Society Archives

Wednesday

11 Mar 2009

Is this how a Labour Opposition would attack a Tory Government?

An incisive column from Daniel Finkelstein this morning, which perfectly sets out how difficult managing the public finances will be for the next government. This passage on public service reform is worth pulling out: “The Tories will aim, of course, to make services more efficient and to get government out of wasteful projects altogether. Yet even this will prove hard. Reform costs money. Making people redundant, moving offices, sending out circulars full of new instructions, keeping interest groups happy while making controversial changes – it all costs money. And (here’s a point I may not have mentioned) there is no money.” It’s something which Team Cameron should bear in mind.

James Forsyth

The odds are loaded in the terrorists’ favour

Media coverage of the dissident Republican groups has focused on the question of how much support they have. But, as Martyn Frampton pointed out on The Today Programme this morning, a terrorist organisation doesn’t actually need that many people to cause serious disruption because the odds are loaded in their favour. As the IRA, who did not have that much support in the 1980s, said after the Brighton bomb, “Today we were unlucky, but we remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” The dissidents might be in small number but there have carried out a hundred plus incidents—bombs, foiled attacks and shootings—since

Peter Hoskin

No.10 belatedly starts the G20 expectations management

Today’s Times has a great double-page spread on the forthcoming G20 meeting; concentrating on how much the summit will cost, and the dim prospects for any meaningful agreement being reached. Nestled among the coverage is this quote from a “government source”: “We are by no means talking it down but I do not think anyone is suggesting the world’s problems can be solved in a single day,” If this is expectations management, it’s all too little, too late. We’ve already had Brown calling for a global “grand bargain”; we’ve already had the Downing Street-fuelled idea that this is Brown’s Big Chance to save his premiership; and these memes have had

Tuesday

10 Mar 2009

Peter Hoskin

Downing Street can only reach the US answering machine

Earlier today, Ben Brogan reported a telling comment from the Cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, that, when it comes to discussing the G20 summit with Washington, “There is nobody there … You cannot believe how difficult it is.” The remarks have since been withdrawn, and expunged from civil service websites. But, in spite of the revisionism, the sentiment has cropped up elsewhere. A couple of weeks back, the Times quoted an anonymous “British official” saying the following: “The new US regime is like an echo chamber. We are struggling to get people even to return our calls. They are totally focused on domestic issues and have not lifted their heads to

Alex Massie

The Cool Black Guy and the White Nerd

That’s how Jon Stewart described Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. Actually, Brown comes out of it fine as Giftgate receives an airing on the Daily Show. Bonus: there’s chuckling at Hillary Clinton’s expense too. A trifecta then. The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c Brown in the USA Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things With Demetri Martin Political Humor Economic Crisis

James Forsyth

Obama administration: Only 5 percent of the Taliban is incorrigible

Chuck Todd at First Read flags up some fascinating comments from Vice-President Biden on his visit to Nato: “5 percent of the Taliban is incorrigible, not susceptible to anything other than being defeated. Another 25 percent or so are not quite sure, in my view, the intensity of their commitment to the insurgency. And roughly 70 percent are involved because of the money, because of them being — getting paid.” Biden goes onto say that the “idea of what concessions would be made is well beyond the scope of my being able to answer, except to say that whatever is initiated will have to be ultimately initiated by the Afghan

Andrew Haldenby

Is this Government finally talking small government?

I’ve just got back from the launch of The Lab, a new initiative by NESTA to increase innovation in public services (which I’m helping). Gordon Brown turned up, with John Denham and Liam Byrne, to give his blessing and to bang the drum for his own contribution today, the new White Paper by the Cabinet Office on public service reform. The opposition parties have been too quick to dismiss the White Paper. They’d have been best advised to engage with it, as it tackles head-on one of the day’s Big Questions: what should happen to the size of government in the wake of the recession? Most of the paper repeats

James Forsyth

Labour’s economically inactive support

I’m fairly sceptical of polls at the moment, politics has been so unusual these past few weeks I’m not sure how worthwhile a snapshot is right now. But the breakdown of today’s numbers in The Times —Labour 30, Tories 42, and Lib Dems 19—does strike me as fascinating. Peter Riddell points out the differences between public and private sector voting intentions. Amongst private sector workers the Tories are at 45, Labour 29 and the Lib Dems 17. But with public sector workers it is Tories 38, Labour 26 and lib Dem 17. It is not that surprising that support for the party of the centre-right is higher among private sector workers.

Fraser Nelson

Don’t hold your breath for a manufacturing-based recovery

Hmmm. So much for manufacturing-based recovery that is supposed to come as a result of the crash of sterling. Manufacturing output was off 2.9% in January, the eleventh consecutive drop. The fact that we’re a lot cheaper to Americans and Europeans doesn’t seem to help much – partly because any sane foreign client will demand price reductions, mindful of the currency drop. Result: a precipitous fall in the ONS Manufacturing Index of Production (below): And in case you were wondering then yes, it’s the worst of any post-war recession as the below graph from Citi shows. A Major-style bust? If only.

