Society Archives

Friday

27 Mar 2009

Osborne clamps down on public sector fat cats

There is an important policy announcement from George Osborne in his interview with The Sun today: “He also declared war on public servant fat cats. None will earn more than the PM’s £190,000-a-year.” This is both good politics and good policy. It will strike a chord with a public that is increasingly angry and frustrated at the excesses of the public sector boss class. And, really, can any CoffeeHousers explain why the chief executive of the Carbon Trust has to be paid £262,350 a year? One of the great scandals of Labour’s period in power is how public sector managers are now getting paid private sector salaries but still receiving

Peter Hoskin

Anticipating a “Budget for jobs”

As James said earlier, we can expect plenty of failures of expectations management between now and the next election, as the Government searches desperately for fightback opportunities. After the G20, the next event to hype up is the Budget, and there are already signs that the Government is setting itself up for a fall over that. Take this revelation in today’s FT: “Mr Darling’s aides are privately calling the April 22 statement a ‘Budget for jobs’, although the limited funds at the chancellor’s disposal may make little impact on the rising tide of unemployment. Top of the wishlist for unions and employers are measures the government could introduce to boost the

James Forsyth

Hannan passes the million mark

Daniel Hannan’s evisceration of Gordon Brown has now passed the one million mark on YouTube and the mainstream media is now covering it. Mission accomplished for the right side of the blogosphere.

James Forsyth

Hope over expectations management

Martin Kettle and Steve Richards devote their columns today to the question of why Gordon Brown has so hyped the G20 Summit that it cannot possibly live up to expectations. Kettle sums it up nicely, when he writes that: “He has set expectations too high. His rhetoric left reality standing. From the moment the summit was mooted, Brown bet the whole farm on the rewards of being seen at the heart of the economic summit. As a result, Thursday’s gathering has been seriously oversold as a transformative political event. The danger for Brown is that now, instead of being hailed as the man who led the global economy out of

Thursday

26 Mar 2009

James Forsyth

The Iran two-step

Bob Kagan, one of the smartest foreign policy thinkers around, points out why Obama’s attempts to reach out to Iran are, from a hawkish perspective, sensible: “So one of two things is going to happen: Either the friendly diplomatic approach works, and the Iranians actually cave and accept American and European demands, which would be good. Or the friendly approach doesn’t work, and the Iranians proceed on their present course, thus proving that even diplomacy sincerely pursued by a well-intentioned president has no impact on Tehran’s calculations. I honestly can’t see the harm in the Obama administration’s efforts. I hope they succeed.” If we are ultimately forced to choose between

James Forsyth

Even the left is beginning to abandon the idea of change from above

Soundings, the left-wing journal, has just released a book entitled The Crash: A view from the left (you can download it for free here). Edited by Jon Cruddas and Jon Rutherford, it is—as the title suggests—an explicitly left-wing take on recent events. Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with the book’s economics. Its contributors don’t see that the economic consensus in Britain was sadly not pro-market, but pro-corporate—a different thing entirely. But what should interest Coffee Housers, is how even the left is moving away from top-down solutions. In their introduction, Cruddas and Rutherford call for a “socialism of equality, freedom and solidarity – not dictated by the few from above, but

Mary Wakefield

The decision to let abortion clinics advertise on TV is wrong on every level

The news that abortion clinics are to be allowed, for the first time, to advertise on TV and radio strikes me as utterly grim: a bad idea and a deeply sad one to boot. The Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practise say they’re responding to Government calls to combat rising teenage pregnancy but if so they’re going about it exactly the wrong way. To start with it’ll be counterproductive. To advertise abortion is to suggest that it is a legitimate form of birth control—and the simpler and more painless the ad makes it look the more it’ll encourage young girls not to take sex seriously; or to worry about protection. So

Daniel Korski

Karzai is no longer part of the solution in Afghanistan

Kabul Hamid Karzai has been steadily losing international support. It started last year when the Afghan leader scuppered the appointment of Paddy Ashdown to head the UN operation in Afghanistan. Then came a few choice leaks from Richard Holbrooke, criticizing Karzai, while Vice-President Joe Biden is said to have stormed out of a meting with the Afghan president. Visibly shaken, Karzai became more erratic and paranoid. But the mood in Kabul today is now completely different. In a few weeks the wily Karzai has managed to turn the tables. He has outmanoeuvred the opposition, who had demanded his resignation when his mandate runs out (there is a gap between the

James Forsyth

A very public courtship dance

A few weeks ago, Allegra Stratton put the cat among the Labour pigeons when she blogged that Jon Cruddas and James Purnell might team up to run for the leadership. At the time, some dismissed the idea out of hand. The nay-sayers argued that the ideological differences between Cruddas and Purnell are simply too large; Cruddas takes his inspiration from the first phase of Blairism and Purnell from its final period. But I’ve always thought an alliance was a distinct possibility. Both men know that their factions aren’t big enough to deliver the leadership on their own. Another factor pushing Cruddas and Purnell together is that the other leadership options

Peter Hoskin

Another of Brown’s attacks undermined?

