Society

Tuesday

Lisa Hilton

A fat-fighting New Year?

I love the gym on a January morning. The frantic flush on the faces of the bankers as they Stairmaster to redundancy, the quivers of the anorexics staggering into their fifth mile. Actually, there aren’t any anorexics. The anorexics of Bloomsbury are clearly lacking in New Year’s resolve. Hardly surprising, as despite the tsunami of publicity annually devoted to the perils of eating disorders, only 19 out of 1,000,000 women are suffering from anorexia, according to Clinical Knowledge Summaries, as opposed to the 240,000 afflicted with obesity. Hardly an epidemic, yet anorexia is one of those curious points of intersection where the Guardian and the Daily Mail agree. Despite being

Peter Hoskin

Spelman in the clear

Team Cameron will be delighted with the news that Caroline Spelman is to be cleared of any wrongdoing over the ‘Nannygate’ affair – the Tories can well do without any “sleaze” accusataions being fired in their direction –  and the expectation now is that she’ll be kept in the shadow cabinet, although not necessarily as party chairman.  To my mind, Cameron would be best-advised to move her to an alternative brief.  Although it may have been partially down to the allegations hanging over her, Spelman has been a near-invisible figure over the past year-and-a-half.  And one imagines that any of the names being mooted to succeed her – Eric Pickles, Jeremy Hunt or Chris Grayling – would better

Peter Hoskin

Tories on tour

One of the charges most frequently levelled at the Tory shadow cabinet is that their commitment to the cause isn’t quite great enough; that they lack the same out-of-power-obsessiveness that drove New Labour between 1994 and 1997.  Revelations about second jobs and the like have often made this argument quite persuasive.  But Tory supporters can take heart today from the fact that most of the shadow cabinet is spread across the country, making the case for their party’s economic approach. As Tim Montgomerie points out, this caps what has been – bar one or two caveats – an effective Tory performance over the Christmas and New Year break.  The shadow cabinet seems

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How to restore Britain’s military standing

Rachel Sylvester’s column today, highlighted by Pete this morning, raises the question of who should take the blame for the decline in Britain’s utility as a combat ally. This is principally a result of this country fighting wars on a peacetime budget. It was one of Tony Blair’s great failings that he did not tell Gordon Brown that the need for a serious and sustained increase in defence spending was non-negotiable. (When Brown became Prime Minister, the military had to fight two wars for a year without even a full time Secretary of State for Defence). What the military can be faulted for is a series of high-handed comments and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Gaza dilemma

Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the New Yorker and now at The Atlantic, is a fantastic writer and always worth reading on the Middle East. His post, flagged up by Clive, explaining why he isn’t commenting more on the situation in Gaza, is as depressing as it is moving: “I’ve served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I’ve been kidnapped in Gaza; I’ve reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn’t kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they’ll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work

Peter Hoskin

Targeting Iran

I missed Robert Kaplan’s latest dispatch yesterday, but this passage is still worth flagging up: “How do you fight unconventional, sub-state armies empowered by ideas? You undermine them subtly over time, or you crush them utterly, brutally. Israel, unable to tolerate continued rocket attacks on its people, has decided on the latter course. Our own diplomacy with Iran now rests on whether or not Israel succeeds. We need to create leverage before we can negotiate with the clerical regime, and that leverage can only come from an Israeli moral victory—one that leaves Hamas sufficiently reeling to scare even the pro-Iranian Syrians from coming to its aid. In defense of its

John Stokes

A surprise choice

The appointment of Leon Panetta to run the CIA in the Obama administration has sent shock waves through the US intelligence community. Panetta, who was Chief of Staff in the Clinton White House, is a budget hawk who in the past has argued for tougher control of intelligence spending. At the same time, he has been a fierce critic of the CIA’s campaign of kidnapping, assassination, torture and warrantless wiretapping, which was authorized under the Bush administration. For decades, the CIA has fiercely resisted outsiders being imposed on its clandestine and insular world. The last two outsiders to run the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner and John Deutch, were widely considered

Peter Hoskin

A relationship on the wane?

A typically insightful piece by Rachel Sylvester today; this time on the Obama administration’s precarious commitment to the “special relationship”.  The key revelation is about a report doing the rounds among British defence and diplomatic officials: “Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America – which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War – is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

I am Michael Common*

And so it continues. Not content with discovering “passive” smoking, the health boffins have now discovered something called “third-hand smoking”  – all the better, presumably, to drive the last remaining smokers into the mountains (be they the Rockies or the Western Highlands) where, armed with only our wits, a lighter and a dwindling supply of contraband tobacco, we shall slip from cave to cave, lair to lair, all the while pursued by an army of “health professionals” hell-bent on saving us from ourselves… *The hero of Michael Heath’s long-running Spectator cartoon strip, The Outlaw, Michael Common is the last, still-persecuted, smoker in England.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Further Adventures of Lance Armstrong

When he finally gets off his bike (again), does Armstrong see a future in politics? Looks like it. Interviewed by the Daily Beast he puts it like this: If you feel like you can do the job better than people who are doing it now, and you can really make a difference, then that’s a real calling to serve, and I think you have to do that. I felt a strong desire to come back and race right now because I felt we had a place and I could have a real impact and that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t think you want to enter political life unless you

