Society

Thursday

Mark Bathgate

Risky business | 3 December 2009

With the largest transfer of liabilities in British history – the insurance of the risk of loss on £240 billion of toxic RBS assets by taxpayers – proceeding, there is worryingly little information being given about either what these assets may be or what risks there are to the taxpayer. Rather than the parliamentary enquiry and detailed disclosure Swiss parliamentarians demanded when UBS needed similar assistance, a small press release noting such exotics as “structured credit assets “ has been issued. The spin continues to be that there is nothing to worry about and all this money will come back fine. Bank of England data shows that UK bank exposure

The Spectator

In this week’s Spectator | 3 December 2009

The latest issue of the Spectator is released today. If you are a subscriber you can view it here. If you have not subscribed, but would like to view this week’s content, you can subscribe online now. Six articles from the latest issue are available for free online to all website users: As the world gears up for two weeks of hob-nobbing in Copenhagen, it is plain that climate change has mutated from a debate into a catechism. With so much at stake, says Fraser Nelson, can we afford to dispense with rational argument? The Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, continues to deny that Islamist extremism is being taught in state-funded

Wednesday

Lawrence Kay

Politicking on the backs of the poorest

This afternoon Jim Knight MP, the minister for welfare reform, proclaimed that the Government wants to turn the Jobcentre Plus network into a careers service for everyone. He said that welfare advisers, who currently try to help get people on benefits back into work, will start to “provide opportunities for progression” for anyone in a job – no matter whether the person is a banker or a bin man. This is a bad idea for a simple reason: it is far more important to help the unemployed back into work than give assistance to people who already have a job. The longer that someone is out of work, the worse

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Dazed and confused | 2 December 2009

How are you feeling this morning? Muddled and confused? Follow my rule, then: always wait until Thought for the Day has finished before you enjoy your first stiffener of the morning. Lord Stern thinks most of you are muddled and confused, and has said as much. Anyone who doubts man-made climate change is muddled and confused. Stern is the chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. The Grantham Institute is of course named after Leslie Grantham who played Dirty Den in the popular soap opera “Eastenders” but who, in his spare time, made up a long list of figures which proved that the earth was getting

David Blackburn

This small man thinks he’s St. Joan

I sympathise with Alistair Darling and his defence of the City. When he’s not contending with Gordon Brown’s suicidal Tobin tax proposals, Darling has to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated anti-Anglo popular politics. Yesterday, the Elysees’s Puss-in-Boots delivered a deliberately provocative and economically senseless attack on what he described as the “unconstrained Anglo-Saxon market model.” Sarkozy sees the appointment of Michel Barnier as EU financial regulation supremo as a “victory” for France; he expressed himself in those exact terms: “Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the

Peter Coleman

Australian Notes | 2 December 2009

I was both right and wrong. When Tony Abbott’s Battlelines came out a few months ago I wrote in these pages that it had many excellent things to say but its thinness on economic policy meant that his Parliamentary colleagues would be unwilling to elect him as their leader. That was wrong. But I added: ‘except in the most extraordinary circumstances’ — and that turned out to be right. The Liberal party is lucky to have had him to fall back on. The rage of the Left shows that it knows it now has a fight on its hands. John Howard will be both the guest of honour at the

Interconnect

Man-made global warming is real. The solutions being touted are not

The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options Judging by the opinion polls, those gathering at the Copenhagen climate change summit have a lot of persuading to do. Just two in five Brits think that global warming is taking place and is man-made. Only one third of Americans think that humans are responsible for climate change. The number of Australians who deem global warming a ‘serious and pressing problem’ has dropped sharply. The urgency which grips politicians around the world seems not to be shared by the general public — to the frustration of people

Stephen J Dubner

A solution that dare not speak its name

Imagine for a moment that a terrible, unforeseen threat to humankind had suddenly arisen, one so grave that it endangered the very future of the planet. Two teams of respected scientists immediately set to work, trying to find a way to prevent the impending disaster. The first set of scientists returned with a potential solution, but it had some shortcomings. It was expensive, with a price tag in the trillions of dollars. It also required nearly every human being on the planet to change his or her behaviour in fundamental ways. And even if the scientists’ scheme worked, it would take decades for the benefits to be felt. The second

