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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

We are in a financial crisis which has been going on for more than a year. It is remarkable that, in all that time, no political leader has had anything much to say about it. In the United States, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama appears to have any understanding of what is going on. Over here, Gordon Brown’s supposed gift for economic analysis seems to have deserted him. One hears phrases like ‘the fundamentals are sound’, and trembles. David Cameron, pursuing the favourite strategy of keeping his party away from bad news, acknowledges the gravity of the situation without proposing remedies. It may be the right tactic, when in a hurricane, to lie as low as possible and wait for it to pass, but big political rewards do come to those who, people believe, have successfully diagnosed and treated economic malaise. That is why people have heard of FDR and Margaret Thatcher, and tend not to remember Warren Harding or John Major. At present, the only British politician with a reputation for economic thinking is Vince Cable, which makes one feel there is a gap in the market.

Under its leader from Kirkcaldy, the Labour party has become a thing of ill omen. Just as Macbeth is superstitiously known as ‘the Scottish play’, I feel it would be safer to refer to Labour from now on as ‘the Scottish party’.

On BBC One’s magazine programme The One Show last week, I happened to watch an item celebrating ‘the Taggart of the wildlife world’. He is DC Dave Mackinnon, and from his police station in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, he scours the Scottish landscape for ‘wildlife crime’. On the day The One Show visited, DC Dave was pursuing reports of a dead buzzard. Buzzards are a very common species of hawk, so you would think that not a day passes without a dead one being found somewhere in the Grampians, but off sped the detective, the television cameras and another police car with a second officer to assist. As the presenter said, they were ‘treating this like any other crime scene’. A GPS reading found the bird which was, indeed, dead. On one wing, DC Dave discerned a small hole which he said could have been made either by a shotgun or a rifle (as if the impact of the one were indistinguishable from that of the other) or, he thought, possibly not. The bird was X-rayed, and then put in a bag and taken off to Edinburgh for a post-mortem. When this process was complete, it was decided that the buzzard had died of natural causes. In the eyes of the unquestioning BBC (‘Most of us find it hard to get our heads around the idea that people make it their business to harm animals and birds’), Mr Mackinnon was a hero in a war against game-keepers — indeed, I have heard them promoting him on another programme on Radio 4. But it struck me that he should himself be arrested for the serious offence of wasting police time.

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Andrew Forbes

September 18th, 2008 1:45pm

It is quite incredible that the police do not have the resources to do much investigation of domestic burglary, but can find men, forensic support and the like to investigate buzzard deaths, not because a crime was suspected; merely a dead bird. Buzzards are not an endangered species.

Red Kites are an endangered species, though in this country; someone needs to tell this to the group dodging traffic on the M40 trying to pinch roadkill. I can only see them getting rarer.

I believe the environmental regulations are similarly skewed (it might have been you in the Daily T that pointed this out, Charles); there was a town that had been flooded, which had had a request for flood defenses denied. Meanwhile, millions was being spent nearby to protect a piece of marsh for some warblers or similar. The irony being, the birds could simply fly away and build a nest elsewhere, but the home owning tax payers standing in 3 feet of mixed rainwater and sewage could not. Best only to read the sports news.

perdix

September 18th, 2008 4:01pm

Vince Cable - "The only politician with a reputation for economic thinking".??
You should see John Redwood's daily blog.

JohnAnt

September 20th, 2008 12:19am

It'd be interesting to imagine some classics rewritten for Tesco:

"Happy families are all alike. They bulk-buy lots of fish fingers and crisps."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a Beef Stroganoff and Treacle Pudding from Tesco's Finest Range."

"Call me 'Supervisor'."

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, carrying a bowl of microwaveable vanilla custard, today's special offer."

Ross Burns

September 20th, 2008 11:58am

It gives a shudder to read that book publishers bow to a supermarkets 'preference' for book dust covers. I won't read a book with a bad cover. This leads me to hunt down one which is suitable, and it is worth it. Many re-issued good books look like fisherprice kids picture thick things, because the contents seemingly haven't been given a thought at the latte meeting where such a thing should be thought about. I'm glad Charles elegantly pointed this absurdity out.

Andrew Forbes

September 23rd, 2008 12:08pm

JohnAnt has hit on something.

"Golly Holmes, is that another 5% solution you're having". "No. Bicardi Breezers are 3 for 2 at Tesco, the choice was elementary my dear Watson".

"Martini, Mr Bond?" "No, those Smirnoff Ice look great; don't shake it, you'll spray it all over my Tux."

David Short

September 24th, 2008 3:06pm

Ian Fleming always insisted on designing the book jackets for his Bond books.

As a scion of the Fleming merchant bank family, if he were alive today and was turfed out on the streets of Canary Wharf, he could wander over to the Tesco Metro there and sign up as a book jacket approver.

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.