Society

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Why have Mandelson and Clarke been kept apart?

Reading Bagehot a couple of weeks ago, on the prospects for a televisual clash between Ken Clarke and Peter Mandelson, it struck me how the dynamics of the situation have changed.  Despite the drooling anticipation of numerous political observers, both Labour and the Tories have seemed reluctant to put their two business frontbenchers up against each other.  But, at first, most of that reluctance came from Tory folk I chatted to – their fear being that Mandelson, face-to-face with Ken, would milk the occasion for all its split-story worth. Now, though, after weeks of strong message discipline from Clarke, that fear seems to have subsided.  Instead, there’s much more reluctance

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

A modest proposal

The Quilliam foundation has found that 97% of imams working in Britain are foreign-born, and that nearly half of mosques do not make provisions for women. A huge proportion of mosques are led by rabble-rousers, obsessed by Middle Eastern politics rather than the actual day-to-day needs of their community. In short, Muslim religious culture is failing to integrate, to become more British. How can Muslims be encouraged to integrate? The Quilliam foundation suggests that tighter regulation is needed, and more care to fund community projects run by moderates rather than extremists. Hazel Blears argues that the government should be energetically engaged in the debate about what constitutes extremism (I think

Alex Massie Alex Massie

In praise of… Ryanair

Everyone is supposed to hate Ryanair, right? It’s the compay that takes the frills out of no-frills and that, increasingly, seems to relish treating its customers with a degree of contempt. Despite this, I think it a splendid airline. That’s not just because it can fly one to interesting places for tiny prices (though obviously that’s a large part of its appeal) but because Ryanair strips the nature of the deal back to its essence: who really needs assigned seating or terrible in-flight food? No, Ryanair is basically a taxi: nothing more, nothing less. And, frankly, there’s also something amusing about its shameless hucksterism and Michael O’Leary’s insatiable desire to

Peter Hoskin

Labour to hire Sir Alan for mayoral bid?

Much ado round Westminster about Andrew Gilligan’s claim that Labour, through their London director, have approached business-supremo-cum-TV-personality Alan Sugar to run as their candidate for London Mayor in 2012.  As Paul Waugh reveals, Labour are denying it all – but the story still makes a lot of sense.  After all, Sugar is high-profile; popular with the public; and, despite his burgeoning friendship with Gordon Brown, sufficiently independent to remain unsullied by this Government.  And, to top it all off, he’s not Ken Livingstone.  To my mind, he could could be a formidable opponent for Boris, and Tory grassroots seem to agree – respondents to a ConservativeHome survey last week put him

Peter Hoskin

Mandelson struggles to pull the media strings

There’s an air of desperation about Peter Mandelson’s article in the Wall Street Journal today.  The notion that the UK’s uniquely well-placed to deal with the downturn seems to have been jettisoned – Mandy gives the excuse that “the U.K. has taken an early hit from a credit crunch that began with a serious failure in financial markets – perhaps even more than most because of its large financial-services sector.” – but the essential message is still the same: creditors, please don’t worry, the UK will remain solvent.  This paragraph contains it in a nutshell: “Just as importantly, when the government announced its borrowing plans last year, it made clear commitments to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Good banking needs a bad bank

The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal Europe rips into the Asset Protection Scheme the government announced yesterday: “It’s little surprise that U.K. financials rallied yesterday on the news that the British state will guarantee more than £500 billion of the banks’ toxic assets. It’s like getting car insurance after having crashed the vehicle into a wall. The “Asset Protection Scheme” is a great relief for everyone around — shareholders, managements, creditors — except for the people who share no responsibility for the mess: taxpayers. In a sign of how bad markets believe this deal will be for taxpayers, prices for U.K. government bond futures initially slid more than

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A bonfire of taxpayers’ cash

And what, exactly, is the point of this mind-blowingly large bank insurance scheme? I haven’t blogged on this so far as it just leaves you numb: as Charles Moore says in his Notebook in this week’s magazine, you just stop reacting. Another £300bn? A £10bn loss from Lloyds/HBOS – and that’s our problem now? Or is it? Whatever, Mr Brown. The taxpayer has endured so much pain that the new blows don’t register. Our nervous system is already in ruins. Billion is the new million. Trillion seems a made-up word, although it’s popping up with greater frequency. The next in line is quadrillion, which sounds like some kind of a

Peter Hoskin

Yet another broadside against Brown’s economic management

For the third day in a row, the head of a prominent independent body has given Gordon Brown a kicking.  After Lord Turner’s attack on Brown’s regulatory system, and Mervyn King’s comments yesterday, Steven Bundred, the chief executive of the Audit Commission, today laments our massive public debt.  His article in the Times (headline: ‘Our public debt is hitting Armageddon levels’) is well worth reading in full, but here are a few key passages: “Those who are too young to remember [1975-76 and 1993-94] would do well to learn about them fast – because even the dark years of the mid-1970s and the early 1990s may look like days of

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Daily Mail’s Definition of Britishness

Golly. The Daily Mail seems to have a very narrow, dangerous view of who is, and who isn’t, British: However although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants. How – what’s the word? – charming. [Via Danny Finkelstein]

Martin Bright

The RBS Bailout

A friend has just pointed out this extraordinary quote from The Times article on Fred Goodwin (I have stripped him of his knighthood as the government should). “The handout means that RBS will have received more than £45 billion in public funds, equivalent to a penny on income taxes for more than a decade” I had to read this several times and then kick myself, rub my eyes and then kick myself again. Can we please ensure that Fred Goodwin walks away with no pension as a starting point?

