Society Archives

Thursday

12 Feb 2009

Government by the Phone Book

I confess I find this entertaining and reassuring in equal measure. A new Rasmussen Report in the United States finds that: Forty-four percent (44%) [of] voters also think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress, but 37% disagree. Twenty percent (20%) are undecided. The entertainment comes from the 20% who aren’t sure and would like a little more time to think about it. But it’s also reassuring. Politicians may dislike people “carping on the sidelines” but then they would, wouldn’t they? Lowering our expectations of politicians and, for that matter, reducing the amount

Wednesday

11 Feb 2009

Martin Bright

McNulty survives the Newsnight ambush

A great edition of Newsnight tonight, featuring an ambush of employment minister Tony McNulty in an empty, echoing Birmingham factory. McNulty had been characteristically honest by saying that things are likely to get worse before they get better. Paxman was right to remind Theresa May that there are still a million fewer people unemployed than under the last Tory government. She didn’t have an answer for that. Yet that’s no consolation for those people who are losing their jobs right now. But the real point is that this recession is hitting very quickly. Unless the government acts quickly then redundancies will already have been made and it will be too

Daniel Korski

Who knows what Afghans think?

The political class loves polls. They tell them — or at least they think they tell them — what the public think. The hunger for polling data has now spread to post-conflict situations. Want to know how things are going in Afghanistan? Commission a poll. So this week David Miliband has been hitting the airwaves to respond to a new poll of Afghan opinion. The poll, the fourth conducted by an international media consortium since 2005, showed falling support for President Hamid Karzai, and a sharp decline in the proportion of people who think the nation is heading in the right direction, from 77 percent in 2005 to 40 percent

Peter Hoskin

Write Gordon’s apology

So, Our Dear Leader’s studying tapes of Barack Obama to find out just how to say sorry. We still may never hear an actual apology, but at least he’s doing his homework. Here at Coffee House, we figured we should help him out. So this, CoffeeHousers, is your mission… Write out a script for Brown’s Great Apology, of no more than 300 words, and post it in the comments section below. The idea came from Alex’s classic blog post earlier today, and I’d recommend you read his effort for inspiration. Here’s a snippet: “Mistakes do happen, you know. Nobody’s perfect. Not even Tony. When this government encouraged risk-taking and suggested

James Forsyth

Far more than shallow speech

In debates about Afghanistan, and previously Iraq, people like to puff themselves up and declare that ‘there is no military solution’ and that ‘we must talk to those who are prepared to give up violence’. They then rest back in their chairs and wait for everyone to applaud their wisdom. But in fact they have merely made two obvious and shallow statements. In his speech to the Munich Security Conference, General Petraeus pointed out the flip side to these statements of the obvious. On the first point, while there is not a purely military solution there can be no solution without the military. In these kind of conflict / post-conflict

Martin Bright

Why select committees matter

I take my hat off to the Treasury select committee for the spectacle of the hearings on the banking crisis. This is more theatre than genuine scrutiny – but without real powers to subpoena witnesses and force the disclosure of evidence then this is about as good as it’s likely to get. In the absence of real judicial teeth, the committee has to rely on the tools of the jobbing journalist – leaks and whistleblowers. Step forward Paul Moore, the HBOS head of risk who was sacked by the bank’s chief executive Sir James Crosby for warning of the dangers ahead. This is gobsmacking. In a better world, Crosby would be arraigned

Martin Bright

The crisis of investigative reporting

I caught Walter Isaacson on the Daily Show last night (video here) talking about the future of newspapers and it was pretty scary. Isaacson has written a long piece for Time magazine suggesting that media organisations have to find a way of charging for Internet content or journalism will die. His thinking is that if we are reliant entirely on advertising then there will be no demand for good old-fashioned investigative journalism, which is driven by the relationship between reporter and reader. Stewart put it to Isaacson that the only way to save the print media was to invent narcotic ink, and I’m nearly as pessimistic. However, I’m with Isaacson on

