Society

Thursday

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

Peter Hoskin

Balls to be sent Home?

It’s reshuffle rumour time, I’m afraid, with a few of today’s papers carrying stories about whom Brown might ditch and promote in the aftermath of the local elections.  Much of it centres on Jacqui Smith, who appears to be the favourite to get the chop.  And there’s also some chat about Hazel Blears getting demoted in the wake of her YouTube smackdown of our Dear Leader. Myself, I can’t see Blears getting moved – Brown could well do without alienating her even further, especially as doing so would probably infuriate plenty of others in the Labour Party.  But sacking Smith would be a far less politically dangerous move.  The Home

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why we need public service reform

Hamish McRae, whose coverage of the crash has been prescient and authoritative, sets out the key question that comes out of the state of the public finances in his column today: “We have had over the past decade the largest increase in public spending that has ever taken place in peacetime. It is also the largest increase that has occurred, proportionate to GDP, of any major economy during that period. So we have in effect been carrying out a huge experiment: to what extent can you improve public services by spending much more money on them. (The tax take, by contrast, has actually declined as a proportion of GDP.) I

Peter Hoskin

Humanising the numbers

Gordon Brown loves hiding behind numbers.  He does it almost every PMQs – when he reels off the usual tractor production statistics – and he has done it in every Budget he’s been involved in, either as Chancellor or Prime Minister.  My guess is that he hopes to cover up not only how bad things are, but also the human dimension of the fiscal and economic crisis.  £billions, £trillions of debt, what does it matter?  So long as he can continue to talk abstractly about “investing in growth”. Of course, revealing the debt crisis for what it is – an aberration which will burden the British public for decades –

Peter Coleman

Australian Notes

Editing a small magazine is like writing a poem. It is half judgment, but also half inspiration. It can never be done by a committee. So I sensed disaster when I read that the Monthly in Melbourne boasted a committee that met regularly to make editorial decisions (even if it did meet, as reported, in Jimmie Watson’s wine bar in Carlton.) The idea of an editorial committee trying to direct, overrule or censor the editor is repugnant, philistine and almost always counterproductive. At best, such a committee is useful as a list of names to indicate support. One or two of them may have an idea worth ringing the editor

Christopher Fildes

A new bank from a very old stable

My racing correspondent, Captain Threadneedle, thought that banking and racing went together. He wanted Barclays to buy the Tote: perfect synergy, he thought, with matching systems, merged accounts, an overlapping customer base and a marketing slogan that would write itself: ‘You can bet on your overdraft with Barclays.’ He was, as we now know, before his time — and then the banks (Barclays included) took to betting on their own account, splashing out on doubles, trebles and accumulators, collecting piles of toxic betting slips and deservedly losing their boots. It has been left to Weatherbys, a very old name in racing, a new name in banking, to vindicate the Captain’s

Harry Mount

Wales and the Welsh are no longer a dismal joke

In the hall at Aberglasney — a fine, classical country house, built in 1720, 20 miles north-west of Swansea — high up by the cornice, an elaborate chunk of plasterwork is missing. To give the full catalogue entry, it is a rococo console, carved with twirling honeysuckles, a motif dear to the ancient Greeks. I know, to my deep and lasting shame, where to find it. In fact I can see it now, on a mahogany stand next to my desk. Its protuberant plaster leaves provide a nice perch for my keys where I don’t forget them. For all its usefulness as a key perch, the console would look better glued back

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Republican dilemma

Parties of the right fall into a simplified, intellectual comfort zone when they have been in power too long. It happened to the Tories and it has happened to the Republicans. David Brooks sets out the problem in his New York Times column: “Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are

Peter Hoskin

New media, same old message

Brace yourselves.  Gordon Brown has hit YouTube with another video message for his adoring public (watch it after the jump).  To be honest, it’s not a bad as his last comedy effort – he’s stepped out of the bunker, for a start, and there’s less rictus grinning – but it’s hardly going to set the Internet alight: The most striking thing is how Brown is using the new media to relay the same message we’ve heard a thousand times before.  He kicks off with the line, “We’ve got to take action to get out of this downturn, and you can’t cut your way out – you’ve got to invest your

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The disconnect over Gurkhas

Watching Joanna Lumley give evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee (I haven’t seen Keith Vaz so excited since he took Shilpa Shetty to Parliament), I suddenly realised what ministers don’t understand. Sure, the Gurkhas understood the terms of their employment when they signed up; no agreement has been broken. Sure, they have seen action serving the people of Bosnia and Iraq rather then Britons directly. But what has changed the argument is immigration. In the past ten years it has doubled to the current staggering total of 1,500 a day. If we are to let so many settle here, why shouldn’t that include veterans who have fought for our

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ouch

Ephraim Hardcastle’s column in the Mail today contains this story about the Prime Minister’s tense relationship with the Number 10 staff: ‘A switchboard operator rang him back the other day and said they wouldn’t put up with being spoken to like that. Brown had to apologise.’ Its appearance is further evidence that it is now open season on stories about Brown’s temper.  

Peter Hoskin

Death by mail

Oh, how difficult life is for a Prime Minister who’s lost pretty much all his political capital.  Almost every major Commons vote becomes a potential landmine, threatening to blow a premiership apart.  And so it is with the Government’s plans for Royal Mail.  As today’s Times reports: “David Cameron holds Gordon Brown’s political life in his hands after the Prime Minister’s decision to risk a Commons defeat over the Royal Mail sell-off next month, senior government figures believe. Downing Street insisted last night that Mr Brown was determined to press ahead, despite weekend reports that he was preparing to shelve reforms championed by Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary. His decision

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Gurkha blame game gets resolved

Pete has already flagged up Rachel Sylvester’s column, but there’s one line in it about the Gurkhas that particularly caught my attention: “I am told that ministers agreed in a Cabinet sub-committee that the issue should be resolved, but they were overruled by No10.” On Friday, there was a huge blame game going on about who was responsible for the Government getting itself into such a predictable political and presentational mess. Some briefed that it was Jacqui Smith’s fault because her department was in charge of the legislation, others said Darling and the Treasury were to blame because they had said it was too expensive, and there was whispering that