Society Archives

Wednesday

4 Mar 2009

Why waiting for Obama to fail is not enough

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, says everyone should calm down and have a cup of tea: Barack Obama and the Democrats have the initiative. Until such time as their policies are perceived to have failed, it doesn’t matter too much what Republicans do. Yes, they obviously should endeavor to be sober and creative—replenishing their policy arsenal for the day when the public is seriously paying attention to them again—but the big question in American politics right now is how Obama handles the financial crisis and the economy. In the grand scheme of things, everything else is commentary. Aside from the fact that the Republican party is neither sober nor

James Forsyth

No game-changer

As Gordon Brown heads back to London he can content himself with the fact that his Washington trip has not turned into the disaster is threatened to during the whole not a ‘press conference but a pool-spray’ moment. His speech wasn’t up there with Blair’s 2003 effort, but his knowledge of American politics enabled him to hit most of the right notes and, at the risk of being guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations, Brown’s delivery was better than usual. Brown must, though, know that the trip has not changed the course of British politics which, from his perspective, it needed to. To use an American sporting metaphor,

James Forsyth

Brown’s speech to Congress: Live blog

Gordon Brown is about to deliver his speech to a Joint Session of Congress. When Blair addressed one in 2003, he received 19 standing ovations. Brown by having the Queen offer the ailing Teddy Kennedy an honorary knighthood has sweetened the mood and guaranteed him a few standing ovations. One problem for Brown is that it is harder to hit the rhetorical high notes in a speech that focuses mainly on the economy than in one on foreign policy. Whatever you think of the content, Blair’s speech in 2003 was a rhetorical tour de force. In that respect, the bar is set almost impossibly high for Brown. He’s also far less

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 4 March 2009

With Brown in America, David Cameron on compassionate leave, and Nick Clegg looking after his newborn son, it’s a Harman-Hague-Cable match in PMQs today. Expect a subdued affair, although there could be some sparks over Harman’s comments about Fred Goodwin’s pension. Stay tuned for live Coffee House coverage from 1200. You can watch proceedings here. 1205: First question for Harman from Keith Vaz, on the “increasing level on violence in video games”. Harman: “There must be tough classification…” etc. 1208: Hague stands to cheers from the Tory benches. Offers his condolences to the victims of the Lahore terror attack yesterday – Harman didn’t. Follows it up by asking whether British troops in

Peter Hoskin

You know things are getting really bad for Brown when…

…Cabinet ministers would rather be in opposition than in his government. This from Alice Miles in today’s Times: “Can the country really bear another 14 months of this? Not even ministers are sure they can endure it: one member of the Cabinet told me recently that, despite the hell of being in opposition, he could hardly wait for the election to get away from the misery and directionlessness of the Brown regime: ‘Gordon doesn’t start from a position of conviction, he just wants to create dividing lines with the Conservatives.'”

Peter Hoskin

A humble rift

So, it seems that Alistair Darling wasn’t speaking on message when he called for some “humility” from government yesterday. The Mail reports that Brown was left “fuming” by Darling’s intervention, and there’s much talk of a rift between the PM and his Chancellor. Brown’s since tried to paper over the cracks, telling Nick Robinson that there’s “always a need for humility”, but he then tore the paper down with this follow-up: “And the idea … that somehow this is a British problem that was a British government mistake, actually what happened is that round the world, as everybody understands, the whole global financial system seized up.” To top it all

Alex Massie

Conrad Black and Paul Pennyfeather

Conrad Black, late of this parish of course, describes his daily routine after his first year in prison: I get up just after 7 except on the weekends and holidays when it is possible to sleep in. I eat some granola and go to my workplace where I tutor high school-leaving candidates, one-on-one, though sometimes I have to deal with up to four at a time, around my desk, and talk with fellow tutors and other convivial people. I lunch around 11 with friends from education, work on e-mails, play the piano for 30 to 60 minutes, return to my tutoring tasks by 1, return to my unit at 3,

Tuesday

3 Mar 2009

Peter Hoskin

Spelman guilty of “inadvertent breaches”

As ConservativeHome reports, the official investigation into ‘Nannygate’ has found Caroline Spelman guilty of “inadvertent breaches” of Commons rules. The “inadvertent” bit means she’ll keep her job in the shadow cabinet, but Paul Waugh writes that she’ll have to repay £9,600 of expenses that she used to pay her nanny. Much like the Brown decision last week, I doubt the outcome will do much to revive people’s faith in the political class.

Isaac Beech

China gets Clintoned (or is it the reverse?)

Beijing It didn’t surprise many in the Western commentsphere that Hillary Clinton chose Asia for her first destination as Secretary of State. A young Chinese friend here in Beijing, however, was surprised that it wasn’t Obama’s treasury secretary who was the first to cross the pond (the Pacific is the new pond). But there’s nothing like a crisis to rewrite a job description: Clinton’s focus in China last week was all economic, encouraging them to keep buying US bonds. Amidst the hubbub that Clinton was zipping up on human rights issues like Tibet to cosey up to the economy which could help hers out of its mess, I can’t help

Peter Hoskin

Goodwin: a Government adviser until five weeks ago

Now this casts the continuing row over Fred Goodwin and his pension in a fresh light. Turns out that Goodwin sat on a panel advising the Government about financial matters until five weeks ago, some months after his management of RBS has driven the bank to collapse and triggered its effective nationalisation. According to the Newcastle Journal, Alistair Darling wrote to him on 28 January, relieving him of the position and thanking him for his “personal contribution”. There’s much talk around Westminster that the Government has used the Goodwin row to distract from other embarrassing stories. But the bitter irony is that it could be far more politically damaging than any

Peter Hoskin

Is Brown’s global mission dehumanising him?

