Society

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the expenses story is so damaging for Brown

I suspect that the story about Brown paying his brother £6,000 for cleaning services could be as damaging to the Prime Minister outside the Westminster Village as the McBride story was to him inside. One of the few remaining things Brown had going for him was the idea that whatever you thought of him he didn’t appear to be a politician on the make and on the take. Headlines about paying his brother £6,000 for cleaning blow away the image of him as a frugal Son of the Manse. It makes him appear just as bad as the rest of them. To be fair, the detail of the story is

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Thought for the day | 8 May 2009

Plato had it right on MPs’ expenses. This from The Republic: “We also have to make sure the guardians do not become like sheep dogs that turn into wolves and abuse their power to harm their fellow citizens. Therefore the guardians will have no private property, they will live transparently, they will be provided for out of taxes, and they will live together communally. First, none of them should possess any private property beyond what is wholly necessary.  Second, none of them should have a house or storeroom that isn’t open for all to enter at will.  Third, whatever sustenance moderate and courageous warrior-athletes require in order to have neither

Peter Hoskin

Slow-motion car crash

They just don’t get it, do they?  Listening to Harriet Harman being interviewed on the Today Programme just now, and she’s sticking to the kind of response pioneered by Sir Stuart Bell last night.  The emphasis, as this quote shows, was on evasion and blame-shifting: “My judgement is this: our system does not have the corruption that obtains in other countries.  Most MPs enter politics for public service, with obvious exception of MPs like Derek Conway.” Hm.  I expect the court of public opinion will feel differently.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Irish Army Told They May Only Play Tiddlywinks

I’m not* one to mock the Irish armed forces and there’s no gainsaying the fact that Irish troops have done their bit in various peacekeeping operations around the world. But (you guessed there’d be a “but”, right?) it’s hard impossible not to be amused by the fact that Irish troops preparing for deployment to Chad have been told they cannot play football soccer on the dusty playing fields of Chad: Defence Minister Willie O’Dea said the decision was made for health and safety reasons. “The reality in Chad is that the ground is extremely hard. Some of the sports are played out on open ground and when people fall, it

Peter Hoskin

A Parliamentary horror story

So far as the Government is concerned, there’s no good time for these expense details to be released.  But now; now is just about the worst time they could have feared.  Just as the Smeargate story is losing most of its urgency –  with the resignation of Derek Draper from LabourList today – here’s another scandal which will rock politics to its core.  And, as Martin suggests, Brown & Co. may bear the brunt of it all.  The main revelations so far involve our Dear Leader and members of his Cabinet, and they’ll naturally be seen as the administration which has presided over this moral debasement of Parliament.  With the

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Clueless government

Joanna Lumley was late for her 4pm press conference – she apologised and explained why. 10 Downing Street had just called her and said they “had just heard” that four of the five Gurkhas have had their test cases rejected. She repeated this, with incredulity. “They had just heard. They had just heard. There seems, if I may say so minister, a gap in communications.” That’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that British government is in utter meltdown, and there be even more stapler-sized holes in the walls of No10 this afternoon. Brown gave assurances on the matter, on the very day the Home

James Forsyth James Forsyth

We can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore the Israeli consensus on Iran

Shimon Peres is a man of the Israeli centre-left and someone who has repeatedly tried to make peace. So, it is worth noting what the Israeli president said about Iran–and how similar is to what Netanyahu says about the subject—in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. JG: Is there a chance that Israel is over-reacting to the language that comes out of Tehran? Let me ask this another way: Is it possible to over-learn the lessons of Jewish history? SP: If we have to make a mistake of overreaction or underreaction, I think I prefer the overreaction to underreaction. There is an Israeli consensus on Iran. For obvious

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Keeping up with the Jones

Anyone who has watched the West Wing knows there’s a cult of long hours in Washington. Obviously, there are times when people do need to work around the clock. But there are other times when a 12 hour working day is sufficient. Anyone who demonstrates this, though, riles establishment Washington. President Bush’s habit of being home for an early dinner was one of the many things that put him at odds with the DC establishment from day one. I remember a journalistic colleague who had worked in the famoulsy late-night Clinton administration moaning to me in the summer of 2001 that Bush’s insistence on being home for dinner, meant that his

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Graeme Swann Takes the New Ball

Shamefully, I’ve not kept a sufficiently close eye on the cricket today. It’s early May and it doesn’t feel right for there to be a test match on so soon. Anyway, reader TS writes “Do you realize that England have just given Graeme Swann the new ball?  In a test match at Lords, no less!  In May!  If this doesn’t merit an “O tempora O mores” post, I’m not sure what does.” Patrick Kidd and the chaps at Cricinfo seem equally perplexed. Actually, I quite like the move and not just because giving Swann a couple of overs with the new ball is refreshingly unorthodox. There’s method behind the idea

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Visca Barca!