James Forsyth

Even the BBC now thinks spending has to be cut

There’s a trailer playing on Radio 4 at the moment for Decision Time. It’s a new show in which Nick Robinson looks at how tough political decisions are made. In the trailer, Nick Robinson talks about the aim of the programme and then says the first programme will look at public spending. His sign-off is: “How would you cut spending–because it does have to be cut” This strikes me as a hugely important shift in the political weather, the BBC now accepts that public spending has to be cut: not the rate of growth slowed but cut. This should embolden the Tories as it suggests that knee-jerk cries of ‘Tory

Peter Hoskin

More must be done for the victims of the recession

Just returning to the theme of my earlier post, I thought I’d flag up some IFS figures which indicate how fiscally squeezed the least well-off are, even before we consider taxes, job losses and the rest. Here’s how today’s Times reports them: “The poorest tenth of the population suffers inflation more than 50 times higher than the RPI measure, which is 0.1 per cent, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said. The most hard-pressed households have an effective inflation rate of 5.4 per cent, while those aged over 80 face a 7.1 per cent annual rise in prices because both of these households spend a bigger proportion of income on food

Peter Hoskin

Moral fervour gives way to technical lingo

Alistair Darling’s article* in the Guardian this morning is a perfect example of why Brown’s global focus will struggle to impress voters. The lingo of international finance settlements is just too dry and disconnected from the plight of the British public. Here are some yawn-inducing excerpts: “For those most at risk, we need to increase financing through the IMF and multilateral banks, through swap-lines between central banks and an enhanced lending facility at the EU level. On Saturday, the G20 finance ministers will meet here in the UK. This will be followed by the London summit on 2 April under the presidency of Gordon Brown. The G20 should agree on

Alex Massie

A brilliant, horrifying, moving article

It’s hard to know how to describe Gene Weingarten’s piece in the Washington Post’s magazine, except to say that it is one of the most heart-breaking, moving, humane, pieces of journalism I’ve read in years. And one of the best. In a sense, mind you, even saying that trivialises the story. It’s about how a parent can inadvertently leave their toddler in the back of their car on a hot day to swelter and, god help us, bake to death. And it’s about how a parent can ever hope to come to any sort of terms with the consequences of such a desperate, fatal, mistake. Just read it.

Monday

9 Mar 2009

Alex Massie

The Libertarian Moral High Ground

James writes: “Too often, politicians on the right, wrongly and short-sightedly, cede the moral high ground to the left. Conservatives in Britain have been particularly guilty of accepting, or at least not disputing, the left’s claims to moral superiority and merely arguing that their approach is more effective.” Well that’s not a problem the libertarians have is it? No shortage of moral high ground there and no small sense of moral supriority either. The libertarian problem is that not many enough people believe it…

James Forsyth

Making the moral case

Too often, politicians on the right, wrongly and short-sightedly, cede the moral high ground to the left. Conservatives in Britain have been particularly guilty of accepting, or at least not disputing, the left’s claims to moral superiority and merely arguing that their approach is more effective. One result of this is when the left manages to look competent, as it did under Blair, voters flock to it. So it is refreshing to see Michael Gove making the moral case for the Tory’s education policies in a speech to Barnado’s tonight: “Our approach to education reform is driven, explicitly, by a sense of moral purpose. We believe education is a good

James Forsyth

The benefits of the vision thing

Amidst the torrent of bad economic news, people want to know where the growth will come from once this crisis has passed. It would be foolish to imagine that we can go back to the status quo-ante, that financial services and property can again drive the British economy as they did during the late 1990s and the early years of this century. George Osborne’s speech on Friday was the best attempt we have heard yet from a politician to answer the future growth question. Matthew Parris, not a man given to hyperbole, described it as “thrilling” and “an example of what politics should be for”. Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former policy

James Forsyth

Frum, Limbaugh and catering to media audiences

British Conservatives can tell Republicans at least one thing about recovering from electoral rejection: don’t believe that what makes a media product successful will do the same for a political party. For years, the Tories looked at the popularity of The Daily Mail, a brilliantly produced newspaper, and imagined that if they could ape its style, tone and positions they’d be onto a winner. But that turned out not to be the case: people wanted something very different from a potential government than they do a newspaper. Equally, a political party has to appeal to far more people—in the British context about 40 percent of the electorate, in the US

Alex Massie

America Moves to the Left

Another problem with the Republican party’s apparent belief that the Same Old Tunes are just as popular as they ever were, if, that is, they’re played properly is that, just as the United States is changing demographically, so its political centre-of-gravity has moved to the left. As Ross Douthat says, persuasively to my mind, what seemed radical 15 years ago now seems possible and much less scary. Thus, the rising cost – and insecurity – of health coverage has helped persuade voters that the government must be a larger part of the solution. Thus too, the rising cost of college education helps persuade families that more needs to be done

James Forsyth

The state of education

A statistic in today’s Daily Mail reveals just how badly comprehensives are failing their pupils. “They educate only seven per cent of pupils, but independent schools produce more teenagers with three A grade A-levels than all our comprehensives put together. More than 10,000 pupils at fee-paying schools achieved three As last year. But among those at comprehensives, fewer than 7,500 achieved such good results.” In his first speech to the Labour conference as party leader, Gordon Brown declared: “the reason I am here – the real reason I am here – is that I want their children and their grandchildren whom I also represent to have all the chances that

Alex Massie

The Prior Problem

Apart from being England wicket-keepers what do Matt Prior and Godfrey Evans have in common? Congratulations if you answered that they’re the only keepers in the history of test cricket to have twice conceded 25 or more byes in an innings. Of course, Evans’s “achievement” came in 91 tests; Prior has done it in just 15. In fact, at the time of writing Prior has the misfortune to rank 3rd and 4th in the list of “most byes conceded in an innings”. The 34 he’s conceded (so far!) in the current test goes along with the 33 he let through against India at the Oval in 2007. In one sense