Over at The Bright Stuff, Martin flags up this passage in Rachel Sylvester’s excellent Times column today: During one recent conference call involving Ed Balls and Lord Mandelson (Mr Brown’s new core team who have regular strategy meetings) the Prime Minister was pressed repeatedly to deal with a list of specific issues but kept turning the conversation to his plan to create a new economic world order. It’s a compelling snapshot, and cuts deep into many of Brown’s political problems. Unlike his predecessor, our current PM struggles to do human; an impediment at the best of times, but potentially fatal when repossessions, bankruptices and unemployment are shooting ever skywards, and

James Forsyth

Progressive ends, different means

Jenni Russell’s piece in The Guardian today about how the left should support the “progressive wing” of the Tory party has set tongues wagging. Tim Montgomerie has some interesting thoughts on it and attempts to identify “the important ten” who one Tory told Russell form the “progressive wing” of the party. Personally, I must admit to finding that these arguments over the naming of things generate more heat than light. In his Demos speech, David Cameron laid out four things that progressive Conservatism stood for: moving people permanently out of poverty, a society with equality of opportunity, a greener, sustainable planet and a safer society. These goals, though, can be

Peter Hoskin

Tragedy on the streets of Lahore

Grim echoes of the Mumbai atrocities this morning, as the news came in that a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team had been attacked in Lahore. Once again, it seems that the perpertrators are a Pakistani terrorist organisation, perhaps even the same Lashkar-e-Taibar; once again, the attack is being described as “well organised”; and, once again, the end result is tragic: at least six people have died and around seven are injured. Perhaps the main difference is that this took place on Pakistani soil. Another is that the gunmen haven’t been captured or killed, and most likely won’t be. It encapsulates the chaos that reigns in Pakistan right now. Aside from

Peter Hoskin

Is Darling paving the way for some “humility” from Brown?

Hm. I was quite surprised by Alistair Darling’s interview with the Telegraph this morning. To my ear, Government rhetoric has been hardening over the past few weeks; the same old soundbites about “Tory cuts” and “Problems which started in America” used ever more defiantly. But here we have a softening of approach, and – although there are some sleights of hand (Darling refers to mistakes made over the “last 15 years” – i.e. these were Tory mistakes too) – something close to an admission of Government guilt. Here are the key passages from the article: “There are a lot of lessons to be learnt by regulators, governments, all of us,”

Monday

2 Mar 2009

Martin Bright

Convention on Modern Liberty

I was really sorry not to get along to the Convention on Modern Liberty at the weekend. I think this is an important development on the political landscape and I salute the organisers. I have been impressed by the energy of Henry Porter in getting this onto the agenda and the coalition is an interesting one. Henry’s article in the Observer was correct to point out the role played by Jack Straw in the erosion of our liberties. Straw, argues Porter is “now carving out a historic role for himself as one of the enemies of democracy and civil liberties in the United Kingdom”. I also enjoyed Suzanne Moore’s take on the

Fraser Nelson

The Spectator Inquiry: Questions for the man who saw the crash coming

After Lord Lawson (whom I interviewed last week – answers to your questions will be posted soon) the next ‘expert witness’ for The Spectator’s wiki-inquiry into the recession is William White. His name is spoken with reverential tones by those who know of him, because he was for years warning about precisely this kind of blow-up. When he was chief economist at the Bank of International Settlements from 1995 to 2008, it was his job to advise the world’s central banks. He was warning for years about the precise nature of this bubble, and wrote various papers – arguing, for example, that inflation targeting was dangerous because it rendered

Alex Massie

The Party of Limbaugh

There’s a reason Rahm Emanuel is happy to agree with Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that he, the Great Rushbo, is the de facto leader of the Republican opposition: Limbaugh turns off middle-class, middle of the road voters. An Obama vs Limbaugh battle is not one the White House is going to lose. Indeed it’s hard to think of a better way for the Republican party to marginalise itself and reinforce the impression, held by many voters, that it’s little more than a rump of pop-eyed angry white men. This impression may be inaccurate but there you have it. David Frum is, as you might expect, depressed by this: Rush knows what

James Forsyth

Base politics

Lexington, The Economist’s US political correspondent whose new blog is well wroth checking out, flags up an interesting post from New Majority, the site that is leading efforts to modernise the Republican party: “26% of the electorate is white evangelicals, and 74% of them voted for McCain. McCain pulled slightly less than 46% of the vote, so about four-in-ten of McCain’s voters were white evangelicals. To put it in perspective, white evangelicals are nearly twice as important to Republicans as African-Americans are for Democrats. Despite the surge in African-American turnout and the record high percentage Obama received from those voters, blacks comprised only 23% of the winning coalition.” As Lexington

James Forsyth

Downing Street grateful for its “useful idiots”

Harriet Harman’s comment on Sunday that Fred Goodwin’s pension arrangements are “not enforceable in the court of public opinion” did suggest, as Alex argues, a belief in the rule of the mob not the rule of law. (It also raised the question of why on earth the government had effectively signed off on them when it bailed out RBS). But I suspect that Downing Street is not that enraged about the remarks even if it won’t support them. As Francis Elliott writes, “From Number 10’s perspective the controversy over Sir Fred Goodwin serves a useful purpose in conducting public anger over the recession away from the Government.” The more discussion

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s Mandy dilemma

Oh dear. You feel it had to happen sometime, and here it is: news that Labour MPs are calling on Gordon Brown to “rein in” Peter Mandelson. Predictably, it’s over the continuing Royal Mail row; something that, as it happens, Mandy’s on the right side of. So far as Brown’s concerned, increased hostility towards Mandy puts him in a tricky position. After all, it was Brown’s idea to ennoble Mandelson and draft him back into government in the first place. He did so against a fair amount of internal opposition. So if the PM doesn’t stand by his business secretary – if he caves into the calls coming from