Society

Wednesday

Patrick Macaskie

To muzzle the short-seller is to muzzle free speech

The market needs speculators who are willing to challenge the big battalions, says Patrick Macaskie. Don’t believe the hype: short-sellers were not the villains of this financial crisis People everywhere have been grappling with what has befallen them. Like the closing stages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are waking from a reverie and human folly at its most extreme is being revealed. It is harder to see the happy ending but some things will be for the better. When I think of my children I will be glad to see sensible house prices and society getting a bit more serious and self-critical. But the adjustment will come at a

Bryan Forbes

The market crashes, but the gravy train rolls on

It is difficult to think of anything more depressing than the recent photographs of a smirking Lord Mandy in his ermine drag flanked by two of yesterday’s major groupies, Lord Falconer and Baroness Jay, she who gleefully masterminded the removal of the hereditary peers, but couldn’t resist a title for herself. At the very moment the PM was berating the bonus culture, his new friend, Lord Mandy, was looking forward to trousering some serious dosh from Brussels, and senior executives of our self-congratulatory, ratings-obsessed BBC were awarding themselves £318,000 extra for doing nothing discernibly advantageous for the licence payers. A gravy train still leaves every hour for the fortunate few.

Venetia Thompson

Eat, drink and play bingo. Red or white?

Bingo is a game that I have never really seen the point of — despite recent advertising campaigns attempting to market it as the new raucous ‘girls’ night out’ of choice. It was thus with trepidation that I climbed Home House’s grand staircase and entered one of their private rooms along with 30 other guests for a game of wine bingo. I was swiftly handed a glass of something light and fizzy, thankfully, and all images of fat, single, middle-aged Gala-dwelling women and their legs-11 disappeared. It was only when I reached for what from a distance looked like a macadamia nut in a round basket, but was in fact

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 22 October 2008

The Crows of Pearblossom is a rare children’s book by Aldous Huxley, written in 1944 and published posthumously. It originated as a present for his five-year-old niece Olivia de Haulleville, who often visited Huxley and his wife, Maria, at their ranch in Llano in the Mojave Desert (Olivia later moved to the Greek island of Hydra and became Mrs Yorgo Cassapidis). It was while living on the ranch that Huxley began experimenting seriously with psychotropic drugs such as mescaline and LSD. The story deals with two crows, the female of which wears an apron. Mrs Crow finds that her eggs are being eaten by a Rattlesnake, and after suffering 297

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Annals of Polling, American Division

And then they were eight. Tracking polls that is. Which one should you follow? Or, rather, which should you discount? Happily, Nate Silver is here to explain it all. What I find odd about American polls, mind you, is their tiny sample size. National Journal’s tracking poll only follows a few hundred people for instance and even national opinion polls often only consult around 1,000 people. That’s roughly the same kind of sample size used by British pollsters. But of course there are 60 million people in Britain and 300 million in the United States. Our polls should, therefore, be more accurate. Right? And in America how difficult would it

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Pollster Wars

Ooops. I meant to mention Mike Crowley’s entertaining New Republic piece on the polling wars. It’s a fun, breezy read that’s well worth your time: Shock Poll – blared a Drudge Report headline on December 26, 2007, just one week before the Iowa caucus. At a time when most pollsters were showing a dead heat in Iowa, this new survey found Hillary Clinton with a 15-point lead over Barack Obama. But the only shock, as it turned out, was that someone could have gotten it so wrong: Obama would beat Clinton in Iowa by eight points. The offender was the New Hampshire-based American Research Group. ARG is a black sheep

Alex Massie Alex Massie

In Praise of the Amateur?

Mark Steyn says his old friend and former boss Boris Johnson is a “total squish” on ideological matters (ie, he’s a Tory) and adds this chummy postscript: If Boris can be Mayor of London, Sarah Palin is certainly qualified to be President of the United States, if not Supreme Galactic Commander of the Cosmos. There’s something to this, though of course if Boris buggers up London then that’s tough news for Londoners but not too much of a concern for the rest of the world. The Presidency of the United States is in a rather different category.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

FCO vs Hacks

It seems like Sir Nigel Sheinwald’s assessment of Barack Obama was leaked to the Telegraph months ago. But it was in fact published earlier this month. I’d meant to write about it at the time, but the moment passed and that seemed to be that. Still, Slate has republished the memo, permitting one to observe blogospheric rules of timeliness and revisit the affair. Affair, of course, is putting it too strongly. Our Man in Washington’s report is decidedly cautious. There is not a scrap of controversy in it. On the contrary, it is dry, sober, even-handed and judicious. It could, if it were less dull, be a Financial Times profile.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tito the Builder?

