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Society

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama’s three Afghan mistakes

The Obama administration did not inherit a good situation in Afghanistan. But decisions it has taken have made the situation there worse. First, during the transition it flirted with the idea of withdrawing US support from Hamid Karzai but did not follow through. The result of this was that Karzai—worried about losing American support—came to rely ever more heavily on the support of the worst elements in his circle making him an even worse partner than before. Second it downplayed the importance of democracy promotion. Some might claim that this was sensible pragmatism. But the blow dealt to the Afghan mission, both on the ground and over here, by the

Interconnect

Competition | 7 November 2009

In Competition No. 2620 you were invited to submit an argument, in verse, for the superiority of one vegetable over another. It was Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the artichoke’ that got me thinking about the pecking order in the vegetable kingdom. Here’s a snippet: ‘The cabbage/ Dedicated itself/ To trying on skirts,/ The oregano/ To perfuming the world,/ And the sweet/ Artichoke/ There in the garden,/ Dressed like a warrior,/ Burnished/ Like a proud/ Pomegranate…’ In a bumper crop of entries Martin Parker impressed, as did Frank Osen, David Mackie, Ray Kelley, Robert Schechter and Juliet Walker. In fact, you were all on sparkling form. But there’s room for only

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Alan Johnson is right: the boss should make the decisions; the experts should advise

I have an independent financial adviser. I can recommend him. He gives me expert advice. But I decide, and sometimes I disagree. Nobody would question either the propriety or the commonplace nature of this arrangement. Recently we were discussing what to do with my maturing pension fund. His suggestions looked shrewd but were predicated on a measure of resumed economic growth and the persistence for some years of low interest rates. His assessment was well-informed and would be widely shared. But I just have this hunch that all is not well; that Western economies including our own are rather weakly placed in the grand global scheme of things; that the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Do the Roma really need to improve their ‘resilience skills’?

Did you know that February in our schools has been designated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (sic) History Month? I’d get with it, if I were you, and send your 11-year-old child to school in a gimp mask, with some lube. Good parents make sure their kid is ahead of the curve. You can bet that there will be exercises on exploring multifaceted sexual preferences and maybe practical tests too. So tell your daughter to bin the Mary Seacole face mask she spent ages knocking up for Black History Month and get her dressed up as a boy, with a strap-on. They need those extra marks, the kids. I only

Kate Chisholm

Quiet heroism

When did you last hear something on the TV that was so true, so direct, so resonant that it keeps popping back into your mind? If you’re anything like me you’ll have a struggle to remember anything. When did you last hear something on the TV that was so true, so direct, so resonant that it keeps popping back into your mind? If you’re anything like me you’ll have a struggle to remember anything. But change one word in that question from ‘TV’ to ‘radio’ and you might well be faced with another problem: too many moments of positive connection. On the Today programme last week, Captain Sully Sullenberger, the

Jeremy Clarke

Table talk

Seven hours between flights at Nairobi airport and nowhere to smoke. So I bought a ten-dollar transit visa, left the airport precincts and headed for the nearest bar. It was called The Pub. The white-shirted, bow-tied waiters saw me coming and greeted me with a chuckle, as if they were thinking, ‘Here comes another nicotine addict on his ten-dollar transit visa.’ I hadn’t been settled at my outside table for more than a minute with a Tusker and a fag when a brisk, unshaven man asked if he could share it. He was on a three-hour stopover between Kinshasa and Dubai (final destination Pakistan). He’d smoked four cigarettes already, he

Friday

David Blackburn

Quantatitive Easing is an affront to democracy

Readers of the Spectator will know George Trefgarne’s work, and today he delivered an important report on the dangers of Quantitative Easing. I urge Coffee Housers to read the speech. It provides an interesting and relevant insight into historical precedents for the policy and how to manage it, and gives a balanced analysis of the current policy’s pros and cons. Trefgarne concurs with Mark Bathgate’s critique. There is little evidence that QE has stimulated money supply, as banks are using the cash to re-balance their lop-sided books. QE is funding the government’s debt habit. The IMF estimates that QE has reduced the benchmark 10-year interest rate on government debt by

David Blackburn

Sex, rights and duties

The news that Ed Balls will force 15 year olds to have at least one year of mandatory sex education in schools has re-opened that old debate – who should provide children’s sex education? Personally, I doubt whether teachers or parents are better suited to the task, as both use either clinical candour, which children find hilarious, or a stream of inscrutable euphemisms. The wider debate reflects the fact that some teachers and parents advise effectively and others do not because it is invariably couched in terms of rights.   Under such criteria, there is no doubt who should take precedence: the state does not have the right to educate

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The fierce urgency of education reform

Michael Gove is giving a speech tonight reaffirming the Tory plans for radical education reform. In it Gove deploys a battery of statistics to show just how comprehensively the current system has failed. The one that stood out most dramatically to me was this one: “Out of 75,000 children eligible for free school meals only 5,000 were even entered for A level. Of that 189, only 75 were boys.  Yet in the same year Eton had 175 boys who got 3As at A level.  One school with almost two and a half times as many boys getting 3As as the entire population of our poorest boys on benefit.” If this

Mark Bathgate

Printing money is not the solution

With another £40bn disappearing down the black hole known as the British Banking sector, the financial cost of the economic and banking collapse is now only rivaled by the two World Wars in it’s cost to the UK taxpayer. Rather than going to support credit to business or households, the further £25bn of “newly printed money” announced today is likely to go to help prop up the Government debt mountain.   The above chart shows how the Bank of England has been using quantative easing since March. 98.8 per cent has been used to purchase Gilts. As fast as the Debt Management Office “sells” Gilts to the “market”, the Bank

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Drug War Economics

It seems that Mexican drug cartels, vexed by inceased security at the American border, are sensibly moving production to be closer to their clients. Consequently, they’re growing marijuana on Indian Reservations inside the United States. As the Wall Street Journal reports: The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S. officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant marijuana and then several “tenders” to water them for three to four months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch about $120 million on the open market.

