Society

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sports for people who don’t like sport

At Culture11, Michael Brendan Dougherty has a fine piece on how the people who run sports are more interested in catering to people who don’t like sport than for those who, like, actually do. He’s writing about the modern baseball experience but everything he says also, of course, applies to cricket. Especially Twenty20 cricket: Like so many modern stadiums, the Nationals Ballpark experience doesn’t trust the show it is ostensibly putting on: a baseball game. It partakes in the sensibility the brain-zapped sensibility that’s come to dominate live sports. That’s perfect for the jerks who don’t care for the sport. For the rest of us, though, it’s disheartening. The operating

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Taxpayers’ Fantasy Football

Small guest-posting at The Plank on taxpayers’ football. We have Newcastle United and Northern Rock, the Americans get AIG and Manchester United. Sums up the “Special Relationship”, you might say… [Link corrected. Thanks NDM]

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Newsnight’s focus group offers encouragement to Clegg and a warning to the Tories on tax

Frank Luntz is the Marmite of polling: you either love him or hate him. His focus group on Newsnight tonight comparing the three party leaders made—as expected—for interesting viewing. Although I’d have preferred to see the potential Labour leadership candidates tested. I imagine that the Lib Dems will be crowing for weeks about its finding that people warmed far more to Clegg than the other two party leaders. The first thing that struck me was how Tony Blair still so dominates British politics. The panellists saw both Brown and Cameron through the prism of Blair. When the group were offered the chance to bring Blair back, they went for it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Labour form book: Jon Cruddas

Coffee House is running a series of posts on the contenders to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour party leader.  The latest is below.  To read our profile of David Miliband, click here. Jon Cruddas, 46 Pros Clean hands: Cruddas has served in neither the Brown nor the Blair cabinets so it would be harder for the Tories to pin Labour’s failures on him, and he is not compromised by association with the failed Brown premiership. Also, Cruddas hasn’t been a participant in the Blairitie-Brownite wars so he gives Labour a chance to break out of that destructive cycle. Anti-politics politics: Cruddas doesn’t look or sound like a typical Westminster politician.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown’s dangerous interventionism

Yesterday, Downing Street was keen to take the credit for the Lloyd’s HBOS deal. But Brown is playing a dangerous game. First of all, there is the issue highlighted by Alphaville of whether there has been tinkering with the deal to make sure that Edinburgh remains a major UK financial centre. It also appears that someone has leaned on Lloyds not to make the maximum efficiency savings. Then, there is the question of what Brown is doing apparently telling Lloyds to lend in the way that HBOS did. The FT’s Westminster blog reports Brown as saying, “We’ve also insisted on assurances from the new company [Lloyds/HBOS] about their mortgage lending

Henry Rymill

Introducing the new Spectator Wine Club

The new, online incarnation of the Spectator Wine Club has just been launched – you can access it by clicking here, or by using the tab at the top of this page.  We’ve partnered with the very best merchants to bring you some of their finest wines at prices to suit your palette.  And there are also feature articles, tasting notes, insider tips from wine-sellers, and even a discussion board.  To find out more, just read my full introduction here.  Cheers!

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown’s golden touch

Gordon Brown ignored the Bank of England’s advice and sold off half this country’s gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 at an average price of $275 an ounce. Last night, gold reached $870 an ounce in after-hours trading in New York.

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hutton and Purnell: We support Gordon because it is a requirement of our job to do so

There’s some pretty tough competition at the moment for the award for the weakest statement of support for the Prime Minister by a Cabinet Minister. But John Hutton is probably the front-runner for his comments on the Andrew Marr on Sunday. Marr asked Hutton whether he was on the side of the rebels or Gordon Brown. Here’s how Hutton replied: JOHN HUTTON: Well I’m, I’m on the side of the government and the Prime Minister. I’m in the Cabinet. It’s my job to support… ANDREW MARR: So, so… So you would tell those people… JOHN HUTTON: … the work that the Prime Minister is doing and the work that the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Until the Tories move on tax, they’ll be vulnerable to being outflanked

The most interesting conversation in Westminster right now is what a new Labour leader could do to restore the party’s fortunes. One idea that could be particularly politically potent is a bold move on tax. Since Labour came to power, the number of people paying the top rate of tax has pretty much doubled. Brown has kept Labour’s 1997 manifesto promise not to raise the top rate of income tax but he has done so at the cost of making more and more people pay tax at the top rate; a typical Brown dodge. This fiscal drag has had the same effect as an actual tax rise and resulted in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The mood in cabinet

Anne McElvoy has some telling details from inside yesterday’s meeting of the cabinet in her Evening Standard column this morning: “It can’t go on for much longer,” says one Cabinet member who described yesterday’s meeting as “excruciating: an embarrassment”. “It’s not just the country that’s not listening to Gordon any longer: the Cabinet isn’t listening to him. Something is going to give. There were people staring at their hands, some scribbling on their papers, someone else on their BlackBerry.” Anything rather than look their own leader in the eye. Mr Brown told his Cabinet that issues about the direction of the party should not be raised until after the present