Apparently he’s the new go-to guy in this daft Presidential election. Of course, it shows how out of touch I am that when I saw Tito was the headline act I found myself wondering quite how Yugoslav politics had become an issue. Then I realised that it was the lovely Sarah Palin who’d been talking about Tito, so obviously it had to be something else entirely. UPDATE, October 27th. Ana Marie Cox braves the nonsense: Obviously, the big draw in Leesburg this morning was Tito the Builder, aka Tito Munoz, aka defended of Joe the Plumber. If you had ever wanted to hear a crowd of Northern Virigian White People

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Academia

I’m indebted to Nathan Origer for drawing my attention to a fascinating event at the University of Maryland: Subject : Provost’s Conversation: “Re-presenting Disability: Million Dollar Baby, Tropic Thunder and Anti-National Sexual Positions” When : Monday, October 06, 2008 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM Where : Stamp Student Union : Charles Carroll Room Event Type(s) : Lecture A Conversation with Robert McRuer, Professor of English, George Washington University This talk examines a few of the films that have sustained intense criticism from disability activists and theorists over the past few years. Reading these films within a queer theoretical perspective and through the cultural logic of neoliberalism, McRuer affirms and extends

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories need an enforcer who can protect the shadow cabinet from themselves

The evidence all seems to strongly suggest that George Osborne did nothing illegal in Corfu. But that does not mean he should escape without criticism. What he did was clearly foolhardy in the extreme. If Osborne has just googled Deripaska he would have seen enough material to make him hesitate about even being in his vicinity, let alone meeting with him on his yacht. These unforced Tory errors need to stop. What the party need is someone in Central Office powerful enough to demand to be told of anything even potentially controversial that a shadow cabinet member is planning to do and if necessary order them not to do it.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne on Deripaska

George Osborne’s performance at a press conference just now was typically confident. He even ended with a flourish: ‘the journalists say follow the money, but in this case there is no money to follow.’ Osborne stuck to a denial of the specific charge that he had solicited a donation, repeatedly stressing that he ‘neither asked for, nor received, money.’ The frustrated press pack kept asking whether Osborne has discussed a donation with the oligarch at all, but the Shadow Chancellow repeatedly batted that away, which will not play well in the media. Osborne said that he went on board Mr. Deripaska’s yacht twice, once with Mandelson and once with Feldman. But perhaps the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Corfued

The Battle of Corfu, the first encounter in the Mandelson-Osborne war, just escalated with Nathaniel Rothschild’s allegation in The Times that “George Osborne, who also accepted my hospitality, found the opportunity of meeting with Mr Deripaska so good that he invited the Conservatives’ fundraiser Andrew Feldman, who was staying nearby, to accompany him on to Mr Deripaska’s boat to solicit a donation. Since Mr Deripaska is not a British citizen, it was suggested by Mr Feldman, in a subsequent conversation at which Mr Deripaska was not present, that the donation was “channelled” through one of Mr Deripaska’s British companies.” The Tories emphatically deny this. This whole story started with the

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Behind the Security Theatre Curtain

Airport security? A complete joke. This has been apparent for some time, of course, but all the “security theatre” nonsense at least makes it seem as though something is being done. And that is the important thing, isn’t it? The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has a good piece demonstrating just how pointless the mania for “security” is. No chance of a return to sanity of course. That would mean the terrorists are winning. Anyway, Goldberg successfully passes through the security checkpoints using a fake boarding pass: We were in the clear. But what did we prove? “We proved that the ID triangle is hopeless,” Schneier said. The ID triangle: before a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Can’t buy a car? Call the government!

Yes, I would vote for Barack Obama rather than John McCain. But that doesn’t mean that one expects too much from an Obama administration. Consider this startling passage from a speech the candidate gave in Toledo last week: I also believe that Treasury should not limit itself to purchasing mortgage-backed securities – it should help unfreeze markets for individual mortgages, student loans, car loans, and credit card loans. Car loans? Really? As Nick Gillespie says: Clinton was a free trader and interested in policy innovation. By contrast, Obama never misses a chance to mention China in a disparaging way and all of his plans seem to revolve around throwing money at

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain deserves better tham Ambassador Winfrey

Gideon Rachman floats, on his blog, the rumour that Obama might make Oprah Winfrey Ambassador to London, and no it is not April Fool’s Day. I doubt very much this will happen, there are other ambassadorships I’d expect she’d prefer, but it does illustrate a long-standing weakness in the way the United States appoints its ambassadors. The plum jobs nearly always go to big campaign donors. This is a practise the United States cannot afford now that it is involved in a struggle for international support for its actions in a 24.7 media environment. It needs the best people for the job that it has regardless of whether they gave

Peter Hoskin

One to watch | 20 October 2008

A friend of Coffee House has flagged up the episode of the Tonight programme screening on ITV at 8pm this evening.  Here’s the premise of it, taken from the show’s website: “New Labour has gone back on its promise to hold a referendum on a new European constitution – despite most people wanting one. Tonight steps in, organising a special poll in Luton. Do its voters want to be in or out of Europe?” I’m in the dark over what the result of that “special poll” is.  But – whatever the outcome – the very fact that programmes like this are getting commissioned hints at the depth of public feeling over the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A distorted cause

I’d recommend to everyone today’s editorial in the Washington Post. I’ve posted a couple of key extracts below but if you have a couple of minutes it really is worth reading the whole thing, it is a fantastic corrective to the current narrative about the causes of the crisis: “[T]he problem with the U.S. economy, more than lack of regulation, has been government’s failure to control systemic risks that government itself helped to create. We are not witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets. … We’ll never know how this newly liberated financial sector might have performed on a playing field designed by Adam