Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

China’s currency speculation

The most important story of the day might not be the bank rescue plan in the US or any of the British domestic political stories, but this news from China: “China’s central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund. The goal would be to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies,” Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, said in an essay posted in Chinese and English

Peter Hoskin

The Lib Dems take the lead on second homes

Could the second homes controversy be a chance for the Lib Dems to set themselves apart from the other parties?  They’ve certainly come out hard on the issue, tabling an early day motion calling for the second home allowance to be abolished for London MPs, and calling for an inquiry into MPs’ expenses.  Here, courtesy of Politics Home, is the statement put out by their housing spokesman, Sarah Teather: “It is completely unacceptable that London MPs living within commuting distance of Westminster are allowed to claim money for a second home. Thousands of Londoners travel to work in Central London every single day, so why on earth shouldn’t their MPs?  

Peter Hoskin

Where would we be if Brown had faced more internal opposition?

Trust Frank Field to come up with another revealing anecdote about Gordon Brown in tonight’s Panorama.  This time it’s about Brown’s raid on pension funds in 1997, and is reported by the Telegraph thus: On the programme, Mr Field also recalls the day in 1997 when Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, abolished tax credits paid to pension funds and companies: “I went to see Tony Blair after that budget was announced when the raid occurred on pension pots, and I explained to him what had happened and he said in a rather charming ashion, Gordon didn’t explain it that way to me.” It’s indicative of how – despite the constant feuding

Alex Massie Alex Massie

English Cricket Welcomes the Enemy

The news that England hope to host the IPL  is as unsurprising as it is depressing. After all, what better way to start an Ashes summer than with the distracting influence of a cricketing circus? Never underestimate the greed of those charged with looking after the game, howver. As soon as the Indian government declined to offer satisfactory security guarantees it was inevitable that English cricket administrators, dazzled as always by the prospect of raking in more cash, would prostitute themselves in a mad dash to grab a piece of the action. It is hard to see any advantage in this. Better by far if the circus were taking place

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Railway Dreams

Place your bets, please, if you think this is actually likely to happen: The fastest, most frequent train service in the world could run between London and the North within 12 years, according to the chairman of the government-owned company planning the high-speed link. Double-deck trains travelling at 225mph (360km/h) and carrying up to 800 passengers would depart every four minutes, cutting the journey time from London to Birmingham to 30 minutes and from London to Manchester to just over an hour. I mean, it would be grand if it did but given this country’s record on large scale infrastructure projects this seems a highly improbable venture. After all, in

Daniel Korski

Paving the way for a civilian surge in Afghanistan

Kabul After an adventurous journey from the Emirates—which seemed to include our pilot getting lost on the runway at Dubai airport—I have finally landed in Kabul. In Kabul, I attended briefings by General McKiernan, the commander of the almost 70,000 NATO troops now deployed, and his closest staff. Everyone here seemed to be saying the same thing: that the heterodox insurgency, particularly in the south, cannot be defeated by military means alone. Civilians are necessary. This view fits well with Obama’s reported plans for a civilian surge. But what should a civilian surge consist of and what should these extra civilians actually be doing? There are already some 18,000 civilians

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 23 March – 29 March

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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A storm in an inherited tea cup

The supposed Tory split on inheritance tax is big news this morning, making both the front pages of the Mail and the Telegraph and the 8.10 slot on the Today Programme. But as split stories go this one really doesn’t have much going for it. It requires a stretch of even the journalistic imagination to believe that Ken Clarke’s comments revealed some fundamental disagreement between him and George Osborne. Indeed, if Clarke was guilty of anything it was revealing what Tory high command is fretting about in public. Given the state of the public finances, it is hard to believe that raising the inheritance tax threshold should be a priority.

Peter Hoskin

The system needs an overhaul

There’s a futility about the calls for an investigation into Tony McNulty’s housing arrangements.  Sure, McNulty’s expense claims are outrageous – a mockery of the taxpayer that will further undermine the public’s trust in politicians – but I expect the refrain of the investigators will be depressingly familiar: McNulty acted within the letter, if not the spirit, of the rules.  That, or something similar to it.   Of course, this isn’t to say that McNulty shouldn’t be investigated.  MPs can’t engage in this kind of behaviour without some sort of scrutiny of their actions.  But it is to say that there needs to be a wider review of MPs expenses. 

