Society

Thursday

29 Jan 2009

Lib-Lab-love?

Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, makes the case for a pre-election Lib-Lab coaltion in this week’s New Statesman. His central points are that it could save Labour from electoral wipeout and would enable the two parties to outflank the Tories on “progressive” policy. This paragraph pretty much sums it up: “The coalition would not mean guaranteed re-election but – going into it with a majority of over 150 – it would have more than a decent shot. A Tory majority government could be well beyond Cameron’s grasp and the centre of gravity would shift away from the right in a campaign where two progressive parties challenge Cameron’s

Peter Hoskin

The challenge facing the Republicans

Just in case the GOP needs another reminder to broaden its coalition if wants to make headway in 2012, here’s a new study from Gallup. It finds that just 5 states – representing 2 percent of the population – can be classed as Republican (i.e. a significant plurality of adults there identify themselves as Republicans). Against that, there are 35 Democratic states and 10 “competitive” ones. Here’s the graphic which illustrates it all: Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan

Alex Massie

White House Style

At long last, the long national nightmare is over. From a fun NYT piece on Obama’s looser White House regime: If there is one thing Mr. Obama has not gotten around to changing, it is the Oval Office décor. When Mr. Bush moved in, he exercised his presidential decorating prerogatives and asked his wife, Laura, to supervise the design of a new rug. Mr. Bush loved to regale visitors with the story of the rug, whose sunburst design, he liked to say, was intended to evoke a feeling of optimism. The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln

Alex Massie

Do the Republicans have a plan?

Good question! One of the odder aspects of American politics – at least for foreigners used to the rough and tumble of the House of Commons – is the elevation of bispartisanship to the status of some kind of political sacrament. A cynic would say that the principle motivation for this is to ensure that blame is shared between the parties, not hogged by whomever happens to be in the majority at any given moment. I always have the feeling, mind you, that respectable opinion in DC finds partisanship both excessive and, worse, rather vulgar. (To be more precise: polite society finds Democratic partisanship especially vulgar; since 1994 and the

James Forsyth

Cruddas on Cameron’s progress

Tory sallies into Labour territory on fairness and progress, two words that the left have long taken for granted as their own, are beginning to worry folk in the Labour party if Jon Cruddas’s interview in The Independent is anything to go by. Cruddas, who was at the launch of Phillip Blond’s Progressive Conservatism Project, says: “It is very, very sophisticated, very worrying for us,” he said. “It is not just about policy but language. We [Labour] still have a one-dimensional take on Cameron. I think Cameron is doing well.” Cruddas confirms that the mood in the Parliamentary Labour Party is increasingly grim: “People were wildly optimistic before Christmas; they

Peter Hoskin

Mandy for Prime Minister?

Matthew Parris on top form in today’s Times: Fact: unsourced rumours circulated in the media last weekend that Lord Mandelson had rescued the Government by smoothing ruffled feathers in India after the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, “mishandled” his visit there. Surmise: The source of these rumours was Peter Mandelson. Fact: Miliband has entertained ambitions for the Labour leadership. Surmise: Mandelson wants to finish off Miliband’s hopes. Fact: It has been reported that Mandelson believes Gordon Brown is rubbish. Surmise: His Lordship has somebody else in mind as leader. I’m serious. Labour’s Christmas sugar-rush of optimism that all might not be lost is fading. The polls are tipping back down. Next

Peter Hoskin

Labour’s strategy is stuck in the past

As numerous Labour MPs have been saying recently, Brown needs to start doing something different if Labour are to reverse the Tories’ momentum in the the polls. But, interviewed in the latest New Statesman, Alistair Darling indicates that Labour High Command are happy to stick by the old, tried-and-tested methods which are no longer getting them anywhere: Darling believes that the battle lines at the election will be clear: a simple choice between Labour investment versus Tory cuts. “The Tories seem to be going back to where they were in the early 1980s – saying the government’s role is pretty limited. They have set themselves significant cuts in public spending.

Alex Massie

Our Age of Abundance

Despite the tenor of the times, it is still the case that almost all of us have never had it so good. As Brad DeLong writes at The Week: The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe’s middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort—where we have enough food that we are not painfully hungry, enough clothing that we are not

James Forsyth

A cry for help | 29 January 2009

Sky News’s John Craig has a must-read on reports of Gordon Brown’s behaviour before the vote on the third runway for Heathrow which Labour won narrowly: ‘Labour MPs claim a “tearful and dewy eyed” Prime Minister called the Labour waverers into his Commons office one by one and pleaded with them to back the Government. “If we lose this vote it will de-stabilise the Government and de-stabilise the markets,” said the embattled Prime Minister, according to one MP who voted with the Tories despite the emotional appeal.’ If Brown did get this emotional over the Heathrow vote, one dreads to think how he responded to the IMF’s report saying that

Wednesday

28 Jan 2009

James Forsyth

The next American economy

Obama’s $819 billion stimulus package has just passed the House, albeit without a single Republican vote. But too often lost from the conservation about the stimulus and how effective it will be is what the US economy will, and should, look like once this storm has been weathered. In short, where will the growth come from? David Leonhardt has a fantastic piece in the upcoming New York Times magazine looking at this question. His argument is that education is the absolute key to this question. As he notes: “The median male worker is roughly as educated as he was 30 years ago and makes roughly the same in hourly pay.

Fraser Nelson

Obama all set to snub Brown?

