Society
Monday
Every pollster now has the Tories on course for an overall majority
Today started with a good poll for the Tories and it ends with another. The latest ICM poll for The Guardian has the Tories on 44 percent, up six points on last month. Labour are on 32, down one, and the Lib Dems on 16, down 3. Year on year, the Tories are up seven, Labour down three and the Lib Dems down four. Worryingly for Brown the public have lost confidence in his economic activism. Confidence in Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling has dropped 18 points in two months. Only 31 percent of voters think the Prime Minister’s actions will actually achieve anything positive while David Cameron and George
Is it the schooling or the eyebrows that is the problem?
One friend joked to me the other day that Prime Ministers should only appoint Chancellors whose eyebrows match their hair colour, pointing out that the last two Chancellors to lead Britain into recession have both had black eyebrows and silver hair. But Alex Massie points out that it might be the schooling not the eyebrows that are at fault: both Norman Lamont and Alistair Darling are products of Lorreto, the prestigious Edinburgh boarding school.
How to look the part on the piste
Milan may be Italy’s richest city, but no-one this weekend was talking about the markets or “Il New Deal di Obama”. The only topic during the Engadine treasure hunt is who is going ‘up” this weekend. “Up” means St Moritz, where from December until April, Milanese society is to be found every weekend munching apfelstrudel at Hanselman’s, hosting kitschy raclette parties in their houses at Zuoz or Celerina and possibly taking a run down the Trais Fluors or the Corvatsch. Romans claim the more serious pedigrees, but what the Milanese miss on breeding they make up for in snottiness. Getting it wrong in St Moritz is horribly easy. I’m
Making the motorcade
The New Yorker has a really fun piece this week about a New Republic journalist who was drafted in to drive a car in the president-elect’s motorcade a couple of days before the inauguration. Here’s the bit where she’s given her instructions: The Secret Service guys told her the drill: it would all happen fast; the Suburbans would pull out, one of them with Obama inside, and she would follow right behind. One of the agents had a Starbucks drink, and he offered Lear a sip: six espresso shots on ice. “He told me he gets it three times a day,” she said. They gave her one piece of driving
Cannabis Confusion
There’s something cheering about today’s announcement that the government has decided to ignore its own experts and reclassify Cannabis as a Class B, rather than a Class C drug. Not the decision itself which is entirely regrettable, but rather what it tells us about this government. Not for the first time Labour wants to be seen to be “tough”; not for the first time it’s pandering to the baser elements of a reactionary, hysterical press. So there’s some comfort, I suppose, in the fact that even this government doesn’t have the courage of its convictions (if such a term can usefully be applied to Jacqui Smith et al) since possession
The Muslim Council of Britain’s disgusting decision to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day
Today’s Guardian reports that: “The Muslim Council of Britain boycotted yesterday’s national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in protest at the Israeli offensive in Gaza this month” The MCB’s decision to vote in December 2007 to end its boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day was regarded by many as proof that the group was moderating and that the government should once more start using it as its first-stop in dealings with the Muslim community. Their decision not to attend yesterday, the fact of which was confirmed to The Spectator by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, shows how wrong-headed that thinking was. The MCB’s reported logic for boycotting (I’ve contacted the MCB asking whether
The Tories’ waste-cutting message matures
Good work from the Tories today, who are finally taking the fight to Labour over Government waste. Out of fear of the “Tory cuts” attack, they’ve tended to shy away from highlighting just how much taxpayers’ cash this Government flushes down the fiscal plughole. But no longer. The report released by George Osborne and Francis Maude today is a clear and unabashed attack on Brown’s spending record – there’s even a “Roll-call of waste” – and it contains some sensible sounding methods for controlling spending under a Tory administration, including greater accountability for wasteful civil servants. Whether the proposals will translate to government remains to be seen, but the message
Brown’s spending dilemma
And so the wheels fall off. As the Times discloses this morning, Alastair Darling’s Big Idea to bring forward capital spending projects looks like it just ain’t happening. The thinking was that £billions of this spending could be funded via the Private Finance Initiative – which Brown’s always liked, because of its “Buy Now, Pay Later” qualities, and because the costs can be swept under the fiscal carpet – but now the banks aren’t willing to lend the necessary cash. Other sources of funds have also dried up as the credit crunch bites, so now the Government’s left with a stark choice – either cut back on the spending projects, which include
Brown and out
Today’s ComRes poll in The Independent marks an important turning point. Labour has dropped below 30 percent for the first time since September; this means that Brown has dropped back to where he was before the first bank bailout and the return of Peter Mandelson. Brown has already recovered once when most of the political class had left him for dead but it is almost impossible to see how he can recover again. The brilliantly-constructed illusion that Brown is in control during this crisis has been shattered by events: as repossessions, unemployment and bankruptcies rise, the public will not see Brown as the great helmsman steering them through the crisis.
CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 26 January – 1 February
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – provided your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local
Has Obama determined our Budget date?
This article in today’s Guardian gives us a good idea of what to expect in the forthcoming Budget. Basically, even if Brown ‘n’ Darling don’t reveal the full horror of the situation, things are still going to look decidedly messy – more borrowing to fund a “second emergency package of tax and spending measures”; a lower growth forecast; and, surely, downgraded tax receipt forecasts. Aside from all that, one other detail from the article struck me: “Darling has spent the last few weeks thinking of possible new expansion plans for a budget tentatively scheduled either for early March or after the visit of Obama to the G20 meeting.” Now, counting
Sunday
Where there’s a web there’s a predator…
Or not. Simply astonishing. Who could ever have guessed this? Don’t tell the Daily Express…
Oh Caroline!
A very entertaining piece on Caroline Kennedy’s “run” for the vacant Senate seat in New York by Larissa MacFarquhar in this week’s New Yorker. There are moments at which one feels rather sorry for Kennedy, but overall the piece is not, shall we say, flattering. And what to make of this splendidly amusing stuff from her courtiers? Now Caroline Kennedy has had her moment and flubbed it. Paterson has appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, a second-term congresswoman from Hudson, near Albany. “Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a
How the British left went bust
Nick Cohen’s essay in The Observer Review is written with his trademark honesty and passion and is essential reading. Here’s the crux of his argument: “the paradox of the 1997 Labour government was that it was at once a left- and a right-wing administration. It wanted a huge public works programme. It aimed to redistribute enormous amounts of wealth. To achieve both these desirable goals, it made a bargain with the markets. All right, the political left said, we will accept extremes of wealth we once denounced as obscene. With the City accounting for a fifth of the British economy, we will embrace your speculators and not drive them overseas
Devising an early warning system that won’t be ignored
Just taking a Sunday stroll through this week’s magazines, and thought I’d flag up the Economist’s special report on the future of finance. Plenty of worthwhile stuff in there – but this passage on how, historically, early warning systems have been ignored jumped out at me: “Some would seek to limit the ebb and flow of confidence with early warnings, as if financial busts were a hurricane or an outbreak of plague. Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, would like to see the IMF cast in that role. History suggests that such schemes do not work. People enjoy booms. Walter Bagehot, an editor of The Economist in the 19th century, observed
A recession that the green brigade can enjoy?
The environmental lobby should be the happiest people in Britain right now. The more people laid off, and the poorer people become, the greener this country will get. All that nasty consumption, and economic growth: kaboom! No more. Those Indians and East Asians who looked dangerously like they were about to upgrade from mud huts for houses, and to start to polluting by consuming – well, they’ll be doing that a lot more slowly now. And the great unwashed British masses, who looked like they needed to be taxed out of the sky and off the roads – well, the recession will also take care of them. And the UK
Cash for amendments threatens to sink Parliament’s reputation further
One of last year’s most memorable political quotes came courtesy of Frank Field, always one of the Good Men of Parliament. In the aftermath of the Derek Conway affair, he lamented “…it is difficult to think how much lower our collective reputation might sink among voters generally.” It sounded true enough at the time. Under a year later, though, that reputation has sunk to lower depths. In one way or another, the squabble over the publication of expenses, the Damian Green arrest, and fresh donations scandals have all undermined Parliament’s standing – and rightly so. And now there could be a new villainy to add to the list. The Sunday
The state is too big
If anyone doubts that state spending has grown far too large over the past few years consider these numbers: “Across the whole of the UK, 49% of the economy will consist of state spending, while in Wales, the figure will be 71.6% – up from 59% in 2004-5. Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles. Even in southern England, the government’s share of spending is growing relentlessly. In the southeast, it has gone up from 33% to 36% of the economy in four years.” State
Saturday
Slow Life | 24 January 2009
I said ‘bollocks’ on live daytime television last week, on a Sunday of all days. My children were watching, too. There were complaints, and quite right. I felt bad about it, even though it was absolutely the mot juste. I got rather carried away, frustrated that a good-looking boy with a lot of potential had apparently missed the point of everything so completely, and chosen to spend his three-and-a-half-minute stab at glory yodelling. And how far he had come to stand there, live, live, live in front of 12 cameras and a million people watching, stand there and blow it so utterly. Back in October we’d set out with a