘poshness test’ — favouring those who’ve travelled widely, say. True, the report also contains some hard data — such as the fact that over half of recruits at these firms were educated at independent schools or grammar schools — but by itself that’s not evidence of discrimination. On the contrary, all 14 companies use a variety of methods, including psychometric testing, to ensure they recruit the most talented graduates, regardless of social origins.

The problem isn’t that these HR departments are staffed by snobs, but that insufficient numbers of bright working-class people fill in application forms. For the most part, that’s because these companies concentrate their marketing efforts on Britain’s 24 Russell Group universities and ten in particular — Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Durham, Imperial, Warwick, UCL, Nottingham, Leeds and Manchester. Given how good these institutions have become at cream-skimming the most gifted 18-year-olds, it’s sensible to focus on them, but one of the unintended consequences is that they end up recruiting a disproportionately high number of middle-class applicants. Why? Because the middle classes are over-represented at these universities.

At Oxford, 43 per cent of the current population of UK undergraduates came from independent schools. Cambridge fares a little better — around 37 per cent — but even at Manchester it’s still around 23 per cent. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission repeats the slightly dubious statistic that only 7 per cent of UK schoolchildren attend independent schools — when it’s 14 per cent if you look at those studying A-levels. Nevertheless, the independent sector is over-represented at Britain’s best universities and even the places taken by state school pupils are monopolised by the better off. Last year, fewer than 1,000 children on free school meals who went to a state school were admitted to a Russell Group university.

Which isn’t to say that elite universities are discriminating against children from disadvantaged backgrounds, any more than elite companies are. Again, the problem is too few applicants. Not nearly enough children from underprivileged backgrounds do the A-levels that will let them gain admission to Russell Group universities — maths, further maths, physics, biology, chemistry, history, geography, modern and classical languages and English literature. That’s partly because they’re not steered towards them by their teachers — or, at least, not in large enough numbers — and partly because they don’t do well enough in their GCSEs to take them.

The Sutton Trust published some research this month that identified a group of clever children from underprivileged backgrounds on the basis of their Key Stage 2 Sats and looked at how they fared in their GCSEs. They found that 36 per cent of the boys and 24 per cent of the girls were under-achieving. This is where these children are effectively being discriminated against, between the ages of 11 and 16.

The answer is not to browbeat good universities and top firms, but to make sure that bright children are pushed harder in comprehensives. Insisting that all children do the EBacc, as Nicky Morgan is doing, is a good start. If Owen Jones and Grace Dent want to do something about flatlining social mobility, this is where they should concentrate their energies.

The post The best way to end the ‘poshness test’ appeared first on The Spectator.

Few things are more likely to provoke the disapproval of the bien-pensant left than criticising someone’s grammar. The very idea that one way of speaking is more ‘correct’ than another is anathema to them. Under the guise of being helpful, it asserts the supremacy of the white educated bourgeoisie and seeks to rob the working class and ethnic minorities of any pride in their own culture. It’s a form of ‘linguistic imperialism’.

This explains the tidal wave of hostility that engulfed Michael Gove earlier this week after he issued some letter-writing guidance to officials in the Ministry of Justice. Typical Gove, eh? First he tries to impose his -narrow, right-wing view of British history on the nation’s schoolchildren and now he’s telling senior civil servants they should all write exactly like him. Time to stick his head in the stocks again and reach for the rotten -tomatoes.

I first became aware of Gove’s latest ‘outrage’ via the reaction on -Twitter and googled his memo expecting to find a detailed enunciation of grammatical principles so archaic they hadn’t been in use since the outbreak of the second world war: ‘The particle “to” and the infinitive form of the verb should not be separated…’ etc, etc.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that the vast majority of Gove’s ‘rules’ weren’t grammatical at all, more of a beginner’s guide to how to write good English. For instance, he counsels against using too many adverbs, which ‘add little’. Nothing controversial about that. Indeed, it reminded me of Elmore Leonard’s third and fourth rules of good writing: ‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue’ and ‘Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”… he admonished gravely.’