Peter Hoskin

King weighs in to attack the regulatory system

Plenty of interesting comments have come out of Mervyn King’s appearance before the Treasury Select Committee – Reuters collects some of the highlights here.  But, after the claims Lord Turner made yesterday, King’s criticism of the regulatory system is particularly eye-catching.  Here’s how the Telegraph’s James Kirkup reports it:  Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has said that financial regulators were unable to stop City banks taking huge risks because they did not get support from the British Government and MPs. Regulators who had criticised banks lending in 2006 or 07 would have had “a massively difficult task” persuading politicians to back them. “They would have been seen to be arguing against success,” said

James Forsyth James Forsyth

California Dreamin’

Fraser’s piece in the magazine this week on how California is inspiring the Tories is well worth reading. Fraser makes the point that the Tories are attracted to California because family friendly policies and dynamic businesses go together there. The important thing to appreciate is that these businesses are family friendly not because of regulation but because this is the way to attract the best talent and thus to maximise the company’s profitability. On one trip to California a couple of years back to visit a friend who was at Stanford business school, I was struck by how Google was regarded as the place to work by the student there

Peter Hoskin

How crime could pave the way for quantitative easing

The story of Adolf Burger, a Slovakian Jew forced by the Nazis to produce counterfeit British banknotes, is utterly compelling.  To a lesser degree, so is this statistic mentioned in the Times analysis accompanying a report of his visit to the Bank of England yesterday:   “Counterfeiters continue to ply their trade in Britain and are so adept at producing pound coins that more than one in 50 in circulation are fakes, according to reports released by the Royal Mint. The Mint estimated last year that 33 million of the 1.47 billion pound coins in circulation are fake, a proportion regarded by one currency expert as dangerously high. Robert Matthews, who

James Forsyth James Forsyth

An embarrassment for the Prime Minister

The Standards and Privileges Committee has now reported on the complaint against Gordon Brown and it has concluded that Brown did breach the rules, albeit inadvertently: “We conclude that Mr Brown should not have sub-let part of his accommodation paid for from Parliamentary allowances. However, neither Mr Brown nor the Labour Party derived any financial benefit from this arrangement and there was no intention to deceive. We accept that Mr Brown’s breach of the rules of the House was inadvertent and that he took steps to rectify it as soon as it was drawn to his attention. Mr Brown has apologised and in our view no further action is necessary.”

Peter Hoskin

Firefighting the bankers

In terms of the cash involved, the controversy surrounding Fred Goodwin’s £650,000 a year pension is a mere footnote to the massive RBS bailout announced this morning.  But, politically, it could be far more damaging for the Government. Their attempted solution to the problem is beyond parody – as Alistair Darling revealed this morning, the banking Minister, Lord Myners, has left a message with Goodwin that the pension doesn’t look good and asking whether he could decline some of it.  Goodwin hasn’t yet replied. Despite all the tough talk on bonuses, this lazy firefighting hardly creates the impression that the Government’s cracking down on corporate failure.  And when you couple it with, say, the James Crosby fiasco, it threatens

Peter Hoskin

The bailouts get bigger and bigger

Today’s yet another downturn milestone.  As RBS announces the largest annual loss in UK corporate history, the Treasury’s set to make the bank the beneficiary of what could be the biggest bailout so far.  Robert Peston sets it out thus: “The Treasury has announced that we as taxpayers will provide insurance to Royal Bank against future losses on £325bn of loans and investments. First losses of up to £19.5bn on those impaired assets will be taken by Royal Bank. But to prevent the losses wrecking the bank, we as taxpayers will be injecting up to £19bn of new capital into it, in the form of non-voting shares. Also, losses greater

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Iranian nuclear problem will not wait

Coalition negotiations are ongoing in Israel and so you’d expect them to be the main story for the media there. But every time I go to Haaretz’s site or that of the Jerusalem Post, the top story is about Iran and its nuclear programme. Israel is acutely aware of the threat it faces. The more time passes without the United Nations or an ad-hoc alliance taking serious action to try and deter Iran from going nuclear, the more Israel will feel that it will have to deal with this threat itself. That feeling must only have increased with Obama’s failure to mention Iran in his speech last night and the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Jindal stumbled last night but he’ll be back on his feet soon enough

Bobby Jindal’s response to Barack Obama’s speech last night flopped. In terms of content it fell back far too often on simplistic anti-government platitudes and did not offer anywhere near enough of an alternative vision for how to chart a course out of this crisis. But the content was not its biggest problem, the delivery was. It was far too infomercial-esque. Some commenters on my earlier post on Jindal, in which I tipped him to be the next Republican president, are rushing to say that this proves that Jindal is overrated, that he’ll never make it on the national stage etc. But it is worth remembering that Bill Clinton’s debut

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Presidential Talkathon

Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency (highly recommended, incidentally), resurrects one of my favourite Never-Gonna-Happen-Ploys: the President should make fewer speeches and deliver the State of the Union address in writing, not in person: The “permanent campaign” that dominates modern presidential politics would have appalled our forefathers. Accepting the 1844 Democratic nomination, James K. Polk described the custom of the time: “the office of president of the United States should neither be sought nor declined.” When 19th-century candidates spoke publicly, they sometimes felt compelled to apologize, as 1872 Democratic contender Horace Greeley did, for breaking “the unwritten law of our country that a candidate for President may

Peter Hoskin

The Eye of God

Ok, so I have a bit of a fascination with space and space travel, which I manfully try not to inflict on CoffeeHousers.  But indulge me just this once, as this image taken by the European Southern Observatory – and reported by the Telegraph here – is too stunning not to share.  For obvious reasons, it’s been nicknamed the Eye of God: Truth is, it’s a “shell of gas and dust that has been blown off by a faint central star”.  Even so, an arresting reminder of the beauty of our universe.