Telegraph Blogs

Britain’s subscription to the International Monetary Fund is set to increase from £10.5 billion to £19.7 billion. Douglas Carswell stumbled upon the rise in a draft Statutory Instrument. A Statutory Instrument, for Heaven’s sake. See how the House of Commons, which once fought a war to preserve its fiscal sovereignty, is reduced. Next to our much… Read more

A few days ago, the forward-thinking head of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline explained why his multi-billion-pound global business was happy to slash the price of essential vaccines for children in some of the world’s poorest countries: Andrew Witty wants to make more money for his shareholders. That’s arresting enough, but he also wants GSK to… Read more

Ed Miliband is on Twitter at the moment, using the hashtag #AskEdM to have a “web chat” with Labour voters. His first answer sent me to sleep: “We need a comprehensive plan across all the major sectors – economy, housing, transport. We started it in government.” Inspired thinking, Ed. But it got funnier as nasty Tories… Read more

Easy Rider is certainly a movie that could provide a few fine campaign slogans for Jon Huntsman: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.” (need to reverse national decline under Barack Obama)  “This used to be a hell of a good country” (ditto)  “What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about.” (libertarian vote) “Whew.… Read more

I have, with some personal difficulty, now plodded my way through the turgid text of the report on perceived sexism by Julia Becker and Janet Swim, in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, which has caused a stir with its identification of a syndrome called “Benevolent Sexism”. The study’s full, throat-clearing title is: “Seeing the Unseen:… Read more

In two weeks’ time there will be a meeting in Tower Hamlets with a man called Raed Salah, a Palestinian who reportedly wrote the following piece of poetry in the Hamas journal: “You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques, Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies. Robbers and germs in all times, The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys, Victory… Read more

The Syrian opposition has released this video of Hammad Yahya, an alleged Hezbollah operative (he doesn’t deny being one, just implies that he isn’t) who says that the Lebanese terrorist group has paid men like himself between $1,000 and $3,000 to help the Syrian army violently suppress anti-Assad demonstrations. Hezbollah, he claims, has sent a… Read more

I’ve just had the great pleasure of a guided tour of the magnificently restored St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square; it really did feel as if I was being given a glimpse of the Catholic Church of the future, as envisaged by Pope Benedict XVI. The restoration, as you can see from the photograph above,… Read more

There’s a fascinating exhibition currently on at the KK Outlet gallery of works of art lost on the London Underground system. It proves yet again the hold exerted over our imagination by the good old Tube. The works themselves span the artistic genres, exemplifying the millionaire-sitting-next-to-pauper quality of the Underground, its essentially democratic nature. There’s an… Read more

A friend of mine whose family has sent some six generations of boys to Eton College was grumbling the other day that his son had failed to get in. It’s a complaint you commonly hear from old boys of the school. Once upon a time, as an Old Etonian you put your lad down at… Read more

Better. Not world-beating, but better. Positives He picked a good theme, welfare cuts for cancer patients, and stuck to it. He made good use of Macmillan Cancer Nurses to give his attack weight. He wasn’t rattled by Tory barracking, and even had a swing at trying to shame them into silence. Negatives He struggled to rebut the (predictable) Cameron… Read more

Today The Sun carries an interview with Tony Blair and he’s, well, quite a bit more revealing than he was on Today or in the Times last week. Though he doesn’t put it quite so bluntly, Tony appears to prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband. Here are the key quotes: I am happy to give [Ed] my… Read more

Michael Gove is the best thing to happen to our education system in the last 20 years. He has implemented historic and wide-reaching reform that, in my opinion, goes some way to addressing my accusation that the system is ‘broken’. By 2015 Michael Gove expects every secondary school in England to reach the national average of… Read more

This Government should be ashamed of itself over its handling of the Harrier issue. As we report today, the decision to sell the Harriers was taken in a fit of pique to punish Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope for having the temerity to revisit the aircraft carrier issue during a press briefing earlier this week. Not that… Read more

Anish Kapoor’s refusal to exhibit in China next year, in protest at the detention of Ai Weiwei, is a blow to the British Council’s “UK Now” project, which plans to exhibit British arts in 12 cities across China from April-November 2012. The idea is to capitalise on London taking over the Olympic torch from the Chinese… Read more

It’s official: a new Ice Age is on its way. In what has been described as “the science story of the century”, heavyweight US solar physicists have announced that the sun is heading for a prolonged period of low activity. This makes global cooling a much more plausible prospect in the next few decades than… Read more

It’s one of the most impressive, if unexpected, things about this government – its insistence on increasing Britain’s aid budget even at a time of austerity. For it is a triumph of principled commitment over political convenience, giving the lie to the popular canard that governments only think of the short-term and politicians care only… Read more

The government has finally bowed to a Supreme Court ruling against automatic lifetime inclusion on the sex offenders register. That means that up to 1200 convicted offenders, rapists and paedophiles included, will be eligible to apply for  their removal. While that development will not be popular, it cannot be condemned as poor justice. The Human Rights… Read more

Why are left-wing commentators so allergic to any discussion about overhauling incapacity benefit? If any politician so much as hints that some of the hundreds of thousands of people on IB might be able to work, there will be a Pavlovian outpouring of commentary about “punishing the poor” and “forcing people to work”. What these… Read more

The big news today is that George Osborne is to back the Vickers Interim Report proposals for ring-fencing the “retail” arms of banks from their “investment banking” arms and increasing the retail arms’ capital requirements. If that’s what he’s really going to say, it’s a mistake, because the Vickers Interim Report proposals will make it more likely that… Read more

Belgium has now gone for more than a year without a government and, you know what?  Life is carrying on as normal. The crops are growing, the wheels are turning in the factories, the civil servants (there are lots of these) are lingering over their coffee and speculoos biscuits. A lighter than normal legislative agenda has… Read more

What fun, back in the 90s, to see Carrie, Samantha and co get sloshed at a chic New York bar after work. The stars of Sex and the City were youngish (in their 30s, except for the carefully-preserved 40-something Samantha) and independent (though two eventually tied the knot) and they worked so hard, it was… Read more