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The rebels musn’t let this get personal

One of the things that the rebels have got right so far is not turning this into a personal campaign against Gordon Brown. The Labour party is reluctant to dump its leader, they really don’t do assassination, and so the clever thing to do is to coax rather than bully them into it. By this standard, George Howarth’s remarks comparing Brown to Neville Chamberlain are a mistake. On Newsnight, Howarth declared: “He’s so unpopular that no one can remember a time since Neville Chamberlain, after Hitler invaded Norway, that anyone was so unpopular. “And we can’t allow that situation to continue.” This is the kind of remark that might create

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 17 September 2008

My one regret at having retired from the National Health Service is that I no longer receive official circulars. I used for a time to derive a small secondary income from publishing them; and such was their idiocy that very little commentary on my part was required. They spoke for themselves; it was money for old rope. I am glad to say, however, that old friends keep me in touch with Gogolio-Kafkaesque-Orwellian developments in Europe’s biggest employer (now that the Gulag is no more). One of them, a senior doctor, recently passed on to me an email written about him by someone rejoicing in the title of Lead Nurse Manager,

Martin Jacomb

From Northern Rock to Lehman: who should share the blame?

Martin Jacomb assesses the extent of the damage to the banking system so far — and the effectiveness of responses by central banks, regulators and lawmakers Will it be short and sharp, or drawn out and deep, with lasting damage? A recession is upon us, but no one knows its path. Its course and its force are, like Hurricane Gustav’s, unpredictable. It is already more than a year since it all started. Banks everywhere have made enormous losses; some, even important ones such as Lehman Brothers in New York, have collapsed, and more may do so. They are being blamed for the catastrophe. But it is not as simple as

James Delingpole James Delingpole

‘You grow up with footballs. We grow up with kukris’

It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans. A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 ex-Gurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their un-mistakable crimson-ribboned bronze

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Reasons to be cheerful amid financial apocalypse

On Monday afternoon I rang a Wall Street friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. ‘What’s the mood?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think this is the turning point?’ ‘Hold on a moment,’ he replied. ‘Let me just climb back in off the window ledge.’ There was a pause, then a nervous chuckle. For the half-second of that pause, I actually wondered whether he was serious. And that was just Monday: since then, things have got really frightening. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says the current financial crisis is ‘a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event’, but he’s wrong. There has never been a situation like this:

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The great debt deceit: how Gordon Brown cooked the nation’s books

  A few months before the general election which brought New Labour to power, Geoffrey Robinson had David Davis to dinner in his flat overlooking Hyde Park. The flat had been the scene of much recent political activity, used as a den by Gordon Brown who would invite his allies around and plot his personal strategy, pausing only to watch the football and eat pizzas. But that night the Labour guests had cleared off, and the then Tory Europe Minister was treated to the disorientating experience of being served supper by the butler of a Labour MP. As the conversation turned to the inevitable Labour victory, Mr Robinson said how

Alan Powers

Give a dog a bad name

Alan Powers on Parliament Square Does nobody love Parliament Square? Days before the Mayoral election, Tristram Hunt called it a ‘terrible place: inaccessible, ugly, polluted and grotty’ in the Guardian. When the Mayor of London cancelled the scheme for pedestrianising at least two of the roads around the square within days of his election, there was dismay that the still-unpublished plans for its improvement should be abandoned. If the proceedings within the Palace of Westminster are sometimes absurd, this parallel drama on the street outside was equal in sound and fury. Could commentators distinguish between the square itself and the traffic that circulates around it? Hunt failed to look beyond

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hoots Mon, there’s a Moose Loose… No, not that Moose

Today’s episode of the Sarah Palin chronicles comes via Matt Yglesias who asks: I continue to be baffled as to how moose hunting, which surely almost nobody in the United States does given what a small portion of the country is within moose range, has been construed as an all-American hobby. I assume Matt is being arch here, since really this is not something that should baffle him or anyone else. Hint: the moose is not the heart of the matter. It’s the hunting that counts and, of course, the unapologetic, natural way Palin talks about hunting and outdoor life. It’s not a ploy or a fatuous attempt to curry

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown: The Labour party and the government should put on a show of unity

Gordon Brown’s reply to David Cairns’s resignation letter ends as follows: I will always respect the views of others both in the party and the government but believe that both function best when we show unity. Gordon Brown This strikes me as a revealing choice of words. Brown doesn’t say the party and the government work best when they are united but when they show unity, a subtle but important difference. Maybe I’ve been staring at this for too long but it does seem that Brown is accepting that the party and the government are divided about his leadership but arguing that it is best not to talk about it