Gove also says that, when responding to letters, civil servants should maintain a polite tone, use the active and not the passive voice and try to spell correspondents’ names correctly. That doesn’t strike me as unreasonable either. If I’d written to a minister at the MoJ, I would be quite irritated if the functionary tasked with replying misspelt my name.

One thing Gove’s critics don’t appear to grasp is that it’s common practice for incoming ministers to write to their departmental officials letting them know how they’d like them to respond to letters. Why? Because more often than not, the civil servants are writing on their behalf and the letters bear their signatures. If I were lucky enough to have an assistant doing a similar job for me, I would send him or her a style guide the size of a telephone directory.

OK, Gove did include a couple of grammatical pointers. He advised against beginning a sentence with ‘however’, ‘therefore’, ‘yet’, ‘also’ or ‘although’ and suggested that, strictly speaking, those words should appear after the verb. He also asked his officials not to use ‘impact’ as a verb. It was this unbelievable effrontery that prompted Oliver Kamm, Britain’s leading anti-grammar Nazi, to launch a fusillade against Gove in the Times. ‘It is one thing to have style preferences,’ he thundered. ‘For a minister to require civil servants to follow his own when these have nothing to do with “correct grammar” and impede good prose, and for him to have escaped public derision for it, is -singular.’

Putting aside the fact that Gove didn’t escape public derision — which would have been ‘singular’, you pompous fussbudget — it’s nonsense to say that his guide impedes good prose. On the contrary, nearly all of Gove’s rules can be traced to George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’, an essay that’s generally regarded as the best guide to writing good English that has ever been produced. To give just one example, Orwell’s fourth rule is ‘Never use the passive where you can use the active’. Kamm singles this out for condemnation in his Times article, apparently unaware that it was first set out by the finest prose stylist of the 20th century.

There’s one final reason why it was sensible of Gove to set out these rudimentary principles. I’m absolutely certain that for every Oliver Kamm who bridles whenever these old–fashioned rules are observed, there are 10,000 Toby Youngs who feel almost physically assaulted when they’re ignored. If I received a letter from a secretary of state using ‘impact’ as a verb, I’d scrunch it up into a ball and hurl it at the wall. Given that Gove is in the business of winning friends and influencing people, annoying one person instead of 10,000 is good politics.

The post In defence of Gove’s grammar appeared first on The Spectator.

Two months ago, I set myself the target of losing 11 pounds in time for the Spectator’s summer party on 1 July. To help achieve that, I swore off alcohol and, had I succeeded, my plan was to start drinking again at the party. I managed the weight loss, but didn’t make it to the party because it clashed with a board meeting of the educational charity I set up five years ago. The upshot is that I haven’t started drinking again and I’m debating whether to remain teetotal in perpetuity.

Temperance has its advantages. I’ve experienced almost no headaches or stomach aches since I gave up the booze, although that may also be connected with my diet. I’ve cut out bread, biscuits, crackers, potatoes, pasta, ice-cream and chocolate and tried to limit myself to about 1,000 calories a day. I’m permanently hungry and often gagging for a drink, but the upside is a sense of moral superiority when seeing my less abstemious friends, particularly when they’re washing down carbohydrates with copious quantities of wine.

I remember hearing Keith Richards say that one of the few compensations of giving up heroin was watching the different emotions flitting across the faces of his former drug buddies when he declined to partake. First they looked shocked, then bereft, then resentful, as if he was passing judgment on them — which, of course, he was. My friends’ reaction, when I tell them I’ve given up drinking, is similar.

Feeling sanctimonious is one of the by-products of self-denial and, pleasurable though it is, should be resisted. In the same way that born-again non-smokers are the most virulent anti-smoking bores, I find myself leaning towards all sorts of authoritarian causes I’ve previously rejected. A sugar tax, for instance. In the past, I’ve dismissed this as a form of thinly disguised puritanism, wanting to penalise people on low incomes for indulging in the simplest of pleasures, but now that I’m abstaining from that pleasure myself I feel a sadistic inclination to deny it to others. Inside every fat man there’s an Andy Burnham struggling to get out and demand a Frosties ban.

