Society

The Spectator’s Stephen Pollard has already blogged about this weekend’s big cultural draw – the Sunday performance of La traviata at the Royal Opera House.  Although, if you haven’t yet bought tickets for this “once in a generation” treat, then you’ll have difficulty in getting to see it – all performances are sold out. Far more attainable are tickets for this week’s best, new general release film: the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men.  This gritty, Texas-set thriller merges the violence and hopelessness of classic films noir with the Coen’s own offbeat sensibility, and it’s certainly their most accomplished work to date.  Check out Peter Bradshaw’s review in the

As Larry Elliot reports in today’s Guardian, a rise in the number of over-50s gaining employment has “helped Britain shrug off the impact of the credit crunch”.  Recent figures from the ONS reveal that, in the three months to November, 175,000 new jobs were created in the economy, with an astonishing 90,000 – some 51 percent – of them being taken by those over 50 years-old. However, the surge in over-50s employment may not be all good news, as it’s not unthinkable that underlying economic problems are behind it.  After all – with private sector pensions being so uncertain; house prices falling; and the prices of consumables ever-inflating – the over-50s

Calling for a sense of “perspective” and “proportionality” in coverage of British youth, the BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, complained on Radio 4’s Today on Tuesday that you could get the impression from much media coverage that Britain was a “nightmare landscape of roving bands of drunken teenagers”.   The blunt truth is that, in certain parts of the country, the nightmare is all too real and the BBC has consistently under-reported it. Within 24 hours of Thompson’s interview the London Evening Standard was reporting that, in London alone, five children are injured in gun or knife attacks every day. “We know we have a challenge in youth crime,” said the

Ed Balls was on the World at One, taking a bow for the teachers’ pay deal. He again referred to low inflation and falling interest rates – which will not sound at all right to those reading the Telegraph’s splash about food prices rising at the highest rates in history or the 1.6m poor souls renegotiating their mortgage this year. One of Brown’s key tactics is the fake narrative: cherry picking statistics to cast his years in No 11 in the best possible light. But his official version is now becoming so detached from what people experience and read about that it just sounds fake. One of the reasons the

I always knew I was right not to be one of the 59 million (7 million in the UK) people who have joined Facebook, and Tom Hodgkinson’s article in today’s Guardian has confirmed my prejudice. He makes an extremely convincing case for not wanting to be part of Facebook’s ‘heavily funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands’. Read it — and sign off.