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 11 February 2009

Stay tuned for live coverage of PMQs from 1200 onwards. 1203: A breaking news item worth mentioning: Gordon Brown’s buddy, James Crosby, has resigned his role at the FSA. 1204: Here’s Brown now. He faces a question on Crosby, and responds: “It’s right that James Crosby resigned his role.” 1205: Cameron now. “They can even plant questions at short notice”. He leads on Crosby too. “Does the PM accept that it was a serious error of judegment on his part to appoint [Crosby] in the first place.” On the offensive from the off. Brown responds by citing a KPMG report. 1208: I bet Brown’s wishing Crosby had resigned half-an-hour later. Cameron

Rory Sutherland

All of a Twitter

I was a little uncomfortable when writing my piece on Twitter for the Wiki Man column at the beginning of this year. Mindful that some of the magazine’s offline readership are sometimes faintly sceptical about newfangled gadgetry (the telegram, the Newcomen engine, the loom…) I was cautious about writing a fairly upbeat piece about a new form of communication which lies dangerously close to the line which divides useful innovation from senseless absurdity. Many would say Twitter lies on the wrong side of that line. A year or so before I had registered http://twitter.com/The_Spectator, but mostly for my own amusement. I thought it useful to have updates from Coffee House, and

Peter Hoskin

White collar jobs for white collar workers

A fascinating double page spread in today’s Times, setting out the Government’s plans to get help unemployed white-collar workers get back into work. Apparently, ministers are worried that job centres just won’t be able to deal with the swathe of former bankers, solicitors and accountants that will be passing through their doors, and the idea is to introduce new, 12-week courses so that these people can “refresh their skills”. It’s a striking sign of where we’re at. Catering for the C2s may no longer mean promising lower taxes or, say, improved education for their children, as it did in 1997. It may simply mean safeguarding their jobs, or maintaining their employability. But will it work? I,

Venetia Thompson

The party’s over: welcome to the City’s new puritanism

‘Well, I’ve got the lads an espresso machine — after all, none of us can afford coke anymore, how else are we going to stay awake?’ It was nice to hear that one City banker was putting his hand in his pocket and looking after his troops — they may not be getting bonuses, but at least his team were guaranteed a decent coffee. But even this little luxury may have to be confiscated. It simply doesn’t blend in with the new puritanical City landscape, where the amount of milk available in the canteen and what it can be used for is heavily restricted. Inter-dealer brokers — who spend their

Fraser Nelson

‘We need to be ready for two years of recession’

Opposite Alan Johnson’s desk is a plaque from the Chinese health ministry — a gift that must, at times, seem like a taunt. The Health Secretary controls 1.3 million staff, more than anyone bar the commander of the Red Army. His £120 billion budget is greater than any government department in Beijing. The Chinese economy and the NHS were both subjected to limited market-based reform — yet there the similarities end. Deng Xiaoping succeeded. Tony Blair was ousted. And now Mr Johnson stands in charge of the largest bureaucracy on the planet. We have heard strikingly little about health since he took over, which he regards as a success. The

Scott Payton

No retreat for medal winners

‘One of my American clients recently lamented: “If only I’d put as much money into military medals over the last year as I’d put into the stock market,”’ says Peter Dangerfield, owner of online medals dealership www.medal-medaille.com. The markets for military medals and ephemera are strong, with new buyers venturing into the militaria world in search of shelter from the global financial storm. The top end of the medals market is particularly buoyant, says Mark Quayle, head of the medals department at Spink, which has been buying and selling military medals since they first appeared after the Napoleonic wars. ‘The finer material — such as scarce gallantry groups — continues

