Society

Wednesday

26 Nov 2008

The signs are that Brown will be undone by his PBR

The revelation that a rise in the VAT rate was being considered by the government up until the very last minute, and apparently in the PBR figures themselves, is part of a greater truth that the level of borrowing that the country has embarked on means that taxes will have to rise considerably or there will have to be radical cuts in spending. Brown hopes that delaying until after the election the planned combination of spending cuts and tax rises means that the public won’t cotton on to what is going to happen before they cast their ballots. But the signs are that this is not going to work; the

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 26 November 2008

Welcome to Coffee House’s live blog of PMQs. After Monday’s PBR, you can expect the economy to be the main topic of debate – with Cameron and Clegg trying to highlight the weasels and tax bombshells that Brown has in store for us. Things will kick off at 1200, so join us then. 1203: Here we go. 1204: First question from Sir Peter Tapsell: “Will the PM apologise to the public for wrecking the British economy?” 1205: Important point from Colin Burgon on money lenders targeting young people. 1206: Cameron now. “If the government doesn’t have a secret plan to raise VAT why did the Treasury Minister put his signature to it?” Brown talks about

Peter Hoskin

Will Labour’s poll gains unravel with the PBR?

What to make of the YouGov poll in today’s Telegraph? It was conducted in the aftermath of Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report statement – on Monday evening and throughout yesterday – and came out with the following headline figures: Conservatives — 40 percent (down 1) Labour — 36 percent (no change) Lib Dems — 14 percent (no change) The question now is whether this means the PBR has actually gone down well; whether it means that the public haven’t quite yet digested the Government’s measures; or whether the poll’s just an outlier. The thing with Brown’s Budgets is that they tend to unravel swiftly enough, and this latest certainly looks like

Lisa Hilton

Society news

Despite its increasing resemblance to ‘Heat’ magazine, I was reassured on Tuesday morning that my beloved Guardian has not lost the courage of its convictions. Running an ill disguised-spoiler of next month’s Tatler cover (ha ha, vile toffs, we know who Daisy Lowe is, too!), Hadley Freeman pondered “that almost parodic monthly recorder of Britain’s class system’s” new best friendship with Peaches, Pixie and co. – that’s Bob Geldof’s daughters for those of you who have lives- over more traditional aristocratic totty. The Guardian seems a teeny bit obsessed with the Tatler at the moment; Charlie Brooker was banging on about its list of “waddling bags of arseflesh” aka eligible

Matthew Lynn

General Motors must be allowed to crash

There is probably no company in the world as iconic as General Motors. As the manufacturer of Cadillacs, Buicks and Chevrolets, as well as Opels in Europe and Vauxhalls in Britain, it would be no exaggeration to describe GM as the corporation that perfected 20th-century industrial capitalism. Henry Ford created the first mass-production car 100 years ago but it was GM, under the leadership of Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, that completed the package. Easy credit, brand segmentation, mass advertising, conspicuous consumption, built-in obsolescence: the tools of the modern multinational were hammered into shape by Sloan, then deployed to crush all opposition as the first truly global manufacturer. GM became

Elliot Wilson

A new job for the IMF: as global policeman

In early November the head of the world’s leading multilateral agency made a remarkable public bid for survival. Speaking in São Paulo, addressing the world’s most powerful finance ministers, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, announced that his institution was the right one to lead us out of our financial and economic malaise. Conveniently overlooking some uncomfortable facts — that the IMF must at least share responsibility for getting parts of the world into this soup, and that it failed to predict the coming financial storm — Strauss-Kahn told his audience that the world needed ‘a stronger IMF, particularly as far as early warnings are concerned’. In

Rod Liddle

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case Like me, you may well have received a text message or a spammed email recently providing you with the full names of the adults held to be responsible in the appalling case of ‘Baby P’, the small child subjected to the most dreadful physical abuse resulting in his death. The details of these phone messages are usually accompanied by a demand for ‘justice’ for ‘Baby P’, by which is meant the deafs

Matthew Castray

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little Federal elections come around quickly in Australia. With a maximum term of three years, the average since 1975 has been about two years and nine months. So new Australian governments have an incentive to implement reforms in their first year — or do they? The one-year anniversary of the Rudd Labor government this week gives pause to consider another incentive — one probably familiar in the United Kingdom: to do very little for fear of jeopardising a second term, but maintain the mirage of reform.

