Politics

A distinguished constituent emails me the following story, to illustrate why virtually any party that seeks to reduce the tax burden on the general population will be accused of “looking after the rich”.

Suppose that every day, ten men went to the pub, and drank exactly £100 worth of ale among them. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, the breakdown would be roughly as follows:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay £1.

The sixth would pay £3.

The seventh would pay £7.

The eighth would pay £12.

The ninth would pay £18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank contentedly together in the saloon bar until… Read More

As my esteemed colleague Geoffrey Lean reported yesterday, the IPCC has egg all over its face thanks to its ludicrously wrong claim that the Himalayan glaciers will have disappeared by 2035, when of course what it really meant was “Er 2350, probably, though we haven’t really got a clue. We got the story from New Scientist, which heard it in a phone call with a bloke called Syed Hasnain, and we didn’t bother to check because it suited our scaremongering cause just dandily…”

What our Geoffrey missed, though, in this midst of his most dextrous and athletic reverse ferret was the most interesting bit of the story, viz the relationship between Syed Hasnain and our favourite millionaire troll impersonator Dr RK… Read More

I’m just off to University College London to debate against the President of the National Union of Students, Wes Streeting, and UCL “human-rights lawyer” Philippe Sands. The motion is that “UCL is not ‘complicit’ in acts of terrorism”.

The accusation that UCL is complicit was made by me in the Telegraph after the Christmas Day bomber – former head of the Islamic society at UCL – tried to blow up his pants and bring down flight 253 to Detroit in the process. So it should be an interesting evening.

Not least because the head of the NUS has a great track record of attacking people who criticise radical Islamists. A curious position for him to have ended up in.

One of the speakers UCL have welcomed… Read More

Well, who’d have thought it? Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, has told the Chilcot inquiry that “when our forces went in, we were absolutely amazed to discover there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction.” Bet you could have knocked them all down with a feather. I can just picture them all – Blair, Powell, Alastair Campbell, Sir John Scarlett – sitting around in the PM’s office scratching their heads in complete and utter bewilderment. The fact that Hans Blix and his UN inspectors had trawled the country and found nothing, or the fact that US satellites that could make out Saddam’s bald spot had photographed nothing – this wasn’t relevant. They had intelligence that… Read More

At last, some promising news about our likely next Government. Conservative Home has polled the 250 Tory candidates with the most winnable seats on their most important personal priorities in the next election. And guess what? Of the 19 suggested issues, “Reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” came right at the bottom of their list.

The candidates were given a list of policy priorities and were asked to give each one of them a rating between 1 and 5, 1 meaning the goal would not be important to them and 5 meaning it would be very important to them. A mere eight of the 141 candidates who bothered to respond to the survey felt “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” deserved a 5. It… Read More

I trust that all my fellow bloggers enjoyed a quiet and constructive weekend, just like our political classes. I thought I might start by repeating that I have no power whatsoever to delete or censor anyone’s comments on this site except my own. However, I would take issue with djw, who says that I fail to see through bureaucrats like Trevor Phillips. I ended our interview with Mr Phillips with these words:  “I long for a land with no need of an Equality and Human Rights Commission – but, whilst we have one, then I am glad Trevor Phillips is its leader.”

As for Assegai, if the aim of the Zulu had been as bad as his, the battle of Rorke’s Drift would… Read More

Remarkably, this isn’t a spoof. Really, I’ve checked.

This morning, David Cameron gave a speech talking about increasing the quality of people going into teaching. Someone with a third-class degree, he said, should not get Government funding to train as a teacher. He called for a “brazenly elitist” approach to the quality of teachers in state schools. (You can read the whole story here.)

Now, this was never going to go down well with teaching unions, who, perhaps understandably, bristle at suggestions that some teachers aren’t up to the job.

So some hostile press releases were predictable. But I’m still staggered by this comment, from Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of… Read More

A small but significant hangover from the snow : Here in Sussex, we’re still waiting for Open Reach, “A BT Company”, to re-connect us after a tree fell across our broadband line, removing all internet and fixed-line telephone access from Pitcher Towers.

Here’s the thing about Open Reach: It’s neither open nor has reach. You can’t phone to speak to anyone at Open Reach. It owns and services the nation’s telecoms network, but any maintenance has to be arranged by your service operator, in our case the ever-diligent SCS. So that leads to the Alice-in-Wonderland requirement of phoning Open Reach to be told that we have to phone SCS, so they can phone Open Reach to arrange an engineer. Two week… Read More

Nigel Farage wants to ban the burka (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images)

For many years I used to live on the same street as a sixth-form college in West London, the sort of place which, if Ofsted measured schools by their buzzing diversity rather than actual educational standards, would be near the top of the London league tables. The pupils looked like fairly typical London teenagers – the men dressed like babies, and the women dressed like prostitutes, and increasingly so as the Noughties went on.

Except that, after a few years, the first headscarves started to appear. This wasn’t… Read More

An interview with Kirsty Wark in the the Guardian serves to remind me of a question that has long exercised me. In the course of promoting the launch of her new programme – a revamped version of Newsnight Review to be called The Review Show and broadcast from (guess where?) Glasgow – she points out that she has no plans to stop presenting Newsnight itself. Nor presumably will she be abandoning the new BBC2 quiz “A Question of Genius” or her role as presenter of the Mann Booker prize awards.

So this is my question – and it is not, absolutely not, simply to do with whether you find Ms Wark intensely annoying: why… Read More