Last week, the Islamist group Boko Haram launched a horrific attack, bombing five Nigerian police stations and killing 186 in one day. What started as a campaign targeting Christians in the north has now grown into a crisis that threatens to overwhelm the Nigerian government — and the church leaders who appealed for foreign assistance have had little response. When Nigeria’s president said he is now facing a crisis as grave as the civil war of 1967, in which a million died, his words were barely reported by the foreign press. This former British colony, which we controlled until 1960,...
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It is often claimed that the Lords, unencumbered by the rivalries and ambitions of the Commons, have a greater affinity with ordinary people than MPs. Certainly, this is the spin which opponents of the Welfare Reform Bill would like to put on its rocky passage through the upper house, where the government narrowly avoided a fourth defeat this week. But there is an alternative interpretation: that their lordships are suffering from a form of noblesse oblige which prevents them from seeing that the welfare system has become a racket, incubating the poverty it was set up to eradicate.
This week’s...
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‘Saving the union’ is unlikely to rank highly on David Cameron’s list of new year resolutions. Scotland is becoming a land about which most Westminster politicians know little and care less. It is being handled in 10 Downing St by Ed Llewellyn, who specialises in foreign affairs, yet neither he nor anyone else has the faintest idea what to do about Alex Salmond. The Scots around Cameron regard their motherland as a distant memory, a place where they lived before seeking political asylum in England. The Edinburgh parliament, its arguments and dynamics, are a mystery to the Prime Minister and...
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The murder of a teenager on Boxing Day, stabbed during a brawl over a pair of trainers in Oxford Street, offers another horrifying glimpse of the culture of violence being incubated in our sink estates. Police have not yet confirmed if this was another gang killing, but it seems to fit a sickening pattern. There was Negus McClean, killed in April after he confronted a gang who tried to steal his brother’s mobile phone. Then Nicholas Pearton, stabbed to death in a shop doorway in May by a group of schoolboys. At each outrage politicians denounce criminality and the police...
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Just a few weeks ago, calling someone a ‘technocrat’ was a soft insult. The word meant, in effect, an efficient dullard. Now, technocrats appear to be inheriting the earth. They represent a new global elite, and they have recently added Greece and Italy to their empire. When Egypt’s military faced riots on the streets this week, it sought to assuage the crowds by replacing the government with a cabinet of technocrats. The Libyan rebels are doing the same. We have seen two very different types of regime change this year. The Arab Spring is driven by popular uprising; Europe has...
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First the good bit: the pronouncements of George Osborne’s early weeks at No. 11 helped to pacify investors who might otherwise have treated our government bonds to the same degrading treatment as those of Greece, Ireland, Spain and now Italy. As a result of a credible programme to reduce (albeit not eliminate) the deficit, confidence in UK government debt held firm and the Treasury is now able to borrow money at a shade above 2 per cent, rather than at the 7 per cent now being imposed on Italy. This is, today, the Treasury’s greatest single boast.
Unfortunately, however, Osborne...
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