Dylan Jones

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat To Sofia, then, on a ten-seater NetJet Falcon from Farnborough, accompanied by Bryan Ferry and a small coterie of GQ apparatchiks, including the best-dressed man in Shepherd’s Bush, Nick Foulkes. Some of my friends are big in Japan, some of them are big in America and some of the larger ones are big all over the world. Me, I’m big in Bulgaria. Not as big as government corruption or the drug cartels, but big enough to warrant a mention

Nancy Dell'Olio

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

I am an optimist. One of the reasons why I have always been a fan of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes is that he too was an unashamed optimist who believed in the power of money for making things better. Unemployment, recession, deflation — if we were to believe all we see and read from the courts of the media kings, we might all be depressed into thinking there is no way out. Born in Cambridge in the year that Karl Marx died, Keynes was a much more intriguing figure than his grey cadre of contemporaries. He brought flair and style to a dull establishment. A friend of

Margaret Macmillan

The done thing

The Politics of Official Apologies, by Melissa Nobles George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future. We all call a lot on history these days as the impartial tribunal which will eventually dole out the gold stars and the black marks. We also seem to think that we set past wrongs right by making apologies to groups and individuals. A descendant of that Elizabethan freebooter, Jack Hawkins, has apologised for slavery; post-war Germany apologised and made recompense for the Nazi crimes against the Jews; and the Australian and Canadian

Tuesday

25 Nov 2008

Alex Massie

Department of Hackery

One of the things that distinguishes a good columnist from the ordinary, run-of-the-mill shill is the ability to treat their own party’s failings as severely as they would condemn the blunders committed by the other lot. Similarly, there’s something to be said for the rigour that consistency demands. Polly Toynbee may be correct (though I’d wager she isn’t) that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling played a blinder on Monday, but does anyone imagine that if it was a Conservative government presiding over this recession she would write anything as, I don’t know, cheerful and complacent, as this? Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs.

Alex Massie

Letter from a Florida Prison

Conrad Black: The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers’ unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences. The entire “war on drugs”, by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side economics: a trillion taxpayers’ dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for illegal

Alex Massie

Never mind me mate, what about the other mob?

Commenting on this post Ian Leslie – aka Marbury – argues that we’re on the brink of a new era and that just as Callaghan was right to appreciate that one era had ended in 1976, so Darling and El Gordo may be correct to suppose that another has been shipwrecked now. Maybe. Look, I’m not sure this will work, and if it does work it might be partly by accident and yes I know that Brown hasn’t really earned his authority over the last ten years. This is a gamble. But taking a gamble at this stage is better than doing nothing and hoping things will return to normal,

Alex Massie

Quote for the Day

Chris Dillow – always worth your time – casts a weary eye over a number of government policies and concludes: What this shows, I think, is that New Labour’s claim to believe in technocratic, evidence-based policy is a sham. They are not technocrats at all, but either priggish moralists or cowardly panderers to mob prejudice. Quite so. And as he says, we may need a revolution. Lord knows, however, where that might come from.

Alex Massie

Sexy Horse Noises!

Another lovely obituary from the Daily Telegraph (of course) that is, as always, written with panache: Nick Mills, who has died aged 54, was a country vet with a practice which took him across the world as an anaesthetist for wild animals, an insurance adviser to the racing industry and a “sex therapist” to thoroughbreds at stud. Among the famous racehorses he examined before they were purchased or put out to stud were Epsom Derby winners such as Galileo and Benny the Dip. When the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem showed a lack of interest in the opposite sex, Mills made several journeys to Japan (where the horse was

James Forsyth

Have Brown and Miliband sold out Tibet for Chinese cash?

Robert Barnett, the Tibet expert, has a commentary in The New York Times that claims that Britain has changed its position on Tibet in exchange for China giving more money to the IMF. Here’s the key part of Barnett’s argument: “Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share. Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys

Peter Hoskin

Put your questions to Grant Shapps

Grant Shapps – the Shadow Minister for Housing, and MP for Welwyn Hatfield – has kindly agreed to a Q&A session with Coffee House. Just post your questions for him in the comments section below. And, on Friday, we’ll pick out the best ten and put them to him. He’ll get back to us with his answers a few days later.

Theo Hobson

Why Russell Brand so upsets us

While I admire Charles Moore’s willingness to inherit the mantle of Mary Whitehouse, I don’t think he has quite put his finger on the essence of the Brand-Ross business. The large public outcry provoked by the call to Andrew Sachs can’t be channelled into a general war on smut at the BBC. I don’t think there’s a public appetite to see Ross as the personification of BBC smut, who must never be re-employed by the corporation. Though Ross was involved in the incident, it wasn’t really about him. And it isn’t quite right to see it as an acute example of a general smut problem. It was really about Russell

James Forsyth

Boris v. Brown

The free sheets in London are leading on Boris’s attack on Gordon Brown in his Telegraph column this morning. The column is full of good knock-about stuff but what has attracted the papers’ attention is this passage—the banner headline on one of them ‘Like a drunk’: “He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well. He is like a drunk who has woken to the most appalling hangover, and who reaches for the whisky bottle to help him dull the pain.” One of Boris’s gifts is that he is a politician