Inequality
Levelling up is failing
First the good news: the Office for National Statistics figures released today show that pay is rising at its fastest…
Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…
The rise of the new autocracy
Gstaad Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over:…
The facts about race and education
Judging from the reaction to last week’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, you’d think it had been written…
The false narrative of white vs BAME
Almost 20 years ago, Michael Howard spoke about the ‘British dream’: that immigrant families like his could come to this…
In Gstaad neither poor nor rich worry about inequality
Gstaad Here in Gstaad there is no worker alienation. Nor are the rich especially worried. The talk is about…
Disgusted of London - A.L. Kennedy's Serious Sweet reviewed
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
Maybe you should tax me more – just don’t touch my dishwasher
There was a big fuss a year or so ago about a book by a French chap called Piketty about…
The cruellest month
My August-born toddler is being marked out for failure – thank God the rules are changing
Chairman Mao: monster of misrule
Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in…
Just how hard is it to sack a lord?
Safe house Lord Sewel is unique in leaving the House of Lords in disgrace. Until the House of Lords Reform…
‘The problem isn’t that we’ve been slaves to free markets’: Joseph Stiglitz interview
Joseph Stiglitz, the left’s favourite economist,on making the free market work
Spectator letters: England’s defining myth, and another forgotten genocide
Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much…
Lefty myths about inequality
As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years?…
When Rome’s 99 per cent stood up
In the UK the richest 1 per cent — 300,000 — of the working population control 23 per cent of…
The real problem with our MPs: they’re obsessed with the super-rich
Had the public been asked, before Monday morning, to identify two MPs who stood for honesty and decency, the names…
Why I’m glad there’s no British Las Vegas
I didn’t realise that the Rialto Bridge has a moving walkway and muzak, that the gondolas beneath it float on…
Revealed: the marriage gap between Britain's rich and poor
Marriage has emerged as a serious – and perhaps surprising – social divide
David Cameron’s not the only one in trouble over morris dancing
Dirty dancing David Cameron was accused of causing racial offence by posing with blacked-up Morris dancers, though it was pointed…
How the Ancient Greeks did wealth taxes
After 685 tightly argued pages, the ‘superstar’ economist Thomas Piketty unfolds his master-plan for closing the gap between the rich…
Fight Thomas Piketty or face a mansion tax
The postman at the door is stooped by his burden like an allegorical statue of Labour Oppressed by Capital. His…
Being rich makes you mean: here's proof
It’s all the rage these days to worry about the growing gap between rich and poor. Our fretting was fuelled…
Britain is now a socialist utopia
Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise…