At least in the case of sugar my zeal is tempered by the knowledge that I’ll start consuming it again before long. With alcohol, I’m not so sure. I used to have a wonderfully uncomplicated relationship with booze, but I made the mistake of giving it up for a couple of years in 1999 to prove to Caroline, then my fiancé, that I wasn’t an alcoholic.

I started drinking again about an hour after we’d got married and it wasn’t as much fun as I’d expected. I turned into a more self-conscious drinker than before, monitoring how many glasses of wine I’d had, sometimes switching to water for a bit and generally trying to delay the point at which I moved on to hard liquor. Alcohol ceased to be a source of pleasure but one of neurotic self-examination. After 14 years of this tedious drama, it’s a relief to be free of it.

There is a psychological cost, though. The most pleasurable part of drinking is the first glass of the day — that warm sense of euphoria as the alcohol enters your bloodstream, buttressed by the sure knowledge that you’re not going to do any more work. Later in the evening, midway through the second bottle, the self-loathing begins to kick in, climaxing the following morning when your children burst into the bedroom at 6 a.m. It may sound weird, but these swings between peaks and troughs provide my life with a kind of structure; it’s a rhythm I’ve become familiar with. Now, with no cork to pull at 7 p.m., I find myself in one mood all the time, neither euphoric nor depressed. Emotionally, it’s a flat line.

I’m quite enjoying the stability, but I can see myself getting bored with it. I had dinner last week with a man who’s been teetotal since struggling with a bout of cocaine addition when he was young, and I asked him whether this was a problem for him. I was hoping he’d say that, in time, the body’s natural rhythms kick in, but no. ‘I haven’t experienced anything resembling euphoria for over 20 years,’ he said. As he looked at me wistfully, it was obvious that a little part of him still hankered for it.

Am I prepared to pay that price? Probably not.

The post Giving up alcohol is not as much fun as I’d hoped appeared first on The Spectator.

I took my three boys for a cycle ride in Richmond Park on Sunday. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a good way to relax, but I had to be back home in Acton by 2.15 p.m. for my daughter’s 12th birthday party. Given that we didn’t leave the house until 11 a.m., and were relying on public transport, we were slightly up against it.

We got to the park at noon, which gave us about 75 minutes to complete a seven-mile circuit, allowing for an hour to get home. Just about doable, but only if all three boys went flat out and resisted the urge to get off and push when we were going uphill. The weakest link was seven-year-old Charlie, who still has the same bike he had when he was five. No gears and tiny wheels, so he has to pedal twice as quickly to keep up. There was something both heartwarming and comical about him as he powered forward, his little legs pumping like pistons. From time to time, I would swoop up behind him on my bike, place my hand in the small of his back, and give him a ‘turbo boost’.

He managed to keep going on some of the shallower inclines, but when we came to the really steep hill in the final stretch he slowed to a snail’s pace. By now it was 12.45 p.m. and we only had 30 minutes to complete the circuit and get back to Richmond station.

‘Come on you big Jessie,’ I said, giving him another turbo boost. ‘Give it some welly.’

‘I’ve got to have a rest, Dad,’ he said.

‘A rest? Don’t be pathetic. You’re usually so full of beans.’

‘I’ve run out of beans,’ he said, coming to a stop.

‘But you can’t let the hill defeat you, Charlie. You’ve got to keep going.’

‘IT’S DEFEATED ME,’ he said, hurling his bike to the ground.

To any passers-by witnessing this exchange — and there were several — I must have looked like a typical pushy parent. Worse, a bully. If anyone had intervened and told me to go easy on him, my defence would have been that I was trying to teach him not to give up when the going gets tough. Psychologists refer to this trait as ‘grit’ and there’s quite a lot of evidence that adults who possess it in abundance are likely to lead successful lives.