Matthew Vincent

The rise and fall of Mr Two-and-Twenty

‘Mr Ten Per Cent’ has long been a term of contempt. Indeed, finagling Hollywood agents’ decimation of their clients’ earnings resulted in one of the few successful exports of a Spoonerism to California — to explain the difference between a talent agent and a rooster (the latter ‘clucks defiance’). So why has it taken a global credit crisis, the collapse of several major investment banks, and Bernard Madoff’s alleged £50 billion fraud, for anyone to question the remuneration of the agent’s Wall Street equivalent: ‘Mr Twenty Per Cent’? Or, to use the full, double- barrelled monicker more befitting his Mayfair cousin: ‘Mr Two-and-Twenty’? He is, of course, the hedge fund

Matthew Lynn

The men who called the markets right

It has been a terrible 12 months for investors. It didn’t make much difference whether you invested in stocks, commodities or corporate bonds, the chances were you took a hammering. Even gold failed to sparkle as the credit crunch cut a swath through every kind of asset class. And yet there were a few individuals who managed to make fortunes as the markets tumbled. In the US, John Paulson cleaned up by betting big against the subprime mortgage market. Over here, amid the general gloom along Mayfair’s Hedge Fund Alley, there were a couple of money managers who could still afford somewhere better than Pret a Manger for lunch. BlueGold

David Young

Health’n’safety everywhere — except in the banking system

‘The President tells me that too much regulation is harming business,’ Margaret Thatcher said, the moment I walked into her office for my weekly meeting. I had been appointed minister without portfolio some months earlier and the Prime Minister had just returned overnight from her latest summit with Ronald Reagan. ‘You had better believe it,’ was my somewhat flippant reply — and for my pains I found myself minutes later with my own cabinet sub-committee on deregulation. This was the beginning of years of deregulation efforts by successive governments, which gradually faded until today, when all that remains is in the name of the department for ‘Business, Enterprise & Regulatory

Rebecca Newman

Galapagos Notebook

Did you know that marine iguanas have two penises? That the temperature at which their eggs incubate determines the gender of a giant tortoise? That a female parrotfish can change into a male? Two weeks in the Galapagos and I’ve climbed volcanoes, swum with penguins, and worn out my shutter-finger photographing sea lion pups. I’ve also become a mound of wildlife trivia. It’s Darwin’s fault, of course. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, I took a berth on a latterday version of The Beagle to retrace the great man’s steps. Crippled by seasickness for most of his voyage, Darwin wrote: ‘I loathe, abhor the sea

Tuesday

10 Feb 2009

Alex Massie

Hope We Better Believe In?

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during afternoon trading February 10, 2009 in New York City. MarkMarkets were down nearly 400 points after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner detailed the administrations plans to battle the financial crisis. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) Last year you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing photographs of Distressed Traders wondering what to do now that their world was collapsing. But times change and the media craves novelty. So now we get Confused Traders instead. This seems reasonable. After all, here’s Paul Krugman: An old joke from my younger days: What do you get when you cross a Godfather with a

James Forsyth

Are they trying to teach Gordon how to say sorry?

The apologies, however hedged, from the disgraced bankers at today’s Treasury Select Committee hearing, highlighted that there has been no apology from the Prime Minister for his role in all this. Indeed, Brown’s consistent refusal to acknowledge his errors has diminished whatever was left of his Prime Ministerial authority. Just remember that Today Programme interview where Brown claimed that, with the benefit of hindsight, the one thing he wished he’d done differently was keep a closer eye on the American sub-prime market. But Martin Bright reports that Downing Street is considering a change of tack: “word reaches The Bright Stuff that the man who has never knowingly apologised for anything

James Forsyth

Only three Republicans vote for the stimulus in the Senate

The stimulus has passed the Senate and now heads to a conference to iron out the differences between the House and Senate versions. However, the bill only got three Republican votes meaning that it passed 61-37, only avoiding the threat of being filibustered by one vote. Back at the beginning of January, the Obama team were talking about getting 80 votes for the package in the Senate. The latest polling suggest that Obama is having the better of the public opinion fight over the stimulus. But there must be worry in the Obama camp that they are into partisan warfare so early on in the presidency. This means that they