When someone says they “hope” to come to your party, it’s normally a polite way of saying “forget it”. And when Brown spoke to Obama on Friday, the president said he “hopes” to come to the G20 summit in London. (White House readout here). It wasn’t a slipup. I called the Foreign Office who confirmed: it is yet undecided as to whether the G20 will be a finance ministers summit or a head of government one. The invites go out next week, and they may find out the week after. Maybe later. To treble check, I contacted the US Embassy in London – is the president coming to the G20?

William Blackstock

Could you get arrested for owning a graphic novel?

Film adaptations of graphic novels such as Zack Snyder’s 300 and the upcoming Watchmen mean that graphic novels are growing ever more popular. They’re not just in dingy comic book shops anymore but on the shelves in Waterstones and Borders. So is it right that they are now under threat by government anti-pornography legislation? There are two bills in parliament at the moment that, if successful, could make the possession of “extreme pornographic images” an offence. An “extreme image” is defined in The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act as one that is “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character”. So far, so good, right? That all

Alex Massie

What English backlash?

My sense is that, like their Scottish counterparts, English nationalists are disproportionately vocal online. Certainly, anything one says about Scotland and the future of the United Kingdom seems to draw them out. But for all that we keep being prmised an English nationalist backlash against Scotland (and Wales!), stubbornly it never quite seems to come. At least that seems to be the case if the results from the latest British Social Attitudes Report are in any way accurate. True 32% of people in England feel Scotland receives an unduly generous share of public spending (up from 22% in 2003) and 61% think Scottish MPs should not vote on English-only legislation.

Peter Hoskin

A graph to scare future governments

Earlier, from the IFS Green Budget launch, I wrote of how long it’s going to take for future governments to pay off Brown’s debt binge. Above is the graph, from the Green Budget, which illustrates the point. As you can see, it will take until around 2032 for us to get back to the 40% debt-GDP ratio that (officially) prevailed under Brown’s fiscal rules – and that’s assuming that governments between now and then embark on a fiscal tightening programme of spending cuts and tax hikes. Even with more severe fiscal tightening, it’s going to take until around 2025. One thing this fails to account for, though, is how much

Alex Massie

Dating a Banker Anonymous. Yes, really.

For all that it’s often criticised in the blogosphere, there’s an awful lot of good stuff in the New York Times. And some of it is very well written. This, for instance, is a splendidly judged intro and set-up: The economic crisis came home to 27-year-old Megan Petrus early last year when her boyfriend of eight months, a derivatives trader for a major bank, proved to be more concerned about helping a laid-off colleague than comforting Ms. Petrus after her father had a heart attack. For Christine Cameron, the recession became real when the financial analyst she had been dating for about a year would get drunk and disappear while

Alex Massie

The Unconventional Problem of Conventional Wisdom

An oldie but a goodie: Frank Foer’s defence of Conventional Wisdom dates from 2001 but it still a jolly read: Since 1980 the New York Times editorial page has published at least 38 columns condemning world hunger, 241 against South African apartheid, and 465 containing the phrase “conventional wisdom”–and never once did the Times mean it in a nice way… The New Republic has been even more hostile–savaging ” conventional wisdom” in 352 articles since 1983 (and TNR comes out only once a week). The consensus against CW has grown so powerful that even CW’s most distinguished purveyors now denounce their craft. In what can only be described as an

Alex Massie

Ulster Lessons

I’ve a piece up at the New Republic today, looking at how George Mitchell’s experience in Northern Ireland may inform his approach to his role as Barack Obama’s middle eastern envoy. Readers of long-standing will know that I take a rather more jaundiced view of the “peace process” than most and that, accordingly, am less enthused (but still hopeful!) by Mitchell’s appointment than most commentators. Nonetheless, Mitchell appreciated that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to forge a peace agreement absent the cooperation of the men of violence. In his view, “To be sure, their participation will likely slow things down and, for a time, block progress. But their

Peter Hoskin

Uncertain times as the IFS delivers its Green Budget

I’m embedded at the IFS/Morgan Stanley Green Budget event – at which the two organisations present their own prognoses for the UK economy and public finances – and my head’s swimming with numbers, forecasts and graphs. Two things are standing out, though: just how much uncertainty there is about where we’re headed, and how restricted future governments are going to be because of Brown’s stewardship of the public finances. First, the uncertainty. As Morgan Stanley’s David Miles put it, there is “an unusally large amount of uncertainty about the UK economy” right now. Even the experts just don’t know what’s coming next, and they’re having to come up with numerous

Peter Hoskin

Expanding Heathrow would ground expansion at every other airport in Britain

If you want to know how anti-competitive a third runway at Heathrow could be, then check out this article in today’s Times. It highlights a study by the Campaign for Better Transport which claims that – thanks to the Government’s climate change target – Heathrow expansion would mean every other airport in Britain having to abandon their own expansion plans. I wonder whether Gordon Brown’s factored that in when he boasts about how many jobs would be “created” by a third runway at Heathrow? Somehow, I doubt it…

Peter Hoskin

The attack that Labour fears

This article in today’s FT is an intriguing addendum to my post yesterday about Labour accepting the “headless chicken” charge. It points out that Gordon Brown has now been “warned by Labour ministers and MPs to stop churning out initiatives to tackle the recession”. And then goes on to describe an “anxious” parliamentary meeting of Labour MPs on Monday night, where one backbencher lamented Brown’s “blizzard” of initiatives. Increasingly, it seems like Labour fear the “headless chicken” attack more than the Tories fear the “do nothing” counter. The political tides certainly favour the Tories here – the “do nothing” tag was always disingenuous, and would become less effective as Team