Society

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 27 February 2010

Gordon Brown using his pen to stab the back seat of his limo in rage puts one in mind of Domitian (emperor ad 81-96) killing flies in rather the same way. Brown’s furious treatment of messengers with bad tidings likewise has many ancient parallels. So our Prime Minister would do well to read some ancient treatises on anger-management. In his de ira (‘On Anger’), the Roman philosopher Seneca (ad 1-65) describes what an angry person looks like: ‘his eyes blaze and flash, his whole face is crimson with blood surging up from the depths of his heart, his lips quiver, his teeth clench, his hair bristles and stands on end,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories deploy their strongest weapon, the prospect of five more years of Gordon Brown

If you had a fiver for every time a Tory speaker today has said ‘five more years of Gordon Brown’ you would soon be rich enough to start worrying about the 50p tax rate. All the speakers in the economy debate stressed how the country ‘cannot afford five more years of Gordon Brown.’ George Osborne talked about how the Tories had to win three battles—the battles over the past, the present and the future.  Ken Clarke, who looked like he has taken to visiting Boris Johnson’s barber, was charged both with boosting George Osborne and emphasising that ‘Brown played a major role in making this crisis worse than it needed

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Telling tales of his mother and father

Gordon Brown does not have much of a personal “backstory” but he does talk about his family. When he’s feeling guilty about something, he mentions his father. But today, speaking to the Welsh Labour Party, he again talks about a figure we heard about a few days ago: his grandfather. “Like so many here I come from a family whose grandfather went without work during much of the 1930s. A grandfather whose small savings gave his son, my father, the chance of an education, the first in our family to go to university. And the lesson of those days is that even in the worst of times families helped each

Daniel Korski

Let us help plucky Moldova

Now that the post-Cold War era has ended it is hard to find small, inspirational states who seek to cement a new-found independence and yearn for what the West has to offer. Georgia looked like such a state until Russian aggression and Tblisi’s behaviour put an end to the country’s westward journey. Ukraine is too big, and too bolshy to count. Belarus is happy in Moscow’s embrace.  But one country still fits the bill – Moldova. Sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, Europe’s absolute poorest country is undergoing a new political spring after the recent elections. A new, Western-minded, youthful coalition government has replaced the old-style communists. It faces enormous challenges,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Huge Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead*

Not to trivialise the story too much, but if this ain’t the headline** in every British newspaper tomorrow then, damn it, the subs should be ashamed of themselves. *So far & thankfully & given the size (8.8) of the quake anyway. UPDATE Sunday 7pm: It seems, sadly, that more lives have been lost than had first been thought. So, consider this flippancy withdrawn. **And no, it doesn’t matter that it may be based on myth. As another man said, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Tories need to hammer home that tax cuts will stimulate growth

George Osborne saved the 2007 Tory conference with a tax cut. He’s recalling that mood today, elaborating on the plans to cut corporation tax which – as James detailed a while ago – will be the backbone of his first budget. Now, you may think: we know all this. Osborne has said he’d cut corporation tax from 28p to 25p and cutting the small companies rate to 20p. He had promised to go lower still, telling the CBI  last April that Britain “will need to go further if we are to keep pace with an increasingly competitive global economy” – and we have heard no more of this since. But

Martin Bright

Brown is not the problem — it’s his thuggish henchmen who need to be reined in

It is now established in that nether world somewhere between the media myth-making machine and the public imagination that Gordon Brown is a brooding paranoid who cannot control his temper. John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants; Gordon Brown pushes secretaries out of chairs. Some stories stick to politicians not because people know they are true but because people want them to be true. It no longer matters what the Downing Street spinners say in response to the claims of rough-housing in the Prime Minister’s bunker. Enough people from the inside have talked to journalists about Brown’s fits of anger for the Westminster village to know that Andrew Rawnsley’s

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How Essex betrayed its residents

Ross Clark on a supposedly ‘model’ Tory authority which has, behind the scenes, left elderly homeowners to suffer at the hands of private contractors For an idea of what public services might look like in Cameron’s Britain we are encouraged to look at Essex County Council. Along with Hammersmith & Fulham it is held up as a ‘flagship’ Conservative authority, showing what can be achieved if councils become more businesslike. Essex it was that in December signed a five-year, £5.4 billion deal with IBM to manage and provide public services such as management of schools, maintenance of highways and organisation of social care. The deal, claims Essex, will save £200

Stuart Wheeler

A question of trust | 27 February 2010

What are MPs worth? I don’t mean this literally. I hope they’re all each worth as much as they would like to be, or deserve to be. But what are they worth to us? They’re the product of our democracy. They’re the consequence of our centuries of stable constitutional development, and the enduring part of Britain’s place in history as the global pioneer of representative government. So to us they are worth quite a lot in fact. But even before their allowances are taken into account, MPs’ salaries immediately put them in the top 5 per cent income bracket. Moreover, this level of pay is unprecedented: you have never paid

James Walton

We believe in angels

Among the more neglected victims of the recession have been the authors of misery memoirs — or ‘mis-mems’ as they’re rather heartlessly known in the trade. As if these people hadn’t suffered enough at the hands of their drunken, violent and/or abusive families, the credit crunch brought more bad news. The books sections of supermarkets began to think that misery was something we could now get for ourselves without the help of reading. What they’d offer instead was a bit of comfort: a belief that, despite appearances to the contrary, we’re surrounded by powerful forces with our best interests at heart. In other words, the way was open for the