Alex Massie Alex Massie

But Sometimes Change is Real

Matt Yglesias correctly suggests that these photos are the Obamas attempt to reduce the “National Cuteness Deficit.” But there’s something else too: besides being charming, it’s striking how these photographs of Malia and Sasha preparing for their first day at a new school are both so very ordinary and yet also a reminder of howit really is momentous thing that this is the next First Family of the United States of America. The ordinary reveals and, in a sense, reinforces the extraordinary… NB: Close examination reveals that the President-elect is not in fact making a somewhat dismissive gesture to his daughter. Three fingers, not two.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

In 2009 the Tories need to kick their dependency on Dave

One habit the Tory party should aim to cure itself of in 2009 is its over-reliance on David Cameron to gets its message across. Some Tories defend the heavy use of Cameron by arguing that he is both the party’s most attractive face and the only way they can guarantee getting their message reported in the media. But using Cameron for nearly all high-profile announcements prevents other members of the shadow Cabinet from developing national recognition. For instance, I fail to see why George Osborne shouldn’t have made today’s announcements on tax. Also, as Tim Montgomerie has noted, if there are too many speeches by a party leader they become

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Things worth reading | 5 January 2009

The economic crisis is so bad that it is often easy to forget that the foreign policy challenges that so dominated the news a year or so ago have not gone away. The mission in Afghanistan will present General Petraeus with an even tougher challenge than Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ambitions will have to be confronted or accepted sometime soon, this year we will find out what happens in China when the economy stumbles, Russia still seems intent on reasserting its dominance in its near abroad and there is—of course—the problems in the Middle East that have so dominated the news in the past few days. So, I’m very glad that

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama’s double-play on taxes

The first order of business for the incoming Obama administration is going to be a stimulus package. With Obama’s vacation over and the President-elect moving from Chicago to DC, the details of the plan are beginning to become clearer. The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration will urge Congress to make 40 per cent of the stimulus, expected to weigh in at $775 billion, tax cuts. As it notes: “The Obama tax-cut proposals, if enacted, could pack more punch in two years than either of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts did in their first two years.” This is a clever move from the ever-pragmatic Obama team. The stimulus

Peter Hoskin

Claiming the future

I wrote yesterday that the race is on between Brown and Cameron to appear the best to lead us through the post-recessionary landscape.  That race became even more competitive today, with both Brown and Cameron serving up their “optimistic” visions for the future.  Our Dear Leader’s came in a speech to the Regional Economic Council, which was packed with nods to a “prosperous future” and to “investment in the future”.  Whilst Cameron’s came in the press conference that Fraser blogged about earlier, during which there was much ado about “increased productivity,” “more efficiency,” and “greener technology”. On the whole, I’d say Cameron’s got out of the starting blocks quicker; but

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron goes grey

Fraser is at David Cameron’s event so he’ll have more on the Tory announcement that they’ll abolish the basic rate of tax on savings and raise the personal allowances of pensioners by £2,000 My initial reaction is that it is a savvy political move, the population is getting older and old people vote in higher numbers than young people. It is, however, a micro not a macro announcement. As David Cameron’s interview on the Today Programme this morning showed the Tories still lack a clear convincing, and compelling answer as to what they would do to lead the country out of this crisis. (Although, it gladdened the heart to hear

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Dwelling on the past will damage Brown

The whole economic meltdown is less of an opportunity for the left in Britain than the US for the simple reason that Labour was in power here in the years leading up to it. Today, Jackie Ashley bemoans that Brown’s refusal to admit that mistakes were made means that the left might miss the opportunity presented to it by this crisis: “We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes. Yet to properly exploit that, Brown and his ministers have to change their tune about the past. To hear him claim he made no mistakes, and that everything about the Blair-Brown handling of the

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 5 January – 11 January

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

Peter Hoskin

Slower to demonise, faster to fix

Although I agree with the ultimate conclusion of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s column today – that we shouldn’t, as a nation, “blame the outsider,” and that we should work towards greater integration – the tirade she launches before it is astonishing, and not in a good sense: “A new government report finds that [the white, working classes] feel “betrayed” and abandoned. Ruined by “ethnic minorities” they cry into their antimacassars and threaten to vote for fascists. The British working classes include people of every shade. But only white grievances matter. Nobody seeks to find out what life is like for the incomers living in the fog of nativist bitterness. Parliamentarians, the media,

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Mr Webb Returns To Washington

There were all manner of reasons for Barack Obama to pick someone other than Jim Webb as his running-mate (though there was a case to be made for Webb too). But, via Ross Douthat, here’s a reminder of why Webb is, as he might put it himself, a serious politician: This spring, Webb (D-Va.) plans to introduce legislation on a long-standing passion of his: reforming the U.S. prison system. Jails teem with young black men who later struggle to rejoin society, he says. Drug addicts and the mentally ill take up cells that would be better used for violent criminals. And politicians have failed to address this costly problem for