LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 16: Photojournalists stage an act of mass photography outside New Scotland Yard police station on February 16, 2009 in London. The event aims to highlight the threat of an amendment to the Counter Terrorism Act that could be used to prevent press photographers taking pictures of the police. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Of course, it’s not just press photographers who are vulnerable to this sweeping, draconian legislation. More here.
So Obama has said he doesn’t feel the need for his presidency to be reinforced by the presence of a British-government-owned bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. As my friend Tim Shipman reports, the bust, loaned to George W Bush after 9/11, is now in the care of the British Embassy in Washington. This is a good thing in as much as anything which damages the Cult of Churchill in the United States is to be welcomed. One can desire this without in any way compromising one’s respect and appreciation for Churchill’s wartime heroics. But the Churchill Cult in the US – especially amongst conservatives – distorts American
Westminster loves defections; they are tangible sign of the direction in which the wind is blowing. So, David Freud’s decision to move out of Labour’s orbit and to the Conservatives is being treated as big news in the village. Tory Kremlinologists should note that it was George Osborne who reeled him in. This is a sign of both Osborne’s continuing importance to the Cameron project and the fact that Freud will be reporting into the leadership not Theresa May. Paul Waugh blogs that the Tories should now be reaching out to two former heads of Blair’s No 10 policy unit, Geoff Mulgan who is now running the Young Foundation and Matthew
It’s an ill-wind that fails to blow in any silver-lined clouds and the current financial difficulties are no exception. It seems that Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan financier determined to “crack” the American “market” with Twenty20 cricket may be in a spot of bother himself. I’m going to guess that having people suggest you could be a kind of Caribbean Bernie Madoff is, even if completely untrue, not Good News. It wasn’t the money involved in the Stanford Twenty20 challenge match between his all-stars and England that was objectionable. After all, there’s a long history of big-money challenge matches and cricket’s known worse rogues than Stanford in the past. True,
I imagine CCHQ will have a ‘headless chicken’ folder, containing examples of where Brown’s numerous schemes to bolster the economy aren’t having the desired effect. If so, it should certainly include a copy of the FT’s study into the Government’s loan guarantee scheme for small businesses. Here’s how the FT introduces it: “Only about £12m has been lent to companies under the government’s £1bn loan guarantee scheme for small business, a month after it was launched, according to analysis by the Financial Times. Leading business organisations on Sunday attacked the ‘trickle’ of funding from the banks, warning that government attempts to kick-start corporate lending simply were not working.” Stories like
I wrote earlier that the papers are stuffed with bad news for Gordon Brown. The same’s true for taxpayers, especially in light of the CBI’s latest set of economic forecasts. They have GDP shrinking by 3.3 percent this year, and unemployment rising above 3 million in 2010. Which adds up to a lower tax revenue for the Exchequer and, in turn, more and more borrowing. Indeed, the CBI estimate that the government will need to rack up £100 billion more debt over the next couple of years than the PBR accounts for. It’s a fiscal mess that – as yesterday’s excellent ConservativeHome report made clear – future governments and taxpayers
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 – provided 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
Few commentators are as well plugged into the Brown circle as Jackie Ashley which makes her column this morning absorbing reading. Ashley floats the idea that Brown might quit after the G20 summit in April to become head of a new international financial regulatory body. Ashley admits that the story sounds implausible but she says that “it comes from quite close to the inner core.” Leaving aside the fact that putting Brown in charge of this body would be rather like putting the head of the West Indies Cricket Board in charge of all pitch preparation for international cricket, it seems highly implausible that Brown, who has waited so long
Is the bad news stacked against Gordon Brown reaching some kind of critical mass? The newspapers today are absolutely stuffed with stories about banks, bankers and bonuses that are either embarrassing or downright ruinous for the PM. And, to top it all off, Trevor Kavanagh begins his Sun column asking why Brown hasn’t resigned after the events of last week. Sure, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see that particular resignation before the next election; but there’s still a growing sense that it’s not so much chickens as vultures that are coming home to roost on the roof of 10 Downing Street. Unfortunately for the PM, his party’s now losing most
When I saw bewildered little Alfie Patten holding his baby I wanted to weep. Though, the 15 –going on- 35 year old mother was winding her daughter with all the casual expertise of a girl in the driving seat of the entire situation. You wonder who to blame first. Not the two kids involved. Sex is in their faces all day –cheap magazines, tabloids, television, the internet – oh, and compulsory sex education from Year 1. They can hardly avoid knowing exactly how to do it -and why in God’s name does a 12 year old boy who looks 8 know where to get, let alone how to use, a
