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Diary

Denis MacShane

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Denix MacShane looks back on his packed summer break

Parliament is back and I can relax. A tiresome cliché holds that MPs have a three-month summer break. If only. I have spent more time canvassing, selling tombola tickets and doing politics than ever before. And then on the eve of the Commons returning there is pure political Wagner. Boris fires Blair! Mandy returns! Like Churchill returning to office in 1939 the signal goes out: ‘Peter is back!’ Russia invades and dismembers Georgia! George W. Bush nationalises more finance capital than Lenin! The USA adds an extra S to become the United Socialist States of America as its ambassador quits Mayfair to open an embassy in the heart of proletarian south London. Now the Commons is sitting we can take it easy after the political dramas of recent weeks.

In Poland, I speak at the Davos of the East — the Krynica conference in the Carpathians which pulls 1,500 business, political and media chieftains from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Georgia — the new Europe that is reclaiming history. Poland is growing strongly. I see more cranes, new cars and stylish women in Warsaw than ever before. The Chinese are opening a big car factory in Poland. After the Kaczynski government which fought a diplomatic war on two fronts — against Berlin and Moscow — Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, who has also written for The Spectator, is making peace east and west and even promoting Poland’s own Ostpolitik by trying to lure Belarus towards democracy. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, gets a rousing cheer from the millionaires when he says Poland will join the euro in 2011.

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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.

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The Spectator's Notes

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‘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.