Society Archives

Saturday

14 Mar 2009

Heir of the dog

If Prince Charles is guilty of anything in selling the ‘Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture’, now the subject of a hysterical scientific controversy, it is the sin of euphemism. The food supplement is marketed as a way to ‘eliminate toxins and aid digestion’. What this means, in the Queen’s English, is that it aspires to be a hangover cure. According to the perfectly named Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, the Prince is relying on ‘make-believe and superstition’, is peddling ‘outright quackery’ and even ‘contributes to the ill-health of the nation by pretending we can all over-indulge and then take this tincture and be fine again’. Professor Ernst

Giannandrea Poesio

Stunted growth

Eonnagata Sadler’s Wells Theatre Twelfth Floor Queen Elizabeth Hall Has dance-theatre given up the ghost? Judging by the two performances I saw last week, Eonnagata and The Twelfth Floor, it would appear so. Not surprisingly, one may add, given that, after more than two decades, the provocative, elusive, multilayered, postmodern genre has exhausted any chance to renew itself. Yet I am not sure whether Eonnagata would have made a different impact 15 or so years ago. Its flimsy narrative, which draws upon the mysterious life and the ever more mysterious gender of the Chevalier d’Eon, is as lame today as it would have been in the Eighties. At least in

Friday

13 Mar 2009

Martin Bright

Comic Relief At Its Best

I very much enjoyed Comic Relief tonight, especially the double act of Anjem Choudhary and Patrick Cordingly on Newsnight. That was comic genius. Why do serious programmes like Newsnight give clowns like Choudhary the time of day?

Peter Hoskin

Spinning an atrocity

Paul Waugh’s got it spot on. The Muslim Association of Britain’s statement on Sudan and Darfur today is utterly disgraceful. Rather than supporting the ICC’s decision to charge the President of Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahamd al-Bashir – who has encouraged the rape and murder of thousands of civilians, many of them Muslim – with war crimes, they describe it as “reprehensible”. Their thinking? That similar prosecutions haven’t been launched against war crimes in “Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya”, as if that somehow mitigates the atrocities that al-Bashir has instigated. It’s reminiscent of the Muslim Council of Britain’s disgusting decision to boycott Holocaust earlier this year. Organisations such as the MCB

James Forsyth

Transparency in public spending

Steve Richards argues with his typical eloquence for higher public spending today. Unsurprisingly, I disagree with him. But, intriguingly, he endorses an idea that in the medium term would, I think, be incredibly effective in cutting down the size of the state. Steve writes: “The shadow Chancellor, George Osborne has proposed the equivalent of America’s Federal Spending Transparency Act that enables US taxpayers to scrutinise online every item of federal government spending of more than $50,000. He has promised that anyone in the UK will be able to find out online, ‘where their taxes are being spent and use this information to hold the government to account’. This is a

James Forsyth

The urgent need for school reform

Every day seems to bring forward new statistics which illustrate the urgent need for radical education reform. Take this from Camilla Cavendish’s column: “150,000 pupils start secondary school innumerate every year” The state of state education in this country is a national scandal. Its failings are destroying both social mobility in Britain and this country’s chances of competing economically on the world stage. Then, there’s this from today’s Times: “Half of children moving to secondary school failed to get into the one they wanted in some areas, according to official figures … One in eight of families in some areas were turned down by all of their selected schools.” Gove’s

James Forsyth

Preventing further tragedy

Camilla Cavendish, who writes with such passion and authority on this issue, sets out why the Serious Case Review into Baby P’s death should be published in The Times today: “I had hoped that he might challenge the refusal of Ed Balls to publish serious case reviews (SCR) in instances where children have died. The refusal to publish the SCR into Baby P meant that the reasons for catastrophic failure were known only to the authority that failed, and the local MP was impotent. I think that secrecy assists incompetence. But Lord Laming does not agree. Sadly, it looks as though he has been captured by the very bureaucracy he

Peter Hoskin

Worse than Madoff?

This is how Jeff Randall kicks off his column in the Telegraph today: “What’s the difference between Bernard Madoff and Gordon Brown? Answer: one has drained fortunes from gullible victims, plundering their income and savings to create an illusion of prosperity. The other is going to jail. Mr Madoff has thrown in the towel. His Ponzi scheme, whereby he needed to suck in ever greater quantities of other people’s money in order to maintain a semblance of competence, collapsed under the weight of undeliverable expectations. Nobody knows for sure how much has gone missing, but Wall Street scribes are calling it a $65 billion fraud. Not bad for peddling fresh

Peter Hoskin

Darling has money troubles

Yes, yes, I know I commented on rumours of a Brown-Darling split yesterday, but this passage from the FT deserves pulling out, especially given Brown’s emphasis on forging a global “grand bargain” at the G20 summit: “The chancellor would love to be able to agree to a tax cut equivalent to 2 per cent of national income in 2010 as demanded by Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary. It would also please Gordon Brown … who has championed a global fiscal boost. But Mr Darling knows he cannot afford it. ‘There’s no money,’ says one ally.” Perhaps the most striking thing about the split reports, now, is their frequency –

Alex Massie

The Idiocy of Sports Nationalism

Daniel Larison is correct: This lack of understanding is the crucial part in any tiresome exercise in sports nationalism: “Our manly sport has subtlety and form, and it reflects the true nature of the universe, whereas their stupid children’s game is pointless and boring.”… Europeans can make the same boredom charge against baseball (and they have), we can say it about soccer or cricket (and we have), and no doubt almost everyone outside Canada has said it about curling (but not, I think, about hockey!). As a teenage curler myself I cannot let it be said that only our Canuck friends appreciate the Roaring Game or, more seriously, that it

Thursday

12 Mar 2009

Fraser Nelson

RBS’s definition of a ‘politically exposed person’

Are you a “politically exposed person”? This is what RBS wants to know about its prospective clients, this is the question that led me (when posing as a potential client) to be asked if I was a member of a political party. And when a state-controlled bank like RBS asks people if they are “politically exposed” – a phrase with more than a hint of menace – it is no surprise that it sends shivers down so many spines. What on earth could they mean? What were they trying to get at? I put some questions about this to RBS earlier today. Here are their replies, and my comments.