The Spectator

This week’s Spectator

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. Five articles from the latest issue are available for free online to all website users: Walking the corridors of Westminster at the moment is like gate crashing a wake, except for one reason. James Forsyth reveals that the expenses scandal has delighted the Tories – it has kept Gordon Brown in power. The Soviets and the Labour party had one thing in common – to keep the forces of conservatism at bay. This

Martin Bright

Is it Possible to Have a Twit-Scoop?

I was interested to see the Observer story at the weekend about Lord Ashcroft accompanying William Hague to Washington.  I tweeted this on October 23rd. I even teased Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie about Ashcroft now dominating Tory foreign policy as well as domestic policy.  Does this count as a micro-scoop? 

David Blackburn

Fifth columnists

The Afghan police were supposed to be layabout drug addicts and petty crooks, but that the force has been infiltrated by murderous, cowardly fifth columnists has concentrated Westminster minds. Current strategy in Afghanistan is failing. Paddy Ashdown’s is one of the most distinct voices on Afghanistan; and although he resembles a crazed Cockleshell hero when in full flow, he provides much needed clarity. In an op-ed in this morning’s Times, he writes: ‘It is at the political, not the military, level that we are failing. And if we did not have enough problems already, we now have a Government in Kabul whose legitimacy has been fatally damaged and for whom

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

There is peace tonight but if Cameron’s Europe plan doesn’t succeed, the Tory Europe wars will return

David Cameron kicked the can down the road on Europe today. What he announced will be enough to keep the vast majority of Tories united behind the leadership until the election; the party is close enough to power that most people are not inclined to rock the boat. But judging from those I’ve spoken with evening, there could be trouble ahead. Tonight’s reaction suggests that the Eurosceptic mainstream of the parliamentary party accepts Cameron’s position. But it wants the mechanisms that Cameron announced to prevent any further erosion of sovereignty to work. The renegotiation will also have to succeed in bringing back what Cameron said it would. If it doesn’t

The Spectator

LIVE: Cameron’s Europe speech

16:05: So, how does Cameron intend to make British law supreme? 16:06: We cannot hold a referendum to stop this treaty any more than we can stop the sun rising in the morning. And now Cameron lets rip. He points out that the betrayal was Blair’s and Brown’s, ably supported by the LibDems. The Conservatives have been consistent. 16:08: The Tories will reform the European Communities Act to ensure that such a betrayal never happens again. Every treaty and European reform will be placed before the people. Here is Cameron’s Lincolnian paradign, that dominated his Confernece speech again – power for the people is his mantra. It confims his avowed

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron promises Sovereignty Act<br />

The word coming out of Committee Room 14 is that David Cameron has just told his MPs that his party’s manifesto will not contain a commitment to a referendum on whatever repatriation package that the Tories manage to negotiate once in government. The most that he said was that if a Tory government was unsatisfied with what it managed to get back, then there might be a commitment to a referendum in the 2014 / 2015 manifesto. Set against this was a promise to put everything that comes from Europe from now on through a new sovereignty act that would require a referendum on any further ceding of powers to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Unconditional surrender

The front benches on both sides felt that they had to say that they accepted Kelly in full and so Harriet Harman and Sir George Young did just that. One member of the shadow Cabinet told me earlier this week the only option for the political class is unconditional surrender. But it does seem like there might be some areas where Kelly is watered down. The bit of Sir George Young’s statement that stood out to me was on commuting rules, where the shadow Leader of the House said: “As Sir Christopher says, IPSA will need to look closely at the proposals in this report. There are legitimate concerns with

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Church of the Very Sad Polar Bears

A judge has decided that belief in climate change is precisely the same as a belief in religion; a conviction impervious to the “present state of information available”. Mr Justice Michael Burton was adjudicating in the case of a hugely irritating chap called Tim Nicholson, who wishes to have his case that he was discriminated against because of his beliefs heard at an employment tribunal. You can read the full story here. This is good and bad, of course. At last we have an accurate legal description for the hysterical shrieking all around us; at last someone with judicial power has agreed with what many of us have been saying

Mark Bathgate

Failing to address the banking crisis is hampering recovery

As another £30 billion of taxpayers’ money is handed over to banks, the role of banking sector in the continuing UK recession cannot be understated. 1990s Japan taught the world that developed economies with zombie banking systems don’t grow.  Crippled by bad debts, lending margins on solvent borrowers increase, credit availability declines and ongoing bailouts are needed. This hampers growth in the rest of the economy. The more indebted the private sector, the greater the damage a bust banking system inflicts. The above chart shows how margins on UK mortgages – the gap between borrowing from the Bank of England and what is then leant to mortgage holders – have