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I was urging Charlie on. I was also worried about being late. But I do think it’s my duty as a father to teach my children the value of perseverance, just as my father taught me. Whenever we engage in a physical activity together I quickly turn into a sergeant-major type, exhorting them to try harder and hurling old-fashioned insults at them when they start flagging, such as ‘you big Jessie’.

Will this actually do any good? Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, wants schools to teach ‘grit’, along with other virtues like self-discipline and courage, and the think tank Demos has even suggested that Ofsted should amend its inspection criteria so schools are partly judged according to how well they teach ‘character’. In their view, all children would benefit from being taught these Spartan life skills — what public schools used to refer to as ‘muscular Christianity’.

In the past, I’ve expressed scepticism about whether characteristics like self-discipline can be taught. Numerous studies of identical twins separated at birth suggest that many of the ‘virtues’ that children are supposedly taught on the playing fields of Eton are partly inherited from their parents. Environmental factors have an impact, to be sure, but in complex ways we still don’t fully understand. Research by behavioural geneticists suggests that each child creates their own ‘microenvironment’ and it’s the features of these unique environments that affect personality development, not shared environments, such as families or schools.

Having said that, I don’t suppose I’ll alter my own parenting style. One of the benefits of passing on traits like ‘grit’ to your children via your DNA is that when they start to exhibit them, as they inevitably will, you can congratulate yourself on what a good parent you are. Talk to any father of a successful child for five minutes and you’ll catch him indulging in this vainglorious illusion and, if truth be told, I’m no different. After a minute’s rest, Charlie picked his bike back up, told me he’d got his beans back and then shot up the hill at breakneck speed. I immediately congratulated myself for having taught him a valuable lesson. We got home at 2.15 p.m. on the dot.

The post True grit and pushy parents appeared first on The Spectator.

Forget about the countryside. When is the government going to do something about the vulpine creatures wreaking havoc in central London? The situation is now so out of control, it’s time the Prime Minister convened a meeting of Cobra to discuss the ginger menace.

I’m talking, of course, about the horde of SNP MPs who’ve invaded Westminster. Actually, I’m not, but I couldn’t resist that gag. No, foxes are the problem. I don’t actually keep a chicken coop in my back garden in Acton — and, for that reason, I’m spared the sight of my beloved poultry lying in a pool of blood with their heads bitten off. But I still have a long list of complaints.

First, there’s the appalling sound they make, particularly during the mating season. When I first heard one of these vile beasts at full cry, I ran upstairs in a panic, convinced that an intruder had broken into my house and was now torturing one of my children. The noise of a howling fox is uncannily like that of a human child in pain. It’s guaranteed to produce a momentary spasm of reflexive alarm even when you’ve heard the same bloodcurdling shriek every night for the past ten years.

Then there’s the threat they pose to domestic animals. I used to have a black, short-haired cat called Trixie which I rescued from an animal shelter and loved almost as much as my own children. Then one day she simply disappeared. In the months that followed, as I trawled the neighbouring streets searching for her and became acquainted with the local cat-loving community, I discovered that I wasn’t alone. West London is in the throes of an epidemic of missing cats. Either there’s been an influx of residents with a penchant for dining on domestic pets, or they’re being killed by a vicious, red-haired predator. I know who my money’s on.

But the thing I mind most of all is the havoc they wreak with the rubbish. I’ve appointed myself the Litter Nazi of my street — someone’s got to do it — and I spend Wednesday mornings walking from one end to the other picking up all the food waste that’s been strewn about by the foxes the night before. It’s a losing battle and in west London most of the streets have been turned into festering wastelands of rotting food, thanks to our furry friends.

When I complain about this, people often respond by saying there’s a simple solution — put your food waste in a wheelie bin. But the problem isn’t me, obviously. I place all my organic rubbish in the special hard plastic containers with sealable lids that the council has provided for precisely that purpose. It’s my neighbours that are the problem. Every household in my street has been given one of these green boxes, but only about half of them use them. The rest simply bag up their food waste in plastic bin liners and leave it on the pavement. They might as well stick a label on the front saying ‘Bon appétit, Mr Fox.’ Providing every household with a wheelie bin would make little difference.