We’ve already mentioned how Mervyn King’s recent comments undermine Brown’s central “doing everything it takes” vs “do nothing” distinction. But a document that the Tories have just put out highlights how another of the PM’s central attacks is now in tatters. Its theme is how Brown has “taken” the Tories’ “advice”, now that he seems to have backed down on another fiscal stimulus. This line cuts right through the “no time for a novice” jibe, and subverts the teacher and pupil relationship that Brown has tried to cultivate in PMQs recently (cf, from a couple of weeks ago, his “Unprecedented means without precedent; global means across the world…” monologue). Brown’s

James Forsyth

An extreme error

Last night Charles Farr, a civil servant who coordinates the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, delivered the Colin Cramphorn memorial lecture. Farr was expounding on and defending the recently released edition of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Listening to Farr, one was struck by how the government still can’t properly grasp that terrorism is merely a symptom of a wider problem, the hold of extremist Islamism on a small but significant section of the British population. Frustratingly, there have times when the government seemed ready to grasp this nettle. After 7/7, Blair declared: “We will start to beat this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. Not just the

Peter Hoskin

Brown shouldn’t stake his chips on a Budget fightback

With Brown’s G20 agenda looking less globe-shattering, and more shattered, by the minute, Andrew Grice – writing in the New Statesman – reveals that the PM now regards the Budget as a more likely stage for any “political fightback”: “Close allies insist that Brown will focus on the domestic agenda once the G20 show is over, and that he knows the Budget on 22 April will be much more important to his chances of staging another political fightback. ‘He has not staked all his chips on a one-day summit,’ one said. ‘He will move on quickly. He has still got a lot of chips left.'” Still got a lot of chips left,

Daniel Korski

The three Talibans

Stereotyping the Taliban is easy. The toppled Taliban Emirate was misogynist and repressive. Then, like now, its leadership partnered with Al Qaeda and acquiesced to Osama Bin Laden’s murderous programme. Then, like now, it committed horrific crimes on and off the battlefield, including ethnic massacres and teenage-cide. Faced with this kind of medieval barbarism, stereotyping comes easy, even naturally. But it also misses things. In the words of the RAND Corporation’s Christine Fair, another one of my travel companions, the ‘militant architecture’ is complex and made up of at least three main groups (and that is not even counting criminals, drug-smugglers and government-affiliated warlords). First there is the ‘real’ Taliban,

Alex Massie

Why Germany Won’t Play Ball

It’s not just Gordon Brown who wants the rest of europe to splash some cash to get us out of the mess we’re in. There are plenty of commentators on the American left – Paul Krugman for one – who also fret that unless european countries join the massive stimulus bandwagon they threaten to delay, or even cancel, everyone’s recovery. Enemy number one, obviously, is the Germans. But as Tyler Cowen points out, the Germans might have some good reasons for their reluctance to go on a spending spree. They remember the costs of German unification and can recall how spending massive quantities of money wasn’t a magic cure-all then

James Forsyth

Stat of the day

The FT’s Westminster blog flags up this quite astonishing statistic: ‘The FT’s resident economics guru Chris Giles has a flabbergasting explanation of the scale of the debt the government is raising in the next two years: £350bn. “That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of Britain between 1691 and 1997, the year Labour was elected.”’ Normally, Prime Ministers who do not lead their party to an election victory and serve only part of a Parliament are mere footnotes in history. Brown will avoid that fate. But he will go down in history as one of the worst Prime Ministers this

Peter Hoskin

Balls sets out his ambitions

Now, this is novel – a politician effectively admitting that they’d like to be party leader. It may be Ed Balls – interviewed in the latest New Statesman – so the news is hardly a surprise. But it still makes a change from the usual non-denials we hear from those with an eye on the leadership. Here’s how he puts it: “I’m not going to say that I don’t want to be leader of the Labour Party, that would be a silly thing to say. But if I ended my political career not being [leader], would that be a failure? Absolutely not. And will I always back the leader of

Peter Hoskin

Brown backs down

Apart from the sentiment expressed, perhaps the most damaging aspect of Mervyn King’s intervention on Tuesday was its timing. Brown’s round-the-world trip was meant to act as a rallying call – but now it’s more an exercise in firefighting, as he deals with tricky questions surrounding our capacity for a “fiscal stimulus”. Take his comments in New York yesterday , where he suggested that there wouldn’t be any further stimulus in the Budget, and claimed there were more “effective and quicker ways” of boosting the economy. This is a trifle unconvincing, coming from a man who has paraded his “everything it takes” credentials for the past few months, and

Martin Bright

The Guardian and Libel

There is a very important piece in today’s Guardian about the UK libel laws by my old friend Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censoship. I urge you to read the article in full. She argues that the UK’s “libel laws remain the most significant daily chill on free speech in the UK”. She is right. There are a number of stories that the British press won’t touch because the threat of being sued by welathy individuals would be so great. I can think of one such story that I would love to tell you about, but if I gave even the merest hint of the identity of the individual involved

Wednesday

25 Mar 2009

Fraser Nelson

Cameron should learn to love the bankers

Seeing Fred the Shred’s house being trashed in Edinburgh gives a glimpse of the nastier elements of the hang-a-banker mood out there – not just in Britain but internationally. Here is a remarkable opportunity for the Conservatives. World over, there are votes to be gained in threatening to tax or regulate the bejesus out of all financiers. Left-leaning governments (such as the Obama administration) find it difficult to avoid this temptation. There has been something of a rift in the White House over this, as Obama’s economic advisers know it makes makes very bad economic sense: in this globalised world, bankers can go anywhere they like (Barclays, for example, recently

Martin Bright

The Left and Radical Islam

There is a part of me that hopes I never have to write another word about the troubled relationship between the British left and radical Islam. But I certainly wouldn’t appreciate being told I could never write about it. This is what I find so mystifying about the campaign by Sunder Katwala, the Fabian Society’s head honcho, to stop Nick Cohen criticising the left for its mealy-mouthed approach to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and its south Asian offshoot Jamaat-i-Islami. He says he finds Nick’s critcism of the Fabians “politically regressive and personally offensive”. So, as a result Sunder has gone on the warpath. I find this very odd. I