James Forsyth

Harman’s biggest weakness

There’s a smart piece in this week’s Economist on what might be the biggest obstacle to Harriet Harman becoming Labour leader after the next election, the narrowness of her range: “Ms Harman also personifies a rather narrow sect of Labour thought. Unkindly nicknamed “Hattie Harperson” for her political correctness, she has often championed a cultural rather than economic leftism associated with the bolshier London boroughs in the 1980s. The Equality Bill she is shepherding through Parliament, with its new rights for women and minorities, is a kind of manifesto for Harmanism. Critics of her preoccupation with sexism often make her point for her with their ugly tone (“treachery in high

James Forsyth

Time to focus, Mr President

No one could accuse either William Galston or David Brooks of being shrill or wanting the president to fail. But both are worried that Obama is heading for disaster because he is trying to do too much. They argue that he needs to put the rest of his agenda on hold until the financial crisis has been resolved. Galston warns that unless Obama focuses on solving the financial crisis, he risks becoming another Carter. “The key analogy between today and 1933 is the centrality of the financial crisis, which makes it hard to understand why the administration has not yet moved as decisively to fix it as FDR did on the

Alex Massie

Watching The Wire from the Left

At the Irish Left Review there’s an interesting analysis of The Wire written by Seannachie (a sometime commenter here) that views the show as, in some respects, an allegory of contemporary capitalism while also looking at how it can be seen to straddle the Bush and Obama eras. I wouldn’t agree with everything he says, but it’s an interesting read and a futher reminder that the show’s genius lies, like that of all great art, in the range of coherent yet conflicting interpretations that may be made of it. This part, however, I do agree with:- In fact it is interesting how much of the detail from the show’s depiction

Peter Hoskin

There may be tension ahead

There’s another epsiode in the Alistair Darling story today, with a hint in the FT that he may be resisting pressure from Brown to introduce a big package of (debt-fuelled) spending increases and tax cuts in the Budget: “Mr Darling, speaking to foreign journalists in London, called for the world’s 20 leading industrial and developing nations to pursue a package of measures to boost the economy including monetary loosening and measures to rebuild banks. However, on the fiscal side the chancellor put the stress on implementing tax cuts and spending increases that were already in the pipeline… …Some ministers believe Mr Darling is coming under pressure from Mr Brown

Fraser Nelson

Why are our state-owned banks asking customers about their politicial affiliations?

Some tip-offs are so awful that you almost hope they are untrue. When I was told by Geoff Robbins, a computer consultant, that he had been asked about his political connections before opening an account with the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland it sounded fantastical. Having the state owning the UK banking system is bad enough, but asking about party membership before you open an account? Not in Britain, I thought. And indeed, the RBS press office denied it outright. “We would not ask that question, nor dream of doing so,” said an RBS spokeswoman. So had Robbins concocted his story? I doubted it. So I called RBS Streamline myself

Alex Massie

In Defence of Twittering

Unlike Clive, I thought Rachel Sylvester’s article on Twitter one of the most confused pieces I’ve read all year. On the one hand she wanted to say smething about Twitter, on the other she bemoaned the fact that nobody trusts politicians. Unfortunately she tried to link these two things in a single column and pretend there was some kind of relationship between them. Which is a shame since this is palpable nonsense. Ms Slvester certainly failed to establish any such link. This paragraph was surely a mistake: Twitter is reality TV without the pictures. There is a combination of neurosis and narcissism involved. The psychologist Oliver James has said: “Twittering

James Forsyth

Balls should publish the Baby P Serious Case Review

The Lord Laming review of the progress that has been made in child protection since his report following the death of Victoria Climbie is all well and good. But, surely publishing the Serious Case Review into Baby P—which Ed Balls refuses to do—would do more good? It shows precisely how the bureaucracy made such a dreadful string of mistakes and with that knowledge in the public domain it would be possible to have an informed debate about what reforms could present such dreadful errors happening again. Michael Gove, who has read the SCR, has repeatedly said that the tale of incompetence it reveals is far worse than what the public

Peter Hoskin

Keeping it in the family | 12 March 2009

With Brown publishing a list of ministerial interests today – some two years late, and possibly delayed by Peter Mandelson’s complex financial dealings – the Evening Standard has the scoop that around 30 figures in the Goverment employ family members at the taxpayers’ expense: “Nearly 30 members of the Government employ their family at the taxpayer’s expense, the Evening Standard reveals today. They include four Cabinet members who are using public funds to pay for their spouses, partners or children to be on their staff. Among the claimants are Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, housing minister Margaret Beckett, Europe minister Caroline Flint, children’s minister Beverley Hughes and Environment Secretary Hilary Benn,

James Forsyth

The SEC was tipped off that Madoff was a fraud in 2000 but did nothing

An article in Mother Jones highlights out one of the most scandalous aspects of the Madoff case, the SEC’s refusal to act on information it was given about Madoff: “Among those that did learn of Madoff’s money management business was Boston-based Rampart Investment Management Company, Inc. In late 1999, Frank Casey, then a senior vice president at the firm, had surreptitiously obtained the Madoff fund’s financials. He directed Markopolos and Chelo, who worked under him at Rampart, to reverse engineer Madoff’s results with an eye toward creating a similar fund for Rampart’s investors. What they discovered instead were discrepancies so obvious that Markopolos noticed them within minutes and “in less than