Richard Florida’s Atlantic cover-story on how the current recession will re-shape America is a thought-provoking read. He argues that the coming economy requires a different kind of geography: “the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required … In short, it will be
There are few things the press likes more than a whistleblower, they make for great copy. So, Gordon Brown will be alarmed to see Paul Moore, the HBOS whistleblower, appearing in The Independent on Sunday. ‘Paul Moore, the former head of risk at HBOS, told the IoS that he has more than 30 potentially incendiary documents which he will send to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee. He says they disprove Mr Brown’s claim about the reasons for HBOS’s catastrophic losses – now estimated to be nearly £11bn – and show that it was the reckless lending culture, easy credit and failed regulation of the Brown years that led directly
When you step back and think about it, it’s really quite astonishing how fast and how emphatically Brown has fallen since his minor ‘bounce’ in the autumn. Sure, he was always going to struggle as the recession bit deeper and deeper. But to so swiftly get to this point – where all news is bad news; where there is little salve or comfort; and where hope is dying from suffocation – really takes some doing. Little wonder, then, that Labour now seems saturated by despair and self-loathing; something that’s captured wonderfully by two comment pieces in today’s papers. The first is Andrew Rawnsley’s article in the Observer, an essential portrait
With good reason, I get suspicious and frightened when things go right. I have learned certain truths during my time on this planet, not least that all events in the end conspire against me and that every rule and regulation I encounter has been tailor-made specifically to frustrate my progress. And yet. And yet. A lot of things have been going right lately. The system seems suddenly to have completely turned around in order to work with me, not against me. I don’t want to be churlish about this. I want to give credit where it is due — to the gods and/or the ruling authorities on earth — but
It’s good to talk Last week, when the snow lay thickly on the ground, in a rare burst of altruism I picked up the telephone and dialled the number of a frail, elderly and vulnerable member of our community, to ask her if there was anything I could get for her from the village stores. The phone rang and rang and rang. Just as I was about to give up I heard the receiver being fumbled into position and a quavering, phlegm-coated voice say hello. ‘How are you?’ I said. ‘Do you need anything from the shop?’ I ought to have known that getting answers to these simple questions was
All’s fair Gstaad At Easter 1215, a young Tuscan married woman innocently flirted in public with a man not her husband. He flirted back just as innocently, and then things got out of hand. A vendetta was declared between Guelf and Gibel, two rival brothers of Pistoia, that resulted in extreme violence, the splitting of Guelf factions into Whites and Blacks with ensuing massacres, 1,400 houses in the middle of Florence burnt, and a feud that brought out every long-simmering antagonism from politics, to money, to envy which lasted far longer than if the flirtation had not been as innocent as it was. Guelfs and Ghibellines came to mind as
There is no certainty today. For years we humble wage-earners were told that City bankers were sage repositories of special expertise who could be entrusted with that little that is left when the taxman and the bookies have finished with us. In reality, it turns out, they were greedy spivs who knew no more about the financial packages they dealt in to feed their bonuses than the betting shop loud mouth who claims infallible information about the winner of the forthcoming 2.30. Now in racing, too, we are riven with doubt. After his defeat at Kempton Park last Saturday on a seasonal debut delayed by a heart scare, many are
Solidarity with the strikers Sir: As a member of the English working class I write to express my approval of and agreement with Rod Liddle’s article (‘Would the working class vote Labour now?, 7 February). I would compare the action of the strikers with those of the shipyard workers of Gdansk in 1980 whose actions exposed to the world the falseness of the Polish Communist Party’s claim to protect the class it purported to represent. These strikers have shown up New Labour’s pretence that it cares about British workers. Peter Mandelson’s performance was eerily reminiscent of the party hacks who were wheeled out to attack Solidarity. What must have sent
The case of Caroline Petrie, the nurse suspended for offering to say a prayer for a patient, discloses something of which most people may not have been aware. To work in the National Health Service, it is officially stated, you ‘must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’. It is remarkable that there should be a state rule about what you can think (the ‘personal’ commitment) before you can be employed. I also wonder if it is possible to have a commitment to equality and diversity at the same time. For instance, if, as Brighton and Hove Council tried to insist against a Christian care home, you
Monday Major recession panic. Clearly we are being out-apocalypsed by Labour. Dave furious and wants to know why we’re still only predicting the worst downturn in 80 years while Ed Balls is calling it the Most Terrifying Depression in the History of Mankind. Obviously, we need to do the doom vision thing better, or we could find ourselves in government a year from now amid allegations that we didn’t see the end of the world coming. It’s not as if we didn’t make a good start with Gids predicting the death of sterling, but since then we have basically been playing catch-up. Thankfully our new economic recovery committee is now