Society

Saturday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 11 October 2008

Reasons to be cheerful The evenings are getting darker, someone called Libor has nicked all our money, and Scarlett Johansson’s got married. There’s little to smile about. So in a spirit of pro bono here are some reasons to be cheerful. For starters, rugby is becoming absolutely fantastic. Not quite the new football, but I wish. With a packed crowd in the purpose-built stadiums at Worcester, Leicester or Northampton you get a better atmosphere than at Old Trafford with a quarter of the numbers. The standard of the top games is awesome, and with someone like Dan Carter at Perpignan you can see the best players in the world on

Richard Middleton

City Life | 11 October 2008

When the credit crunch first hit, Icelanders blamed everyone but themselves: international banks for their loss of faith, hedge-funders in London for betting on the country going bankrupt. Seven months later, though, with its current troubles and the recent central bank rescue of Glitnir, Iceland’s third largest bank, the mood is one of anger amid the dawning realisation that perhaps Iceland’s own politicians and bankers may have played a part in the crisis all along. In bars and restaurants along Laugavegur, Reykjavik’s main shopping street, people are critical of Geir Haarde, the Prime Minister of a beleaguered coalition, while his finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, whose only qualification to a knowledge

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The No. 1 tax detective agency

Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance Seldom has tax featured in the media over the past decade without the lanky figure of Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, or his predecessor Andrew Dilnot, popping up to discuss it. Yet recently the IFS’s monopoly has come under increasingly serious challenge. Whether it be the Daily Telegraph or the Money Programme, there is now a good chance that it will not be Mr Chote giving his hap’orth, but the bespectacled figure of Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. In fact, my rather unscientific analysis suggests that this year the Alliance has eclipsed the IFS in just about

The Spectator

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards | 11 October 2008

Nominations continue to roll in for the inaugural Spectator’s Readers’ Representative. This week saw several MPs nominated for their campaigning work. Richard Hamilton proposes Nadine Dorries. Hamilton commends Dorries for addressing the issue of term limits for abortion with a ‘tenaciousness and passion that caught the public’s attention in a remarkable way’. He applauds her for explaining how the 1967 legislation has resulted, against the intent of the original act, in half a million abortions being carried out each year and for her courage in carrying on in the face of hostility from her opponents. Iain Duncan Smith is nominated by Adrian Fry. Fry writes, ‘I don’t understand the current

Sarfraz Manzoor

An evening with the Muslim Facebook crew

Sarfraz Manzoor celebrates an iftar meal with homeless people and his fellow Muslims, a web-generated ‘flashmob’ observing an Islamic tradition of generosity to the needy It is sundown in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a large outdoor square behind London’s Holborn Underground station. I am here to meet a man called Miqdad Asaria who had invited me to attend what he had described as a ‘flashmob iftar’. During the month of Ramadan, which ended last week, an iftar is the evening meal that marks the end of the fast and it is traditional to celebrate it with family and friends. Asaria had a more ambitious proposal. ‘During Ramadan Muslims get a glimpse

The Spectator

A necessary evil

The Spectator on the Government’s £50 billion bailout Though largely forgotten now, the headlines ten years ago this week had an uncanny resemblance to those of the past few days. There was an emergency bail-out, demands to slash interest rates, bankers warning that the world’s economic system was in danger of systemic collapse — countered by disgusted voices warning that nothing good would come of using taxpayers’ cash to prop up failed financiers. The only difference was the scale. The bail-out of the collapsed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 cost US taxpayers $2.3 billion. This week’s bail-outs will cost US taxpayers $700 billion and British taxpayers £50 billion.

Deborah Ross

Fear and menace

Gomorrah 15, Nationwide Gomorrah is a mafia film and while we are well used to mafia films and even like some of them — for example, and if I recall rightly, The Godfather was quite good; do catch it if you can — this is not that sort of mafia film. There are no big stars, no horses’ heads, no violin cases, no corpses dispatched to sleep with the fishes and no contract killings, which, these days, might also be available as pay-as-you-go. It is always worth shopping around and perhaps asking yourself questions like: do I want my killings during the day, or can I wait until the evenings

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Urban Farmers to the Barricades!

The most depressing thing I’ve read today (so far): Many large US cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Seattle apparently never thought to ban the domesticated fowl within city limits. That’s from a Christian Science Monitor article on the increasing number of urban Americans keeping chickens. Why do depressing? Because the presumption is, quite clearly, that it’s normal and appropriate for cities to make it illegal for you to keep a chook or two. Letting people lead their lives as they see fit is a Risk Too Far! As always it’s If In Doubt Ban It. Actually, Just Ban It First And Don’t Ask Any

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Brown Greenspan bond looks very different now

Gordon Brown is very proud of his friendship with Alan Greenspan, he has hailed him as “the world’s greatest economist” and “the most successful” central banker in history. When Greenspan stepped down from his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Brown quickly appointed him as an economic advisor to the British government. As Prime Minister, Brown has had Greenspan to stay at Chequers. It is easy to see why Brown was so drawn to Greenspan and why he thought the association was politically beneficial. But in the coming months it could turn into a political liability for Brown. Rather than being seen as a friendship between two economic titans,

Peter Hoskin

Martti Ahtisaari wins the Nobel Peace Prize

The former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier today for his “important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts.”  He’s worked towards resolving disputes in regions including the Balkans, East Timor, Iraq and Northern Ireland. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown’s Canute moment