Jim Henley had a great post a while back naming names and shaming those people who blog too much. As Jim rightly put it, these days you need to be a professional blog reader just to keep up. On the other hand, there are those people who don’t blog nearly enough. My friend Kerry Howley is one. Blimpish is another. And so is James Hamilton, whose More than Mind Games has been in a kind of extended winter break for some time. Happily, however, there are signs of the green shoots of bloggy recovery. Happily James is back to remind us how grateful we should be that Barcelona did the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why, in the end, we will defeat Islamist extremism

This report from the Washington Post detailing the tales of refugees from the Swat valley shows why, eventually, we will triumph against the Taliban and their ilk: “As the refugees begin streaming out of Swat and the neighboring Buner district in northwest Pakistan, they carry with them memories of the indignities and horrors inflicted by occupying Taliban forces — locking women inside their homes, setting donkeys on fire — as they tried to force residents to accept a radical version of Islam. “ These groups are simply too extreme to maintain popular support for any amount of time. The Taliban in Pakistan have had success in large part because they

Peter Hoskin

Shift work

Ben Brogan charts the growing debate about the future of the Labour party in his Telegraph column today.  I’d suggest you read the whole thing, but it’s this passage which stood out to me: “Plans are afoot for a gathering in the coming weeks that will bring together Cabinet ministers, Labour grandees, policy thinkers, and – crucially – Liberal Democrats to flesh out a common ground on how to decentralise the state. The idea is nothing short of presenting Mr Brown with a liberal manifesto for the next election. Funding has been secured and a suitable venue is being sought before the invitations go out. To outsiders this must all

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Johnson’s dividing lines

Very interesting write-up in the Mirror today of a speech Alan Johnson is delivering in London today. The enthusiasm of the report suggests that the Mirror is very much open to Johnson replacing Brown. The line of attack, though, is still very Brown. The Mirror reports that Johnson will say: “It is telling that the Conservatives paid lip service to the importance of investing in public services during the good times. But now the recession has seen them revert to their default position of cutting public services at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society.” The minister will warn that the country needed to wake up to the

Peter Hoskin

Milburn Watch

So what’s going on?  As Matt blogged last night, and details in his cover piece today, Labour leadership plots are certainly a-brewing; most probably involving Charles Clarke.  While Dizzy has unearthed signs that the 2020 Vision project –  founded by Clarke and Alan Milburn back in the pre-Gordo era to, ahem, offer “direction” to the Labour party – may not be dead after all.  And now, stage right, we have Milburn advising against a wholesale return to the “policies of state intervention” in today’s Independent: “Meeting the challenges of the modern world calls for a different sort of state: one that empowers, not controls. Faced with the new challenges of

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pakistan: The greatest danger is nuclear insider trading

The New York Times has an excellent symposium up on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. This point from Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who headed up the office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy under President Bush, is particularly concerning:   “Twice since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. taken action to break up networks inside Pakistan’s nuclear establishment who were collaborating with outsiders in efforts to help them build bombs. In both cases, rogue senior officials and their cohorts in the nuclear establishment were not caught by Pakistan’s military, security and intelligence establishment. The network run by the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, channeled sensitive nuclear technologies

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How Brown can stop Mandelson going postal

As Pete said earlier, the question of how Brown gets out of this Post Office mess is fascinating. On the one hand he has the 150 plus Labour MPs who have signed an early day motion against the plan—and you can add to that number a fair few MPs who are trying to fly below the whips’ radar—and the unions, on the other he has Peter Mandelson who has turned this into a test of his and the government’s authority. There is, though, one obvious way out for Brown. There’s no date yet for the legislation to come before the House but most observers expect it to do so after

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Poverty: Grim but Authentic!

There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell’s Weekly Standard piece on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus: This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been–explicitly and officially–a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity… De Valera’s Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn’t matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may

Peter Hoskin

Is this Brown’s Royal Mail escape route?

The politics of the Government’s plan for Royal Mail are becoming more and more confused.  The latest signs from Downing Street are that they may make one or two concessions to the backbench rebels, but that they’ll stick with the main thrust of the part-privatisation package.  Yet Nick Robinson points out another option that may present itself to Brown, as potential partners look warily on at the brouhaha in Westminster: “I have been told that both political and economic factors may delay the implementation of part-privatisation. TNT, the company most likely to be a partner for the Royal Mail, has recently announced a sharp drop in its own profits, a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Smoking To Recovery

Good and bad news from China: A Chinese county has rescinded a rule urging its government workers to smoke more in order to boost tax income. The authorities in Gong’an county had told civil servants and teachers to smoke 230,000 packs of the locally-made Hubei brand each year. Those who did not smoke enough or used brands from other provinces or overseas faced being fined or even fired. The Good news is that the Chinese recognise the contribution smokers make to the public finances; the Bad news is that they seem to be encouraging a rather stern form of protectionism. Still, you can’t have everything – though it’s a sad

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 6 May 2009

Live coverage from 1200. 1201: And we’re off.  The DUP’s Gregory Campbell asks what further assistance Brown can offer the devlved regions to help them during the recession.  Brown: “We will continue to offer real help now”. 1203: Cameron kicks off: “A series of U-turns…”.  Then asks whether these are “signs” that the “government is in terminally in decline”.  Brown responds angrily, saying that Cameron doesn’t ask questions about the economy and reduces things to “personality”. 1205: Woah, this has become angry quickly.  Cameron says that Brown doesn’t realise it is about him: “Your failure to reform public services; your failure to handle the deficit…”  Brown reponds that the worst