No, the solution is to kill the revolting creatures. In the 1980s, Auberon Waugh suggested starting a Shepherd’s Bush hunt that would convene on Brook Green — which gives you some idea of how long the problem has been around. Not a bad idea, and I would happily volunteer to become the Master of Hounds, but it’s unlikely to be allowed, particularly now that the government has bottled out of even modifying the hunting ban.

A more practical solution would be to allow residents’ associations to appoint public-spirited individuals as local ‘fox exterminators’ and let them loose with high-powered air rifles. At present, it’s illegal for members of the public to kill foxes. You need to be a licensed professional, accredited by the British Pest Control Association. I’ve looked into it and these gun–toting wide boys charge upwards of £50 per corpse. Just clearing out my back garden — which seems to double up as a fox brothel every night — would cost thousands of pounds. Crazy waste of money when my three sons and I could clear it with a couple of Webley .22s in half an hour.

What’s the answer, dear reader? Can one purchase a fox-killing biological agent on the dark web? Shall I blast them with the ear-splitting guitar solos of fox-loving rock star Brian May? I’ve heard lion poo can work, although that’s not cheap either. Answers on an email postcard, please — tobyyoung@mac.com.

The post Urban foxes, the ginger menace appeared first on The Spectator.

Is the ‘Tories for Corbyn’ campaign politics at its most infantile? As one of the few conservative commentators willing to defend it in the media, I’ve been doing my best to rebut that charge.

The most frequent line of attack is that there’s something dishonest about it. The Labour leadership election isn’t an open primary. It’s restricted to members, registered supporters and affiliated supporters. OK, you can register as a supporter for £3 — a change brought in by Ed Miliband to reduce union influence — but only if you pretend to be a Labour sympathiser. And that’s just wrong.

The short answer to this is that no such pretence is necessary — at least, it wasn’t when I signed up via the party’s website. In response to the question ‘Why did you sign up?’, I wrote ‘To consign Labour to electoral oblivion’. Nothing fraudulent about that.

All right, say the critics. You may not have lied, but you’re acting in bad faith. You’re taking advantage of a loophole to subvert a democratic process. That’s fundamentally dishonest, even if it’s not duplicitous. It’s unethical, rather than immoral.

I think I have to put my hands up to that, but politics has never been ethical. Indeed, one of the unwritten rules of democratic politics is that it’s OK to behave dishonestly provided you don’t tell an outright untruth. This was summed up by Alex Salmond when cross-examined by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics about his slipperiness regarding the ‘legal advice’ the Scottish government had received on an independent Scotland and the EU. ‘The art of politics is not to lie,’ he said.

What he meant is that it’s perfectly acceptable to say any number of things that encourage people to believe something untrue, provided you don’t tell an out-and-out falsehood. Presumably, that’s why it was fine for the Scottish National Party to give the impression it was anti-austerity during the election campaign, even though its manifesto committed it to the same spending cuts as Labour.

The other main objection to ‘Tories for Corbyn’ is that it’s kicking your opponent when he’s down. Again, that’s true, but since when did the Queensberry Rules apply to politics? Political combat isn’t a bantamweight boxing match. It’s Ultimate Fighting — hit first, hit hard and hit often.

The Labour party has made two silly mistakes. It has changed the rules regarding who can vote in leadership elections in a way that makes it easy for people like me to exploit them. And it has put up a candidate in the leadership election who, if he wins, will render the party unelectable. Or rather, even more unelectable than it was under Ed Miliband, which is going some. If that debacle comes to pass — and Corbyn has a 17-point lead, according to YouGov — it’s hard to see how Labour could recover for a decade. It might even lead to an irrevocable split. To expect the party’s opponents not to take advantage of that opportunity is naive.