Paul Reiter

The inconvenient truth about malaria

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood. In his book — the version for adults, not the one for schoolchildren — he even included a colour photograph of a corpse, a young man, floating face downward, drowned by Hurricane Katrina. I wonder whether the dead boy’s family were consulted. I am a scientist, not a climatologist,

Rupert Darwall

Why Marx would have been a denier

Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’ Who heard the Marxist bark? In the history of global warming, that dog was classical Marxism, a Promethean doctrine that argued for the strengthening of man’s power over nature. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global carbon emissions treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during

Robert O-Mendelsohn

Calm down, dear. There’s plenty of time

The Stern Review is four years old but remains a vital tool for Copenhagen’s policy-makers. It shows them exactly what not to do, says Robert O. Mendelsohn Across the West, we hear the increasingly shrill prophesies that climate change will destroy the earth. The solution proposed is to adopt a new world order with regulations that will dramatically change the global economy. Against this backdrop, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen in a few days’ time to discuss whether such upheaval can be justified. And it is a subject on which economists have plenty to say. Simply put, the costs of ‘abatement’ — the carbon reduction plans being advocated in

Maurizio Morabito

The CIA’s ‘global cooling’ files

A high-priority government report warns of climate change that will lead to floods and starvation. ‘Leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’. The scenario is eerily familiar although the document — never made public before — dates from 1974. But here’s the difference: it was written to respond to the threat of global cooling, not warming. And yes, it even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists. ‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974, goes a little way towards explaining why some people over a certain age experience a

Rachel Johnson

Come on, girls — have a crack!

When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman. It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks,

Deborah Ross

Where’s Tom?

Me and Orson Welles 12A, Nationwide For a film about drama, Me and Orson Welles — Orson Welles and I? Do we care? — is obstinately undramatic. I kept trying to will it into some kind of life, any kind of life. Come on. You can do it. Think of the children! But it would not be roused. It just plodded on, drearily and leadenly, for the full 114 minutes, like I had nothing better to do, which I didn’t, but that’s not the point. Based on true events, it follows the 22-year-old Welles as he mounts his ground-breaking New York 1937 production of Julius Caesar, but as a film

Dominic Lieven

Nanny knew best

Born in 1908, Nikolay Andreyev came from a middle-class family in provincial Russia. His father and mother were both school teachers. His mother had many jewels but never wore them in public, since she believed a teacher should not show herself to be concerned with such fripperies. His parents’ views were those of the liberal intelligentsia. An uncle was killed by the police during a demonstration in the revolutionary year of 1906. Only his nanny was a monarchist, howling, ‘Woe unto you all, woe’ when she heard of the Tsar’s abdication. Nikolay’s mother banished her instantly to her room for spoiling the family’s celebrations. Later, amidst civil war and Bolshevik

Tuesday

Martin Bright

Cumbrian Floods: How Long Till We Forget?

So what happens when the news cameras leave and the people who have been flooded out are left to clear up the mess and rebuild their lives? The point is that the news agenda moves on and the people of Cockermouth will just have to get on with it.  But where is the record of what happened? Who is collecting all those stories of the extraordinary events of November 2009? Thanks to the internet, some of the oral history of the great flood has been automatically recorded. The BBC website captured some of the stories. But they will just sit there without proper curation. And in this time of high

David Blackburn

The case for NHS reform

Britain remains the sick man of Europe. Professor Sir Mike Richards’s report finds that although progress has been made on cancer treatments, diagnosis rates, and therefore the chances of survival, lag behind European standards. A deluge of statistical analysis supports Richards’s findings. The European Journal of Cancer’s recent research into solid cancers, such as breast cancer and melanoma, demonstrated that the speed of diagnosis and survival rates in the UK were “20% below” the European average. Additionally, the table below, which is taken from 2009’s OECD health data, illustrates that the gap between the number of cancer deaths per 100,000 population in Europe and the UK has widened.   1997

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You couldn’t make it up | 1 December 2009

So, here we are then. Another one of life’s harmless little pleasures outlawed by Brown’s nanny state. What will they ban next? You’d think the police would have better things to do than apprehending a bloke simply for enjoying himself and hurting nobody in the process. In the end, they’ll get all of us. Can’t smoke, can’t shout abuse at black people, can’t chastise the kids. And now my one weeknight pleasure can see you banged up by the old bill.

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall 30 November – 6 December

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local