Justin Marozzi

Mogadishu Notebook

From Miami to Mogadishu; from blues skies, pastel perfection, grilled red snapper, key lime pie and margaritas to blue skies, a bombed-out cityscape, warm beer and boiled goat (the main dish in ‘the Dish’). From Miami to Mogadishu; from blues skies, pastel perfection, grilled red snapper, key lime pie and margaritas to blue skies, a bombed-out cityscape, warm beer and boiled goat (the main dish in ‘the Dish’). No question Mogadishu could use a lick of paint and a spot of rebuilding. I drive through it in the back of a Casspir, a landmine-resistant armoured personnel carrier belonging to the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom). This place makes Kabul

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 27 February 2010

In Competition No. 2635 you were invited to incorporate the following homophones into a poem bemoaning the general decline in standards of literacy: ‘elicit’, ‘illicit’, ‘lesson’, lessen’, ‘Dane’, ‘deign’, ‘dissent’, ‘descent’. From time to time, a challenge triggers rumblings of discontent in the competitive ranks, and to judge by the exasperated note accompanying one entry — ‘you can’t imagine how much I hate this comp’ — this was one of them. Its prescriptive nature is not to everyone’s taste, admittedly (a maverick few chose simply to ignore the theme altogether); and I did regret having to disqualify some good entries because one of the specified homophones was missing. What’s more,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 27 February 2010

It takes a more ruthless person than me to walk past any of the defunct branches of Borders without feeling some pangs of conscience. I am sure the chain made some mistakes (it had a strange habit of opening vast, hangar-like stores in out-of-town retail parks such as Lakeside, places not generally known for their wide-ranging literary tastes), but its shops were usually well stocked and staffed. No, it is people like me who are responsible for this bankruptcy, our every Amazon visit a further nail in the coffin of the traditional bookseller. How long before the proper bookshop becomes as rare on our streets as the traditional tobacconist? I

Taki

Trouble ahead

St Moritz As they used to say in Flatbush, I shoulda stood in bed. So, leaving the pretty village of Gstaad on a sunny Tuesday morning, I set out for St Moritz to attend the Annual General Meeting of Pugs club and to participate in the first Pugs uphill ski race on the new course laid out by our president, Professor William H. Gimlet. As the prof. has learnt to ski only recently — ironically, there are no skiing lessons provided by British institutions for the criminally insane — I should perhaps have foreseen, in the words of Irving Berlin, ‘trouble ahead’, but I didn’t. I woke up with a

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An interview packed with Brownies

Brownies galore in our PM’s interview with the Economist. So many, in fact, that I thought I do a quick Fisk:   The Economist: The big worry seems to be the deficit—the deficit. What should the message should be? Gordon Brown: I actually think that the first thing that we’ve got to do as a global community—and I said it this morning and I’ll say it again—is that the reforms of the global financial system are not complete. As far as Britain is concerned, we are dealing with a one-off hit as a result of globalisation. FN: Let us pause, here, to consider the brazenness. Brown’s policies pumped the UK

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Anyone But England?

Happily, I couldn’t find a photo of Steve Nicol’s miss against Uruguay in 1986. Could there be anything dafter, yet still wearisomely predictable, than the news that the polis have warned an Aberdeen shop that dares to sell “Anyone But England” t-shirts* in the run-up to this year’s World Cup finals that said items might be considered “racist”? Quiet times in the Granite City, one trusts, if this is how the constabulary is keeping busy. It’s inevitable that we’l hear much more on this front as the tournament draws nearer (just ask Andy Murray). So, for the record, this blog’s Official England World Cup Position is this: I’d like England

Thursday

David Blackburn

Byrne’s cuts deception

Liam Byrne has caught the Brown bug – not for raging in his underpants you understand, but for fiscal conceits. Tony Wright, the Public Administration Select Committee Chairman, called Liam Byrne (and the opposition as well) to task for misleading the public on the dire effects of cuts. Wright may be proved right: frontline services could well be decimated by the cessation of funding. But he missed Byrne’s deception. The indispensible Andrew Sparrow reports: ‘Byrne said that between 1985-86 and 1988-89 public spending as a share of GDP dropped by 8.6%. Between 2011-12 and 2014-15 it is forecast to drop by 5.9%.’ Because Treasury figures have been constantly out, the

The Spectator

In this week’s issue | 25 February 2010

The latest issue of the Spectator is published today. Inside, James Forsyth argues that the Tories’ situation is now verging on critical; Martin Bright says that Brown’s henchmen are the problem; and Rod Liddle says that bullying has become the latest Public Sector growth industry. If you are a subscriber you can view these articles and many more here. If you have not subscribed, but would like to view this week’s content, you can subscribe online here, or purchase a single issue here. A selection of articles has been made available, free, for all website users: Toby Young goes to war with Caitlin Moran. James Walton explores the strange resurgence

Peter Hoskin

Back with a vengeance | 25 February 2010

All of a sudden, the Big Banks are Big Politics again.  And who’d have it any other way, on the day that the 84 percent taxpayer-owned RBS announced losses for 2009 of £3.6 billion?  And that’s alongside a bonus pool for its staff of £1.3 billion.  Yep – however hard they try, the exorcists of Westminster just can’t shift the ghost of Fred the Shred. In which case, there’ll be plenty about bankers’ pay, and about getting taxpayers what’s owed to them, over the next few days.  And rightly so.  But I often feel that these issues detract from even bigger ones, such as how to ensure that there aren’t

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Charlie’s Angels

Does it matter if this story is actually true or not? It’s clearly going to be a movie soon. All that needs to be decided is the casting: A lingerie model is believed to be the mastermind behind an all-women drug gang that smuggles cocaine into Britain. An international arrest warrant has been issued for Angie Sanselmente Valencia, 30, who is said to only hire glamour models to transport the drugs from South America to Europe. It’s believed that Colombian-born Valencia had been seeing a Mexican drug lord known as ‘The Monster’ but split with him at the end of last year to form her own cocaine-smuggling gang. […] Her