“I’m trying to get the oil price down, and get the fall passed on directly to people at the petrol pumps and then on to gas and electricity bills.” PS I realise that I’m being a bit unfair to King Canute who was actually trying to demonstrate the limits of his powers to his followers.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown won’t be smiling for long

Opinion is divided in Westminster between those who think that with the financial turmoil the political plates have shifted in Brown’s favour and those who believe that any bounce Brown is getting from this crisis will be temporary. I’m firmly in the latter camp and I’d say that Iain Martin has it exactly right in his Telegraph column this morning: “In the years ahead there will be unemployment, hardship and social dislocation. Borrowing will be higher, taxes will rocket, spending on services will fall, and it will have its origins not in the Thatcherite mid-1980s but in the past decade of the most reckless financial mismanagement. Labour over-spent, over-borrowed and

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Financial Crisis: Cui Bono?

Unionists of course. That. at any rate, is Alan Cochrane’s argument in the Telegraph today. With his acknowledged acumen in this field, Mr Salmond has tried to put himself at the very epicentre of this crisis but with every day that passed he has looked more and more like a spear carrier in a major production being directed by people altogether more powerful than he. HBOS and RBS may have their brass plates in Scotland, but the measures needed to cope with the crises afflicting them required action on a scale far outwith the capabilities of one small nation. Mr Salmond’s actions have looked increasingly puny, revealed for what they

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Kirsty Wark jumps the shark

If Coffee Housers missed it, I’d thoroughly recommend watching Kirsty Wark’s interview of George Osborne on Newsnight. It could easily be mistaken for a parody of BBC bias. Wark starts off by suggesting that the Tory governments of the 1980s are to blame for the current crisis; even Gordon Brown hasn’t attempted to claim this. She then proceeds to be unable to understand why the Tories think differently about bankers’ bonuses now that they are being paid for with taxpayer money rather than bank profits. I’m normally reluctant to claim that the BBC is biased, much of its political coverage is excellent. But the contrast between the treatment that Osborne

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tory economic thinking isn’t being discredited by this crisis 

A lot of people are opining that the Tories, as a party of a centre-right, are in trouble because of this financial metdown. Nicholas Watt says in The Guardian today that “[Cameron] faces the same questions being posed to all centre-right parties across the world – and which appear to be inflicting such damage on John McCain’s presidential ambitions. The Tories and the US Republicans are being asked what the champions of light regulation have to say after the spectacular failure of this approach.” While in the Mail Peter Oborne, one of the smartest people in journalism, writes that “The Tory Party has a desperate problem in the coming months –

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Panglossian or prescient?

Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Perry Mehrling have a fascinating opinion piece in today’s Washington Post arguing that we are actually all going to be fine and that the coming recession is going to be quite modest—at least in the US. Here’s the nub of their argument: “Uncle Sam (a.k.a. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke) is doing precisely what’s needed to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. With credit markets drying up, he’s turning on the faucet by recycling our panic dollars back into the financial market. The government is taking in our money (in exchange for Treasury bills) and using it to make mortgages and buy

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Banks can’t splash the public’s cash

Lots of people are mocking the Tories for being concerned about bankers’ salaries; Simon Hoggart ribs Cameron for sounding like a Trot at PMQs yesterday. But the Tory position is actually entirely reasonable. As long as these banks were getting by without state aid it was up to them and their shareholders how much they paid their executives. But now that they are going to be taking public money, we as taxpayers have a legitimate interest in these decisions – a point made in the latest issue’s leader. It would be a sensible step if the government were to declare that a condition of any bank receiving public money would be

Peter Hoskin

Global turmoil, local dilemmas

As Vince Cable pointed out yesterday, events sure are fast-moving.  The latest is that over 20 councils have cash sunk in troubled Icelandic banks.  And that’s aside from organisations such as Transport for London, which – according to Boris – has £40 million at stake here.  Accordingly, the various heads of these local bodies are seeking to meet with the Treasury, to try and get assurances that their money will be safeguarded.  It’s not looking too promising for them.  In the Q&A session following his statement yesterday, Alistair Darling seemed to suggest that – in effect – councils should have known better.  Problem is, council leaders are claiming that they followed Treasury advice

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The debt we’re in

Robert Chote, the director of the IFS, does the invaluable job of totting up in today’s Telegraph just how much debt the country has racked up recently. “In September last year, public sector net debt stood at just under £515 billion or 36.8 per cent of national income. Since then, the nationalisation of Northern Rock has added a further £87 billion and the Government’s day-to-day borrowing another £30 billion. By August this year, net debt had reached £632 billion or 43.3 per cent of national income, roughly the level that Labour inherited from the Conservatives in 1997. To that total we will probably need to add another £40-50 billion for

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Ottoman Threat

Rod uses the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto to give Chesterton an airing. Grand stuff. But Mr Dreher also has this to say: Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, the 1571 grand naval battle that saved Europe from Ottoman Turkish conquest. The victory — one of the greatest ever in naval warfare — was credited by Pope Pius V to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, who’d received countless rosaries in petition for the victory of Christian forces and the protection of Christian Europe from Islamic conquest. Today, then, is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary among Catholic Christians. Europe wouldn’t be free of