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The case for prison reform

Iain Duncan-Smith has an op-ed in the Sunday Telegraph previewing the Centre for Social Justice’s paper on prison reform. Setting aside the moral case, one sentence in it makes a compelling pragmatic case for it: “Two thirds of all prisoners are re-convicted within two years and half are re-convicted within a staggering 12 months” Purely on a cost basis, reducing recidivism has to be one of the many priorities of the prison system. On those grounds alone, the current system is clearly failing and in urgent need of reform. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pakistan, the sum of all fears

My old friend Carlos Lozada has an interesting interview with David Kilcullen, one of the men behind the successful shift in counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. His remarks about Pakistan rather concentrate the mind: “Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn’t control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don’t follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We’re now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Life and Times and Death of Jade Goody

At some time in the future, historians will view the Jade Goody Affair with the same kind of bewilderment and revulsion that we reserve for the excesses of Victorian Britain. But of course Goody’s celebrity – absurd and mawkish and repellent as it was – demonstrates how little human nature changes and reminds us that we’re much closer to the past than we sometimes like to think. And that, of course, is just another way of observing that the sky is always falling. To wit, here’s the Telegraph’s (lengthy) obituary, which also serves as a commentary on the marvellous monstrosity that is the British tabloid press: The first time she

Peter Hoskin

The Tories reposition themselves on inheritance tax

Now here’s another tax debate for the Tories to get caught up in.  Appearing on the Politics Show today, Ken Clarke has suggested that the Tory plan to raise the inheritance tax threshold is no more than an “aspiration”.  Here’s how the indispensable Politics Home reports it: “Mr Clarke said Tory plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold would not be a priority if they win the next election. Hinting plans had been kicked into the long grass, he called inheritance tax reform ‘an aspiration’ but not something they would do ‘the moment we take power’. Asked if inheritance tax was ‘off the shelf’, he said: ‘We’ll have to consider

Peter Hoskin

Brown and Miliband: not seeing eye to eye?

Remember David Miliband’s wrongheaded Guardian article from earlier this year; the one where he questioned the use of the phrase “war on terror,” and railed against the idea of a “unified, transnational enemy”?  Well, today, Gordon Brown has an article in the Observer which seems dead set against his Foreign Secretary’s thinking.  Its headline: “We are about to take the war against terror to a new level”.  And it sets out the global threat of Islamist groups operating “under the banner of al-Qaida”: “We should be under no illusion, however, that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown has the Comprehensive Spending Review postponed

Andrew Rawnsley’s column today contains this great little scoop: “A comprehensive spending review was due this summer. Gordon Brown has quietly told Alistair Darling to scrap it.” Rawnsley reports that the review is being postponed because it would reveal that the state of the public finances dictates that there will have to be huge spending cuts whoever wins the next election. If the government has to admit this, Brown’s Tory cuts attacks will lose its force. At the moment when Labour politicians appear on TV and radio they keep asking what the Tories would cut. The media should respond by asking them what they would cut.  Indeed, Darling has already

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 21 March 2009

Monday V exciting! Our new Apology and Regret Strategy is such a success we are going to expand it. Jed says we’ve really set the agenda with some groundbreaking grovelling which has made Gordon look like a horrid grump who can’t own up when he’s as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a pile of doo-doo. Or should that be do-do? By contrast Dave is a man of towering integrity who is not afraid to say when something he’s had nothing to do-do with has gone horribly wrong. Just as when he apologised manfully for the slave trade, Our Leader’s Apology For The Recession has blazed a trail in

Dot Wordsworth

It’s ‘no problem’ for Dot Wordsworth

The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’ A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past that now. An advertisement that Veronica showed me on the internet offers T-shirts with the words: ‘Quieres tomar un café?’ The English-language website explains that this means: ‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ It is not that I think ‘Can I get?’ is particularly rude. It’s just that it does not convey the thought

The Spectator

Letters | 21 March 2009

Art for money’s sake Sir: It is hardly surprising that Olivia Cole (‘How to put children off art’, 14 March) found so many schoolchildren in the National Gallery and that they seemed to be learning little about art from their visits. The Gallery, like other public bodies, has a funding agreement with its sponsor department, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The agreement for the current financial year is not on the Gallery’s website but for 2007/8 it was set a target for the number of children aged 15 and under visiting the Gallery in ‘organised educational sessions’, of 105,000, which it exceeded. There is no target for the

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 21 March 2009

I’ve come into some money. Twenty grand. Nice. Best not to shove it straight in my permanently overdrawn current account, though, I thought. My laptop is riddled with computer viruses. It would be just my luck if, after holding off for years, the hackers strike the moment I go into the black. So I decided I’d open a new current account with a different bank and put the money in there while I decided how to spend it. More or less at random I took the cheque to a branch of the Alliance & Leicester in the high street. There were no other customers. As I approached her window, the