The other thing to bear in mind is that it’s unlikely that ‘Tories for Corbyn’ will have any influence over the result. Around a quarter of a million people are expected to vote in this election and I don’t suppose that more than a few hundred Tories will bother to become registered supporters. The point of the campaign is not to rig an election, but to draw attention to the fact that a sizable number of Labour MPs, trade union bosses and party activists think a man who describes Hezbollah and Hamas as his ‘friends’ is fit to be Prime Minister. The Labour party has always tried to hide its less attractive face from the public — the side that hates America, overlooks human-rights abuses in Cuba and Venezuela and has more sympathy for Britain’s enemies than it does for Britain. So when that face emerges from the shadows, you can’t blame Tories for pointing at it and saying, ‘Look!’

It’s also a good way to wind up the comrades, which isn’t as puerile as it sounds. Last week, I attended the summer party of CTF Partners, the research firm run by Tory election guru Lynton Crosby, and Crosby gave a speech in which he said that politics is a strange combination of passion and reason. To win, you need to make sure your head rules your heart, not vice versa. That’s why baiting your opponents is effective — it makes it harder for them to keep their cool. ‘Tories for Corbyn’ isn’t just a bit of fun. It’s an effective political weapon.

The post Why I voted for Jeremy Corbyn appeared first on The Spectator.

A few years ago, I got a bit fed up with receiving Christmas cards from my friends designed to show off just how well they were doing. A typical card consisted of five or six blond children on ponies or quad bikes with a massive country house in the background. The caption would be something like: ‘Greetings from Shropshire.’

So I came up with an idea. Why not create my own version? I’d get my four children to strike a variety of delinquent poses. One would be outside QPR stadium, fag in mouth and can of beer in hand. Another would be doing an impression of Lord Coke with a rolled-up £10 note sticking out of his nose. My daughter would be pushing a double buggy containing two snotty babies and sporting a Croydon facelift. This is when they were all aged eight and under, which would have added to the joke. The caption would have read: ‘Greetings from Acton.’

I didn’t do it in the end, partly because I haven’t ruled out standing as the Tory candidate in Ealing Central and Acton. It’s exactly the sort of thing that would be reproduced on a leaflet by the sitting Labour MP, illustrating just what a heartless Tory bastard I am. But I was reminded of it earlier this week when I got a round robin email from the chair of the local residents’ association about a murder that had taken place on the corner of our road.

It happened at one of the local ‘supported living’ facilities dotted around the area. These cater to people that the council describes as ‘vulnerable’, although when you spot one of them at night, loitering at the steps of the unlit footbridge at the end of my street, that isn’t the first word that springs to mind.

In this case, the victim wasn’t a ‘vulnerable’ individual, but one of the staff employed to look after them. She was discovered dead at 6.40 a.m. on Monday and, shortly before that, a resident had absconded from the hostel. He was described as a white man of heavy build who suffers from schizophrenia. The email quoted Detective Chief Inspector Partridge, of the Homicide and Major Crime Command, cautioning against any heroics: ‘I would urge anyone who sees him to contact the police immediately and not approach him.’ No danger of that, chief inspector!

This is the second time someone has been murdered a few feet from my home. I suppose it’s fairly common if you live in London — or, indeed, any large city, although the murder rate in England as a whole is declining. According to the Office of National Statistics, there were 537 homicides in 2013-14, down from 1,041 in 2002-03. Earlier this year, some friends of mine, driving along the Caledonian Road with their four children, actually witnessed a murder. At least my children have been spared that.

Is it a reason to move to the country? I thought about getting out of Dodge after my eldest son was mugged outside our house at the age of six. He had set up a little trestle table and was selling glasses of lemonade at 50p a pop, when a couple of teenage boys cycled past and swiped the Tupperware box he was keeping his money in. He didn’t seem all that bothered by it, partly because I agreed to reimburse him, but also because he’d already ‘priced in’ the moral depravity of his fellow citizens, having already spent six years in Acton.

