Society

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. 

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

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

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

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

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.