If you take a Catholic view of human nature, as I do, and believe we’re all sinners of one kind or another, then it’s no bad thing for your children to be exposed to man’s wickedness at an early age. It’s all very well wanting to preserve their innocence, but encouraging them to think that all human beings are fundamentally good is bad parenting. In the long run, it’s more likely to get them into trouble than bringing them up in the city.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean I’m relaxed about being next door to an ‘assisted living’ facility. I’m not a complete nimby about this sort of thing, but I hope Ealing Council is going to explain to the local community how this murder suspect came to be placed by them in the middle of a residential area. And I hope they’re going to reassure us that they’ll vet these ‘vulnerable’ people more carefully in future.

The post Trouble withthe neighbours appeared first on The Spectator.

Watching a group of unruly children make mincemeat out of a well-meaning teacher has become a television staple and Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, a factual entertainment series that debuted on BBC2 on Tuesday, is a case in point. We look on aghast as five teachers from China struggle to manage a class of ordinary 14-year-olds in England. They quickly discover that the techniques that have made Chinese schoolchildren the envy of the world don’t work with Kevin the Teenager.

On the face of it, the Chinese educational model has much to recommend it. Shanghai is at the top of the Pisa international education league tables in maths, while the UK is in 26th place. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are two and a half years ahead of their British equivalents and outperform the children of British professionals. It seems we could learn a great deal from Chinese teachers, particularly in boosting the performance of our lowest achievers.

So why does it all go pear-shaped when they try to ply their trade at Bohunt School, a comprehensive in Hampshire? Bohunt is a pretty good school by English standards. Last year, 87 per cent of pupils got five GCSEs with grades A* to C, including maths and English, way above the national average of 52 per cent. Yet when Yang Jun, a teacher from Xian in central China, tried to teach his class some basic science, they seemed incapable of paying attention. While Chinese children would be sitting quietly in rows, hanging on his every word, their English equivalents preferred to chat about One Direction and what they saw on TV last night.

‘In China, we don’t need classroom management skills because everyone is disciplined by nature, by families, by society,’ he said. ‘Whereas here it is the most challenging part of teaching.’ Part of the problem is that nearly all Chinese pupils place a high value on education, seeing it as their ticket to a better life, while a significant minority of English teenagers don’t. This leads to a great deal of low-level disruption, which was singled out as a problem by Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw last year.

One Chinese teacher at Bohunt School blamed our over-generous welfare system. ‘Even if they don’t work, they can get money, they don’t worry about it,’ said Wei Zhao. ‘But in China they can’t get these things so they know, “I need to study hard, I need to work hard to get money to support my family.” If the British government really cut benefits down to force people to go to work they might see things in a different way.’

Another difficulty is that, in the words of the programme’s narrator, ‘Chinese education is based on authority, discipline and ruthless competition’, whereas our system is more progressive and child-friendly. Few English schoolteachers expect teenagers to give them their undivided attention if they engage in the traditional, teacher-led approach that is still the norm in China. They are trained to keep children permanently stimulated with quizzes, role-play games and ‘key word bingo’. Even at an above-average school such as Bohunt, children don’t receive what the Chinese would recognise as an education. It’s a hybrid of education and entertainment — edutainment. It’s the difference between an old-fashioned public information film and Horrible Histories. Even the headteacher of Bohunt dismissed the Chinese teaching style as ‘mind-numbingly boring’.

In fairness to English teenagers, there’s little proof that this approach works for all Chinese schoolchildren beyond anecdotal evidence provided by these teachers. Yes, the data from Shanghai is impressive, but teenagers in the rest of mainland China don’t sit the Pisa tests and there are good reasons for treating the Shanghai data with a pinch of salt.

Until recently, the children of migrants from less developed areas weren’t allowed to attend the best schools in Shanghai, which were reserved for the city’s elite. The ban was lifted in 2008, but only for primary and middle schools, i.e. for pupils aged 14 and under. The Pisa tests are taken by 15-year-olds. The children tested in Shanghai are the equivalent of grammar-school kids in England, so it’s not surprising that they’re several years ahead of English children as a whole. If you compare like with like, the gap is much smaller.

If there’s an enduring lesson here, it’s that child-centred teaching methods aren’t as effective as the traditional, chalk-and-talk approach favoured in China. But we don’t need a factual entertainment series to tell us that.

The post Even the Chinese can’t teach Kevin the Teenager appeared first on The Spectator.

The 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has produced some predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth about the horrors of nuclear weapons. The Guardian called the dropping of the bombs ‘obscene’, citing the figure of 250,000 casualties, and CND organised a commemorative event where Jeremy Corbyn renewed his call for unilateral nuclear disarmament.

As a conservative and a realist, I don’t have the luxury of moral certainty. Was Harry Truman wrong to take the decision he did? On 16 August 1945, Winston Churchill defended him in a speech in the House of Commons, making what has since become the standard case. Yes, Japan would have been defeated eventually, but the bombings brought the second world war to an end without the need for a land invasion. In Churchill’s estimation, that would have led to the loss of a million American lives and 250,000 British, Canadian and Australian servicemen.

Critics of the bombings dispute those figures, pointing out that Truman received conflicting advice about the likely American casualties. But does the rightness or wrongness of the decision turn on whether it produced a net saving of lives? Even if the bombings indisputably produced a net loss, that wouldn’t necessarily make them wrong. Truman wouldn’t have been much of a president if he’d attached the same weight to Japanese lives as he had to those of his own people. His first priority was not to minimise the loss of human life per se, but to make sure America won the war, with as few American lives as possible being lost in the process.

OK, so that was his duty as president, but what about his moral duty as a human being? Even there, I think you have to take the historical context into account. Let’s not forget that Japan was the aggressor, not America. The Japanese Imperial Army forced America into the war by launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding a further 1,178. Before that, Japan had proved its bona fides as an expansionist imperial power, invading Manchuria, French Indochina and China. In the Rape of Nanking, Japanese troops murdered up to 300,000 civilians and enemy combatants.

The point here isn’t that Japanese soldiers and their political masters murdered more people than were killed in Hiroshima or Nagasaki — although they did — but that they brought their misfortune on themselves. The person who should be held chiefly responsible for the deaths caused by the atomic bombs isn’t President Truman, but Emperor Hirohito. If you declare war on another country and demonstrate over and over again that there’s no atrocity you won’t commit in order to win, you cannot blame your opponent for using every means at its disposal to defend itself.

As for the objection that the overwhelming majority of the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians, I’m not convinced. George MacDonald Fraser deals with this point in Quartered Safe Out Here, his superb second world war memoir in which he describes his experiences as a 19-year-old private in the Border Regiment fighting against the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma. Fraser recounts an argument he had with a man in a pub who denounced the bombings as an ‘obscenity’. The linchpin of his opponent’s case was that the victims were civilians.

‘I did not pursue the question of whether the lives of your own soldiers should be sacrificed for the safety of enemy civilians, because if you get into that particular moral jungle you’ll never come out,’ he writes. ‘But I did point out that we were, in fact, civilians, too — civilians in uniform, and could he understand our possible resentment that people whose lives and liberties we had been fighting to protect (him, in fact) should be ready to expend us for the sake of Japanese?’

None of which means I’m sure Truman was right. It’s one thing justifying the dropping of the first atomic bomb. But did America really have to drop a second three days later? Surely a single demonstration of its new weapon would have been enough to force Japan’s surrender? Here you get into the realm of historical counter–factuals, speculating about the impact of the bombs on halting Stalin’s advance into Eastern Europe — both bombs, since the second proved the accuracy of the first wasn’t a fluke.

It starts to get pretty murky at this point, but if I’m forced to pick a side I’ll stick with Harry Truman.

The post Nuclear reaction appeared first on The Spectator.