Society

Monday

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

Peter Hoskin

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 20 October – 26 October

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – provided your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron chooses his battleground

On The Today Programme this morning, David Cameron came out firmly against any extra public spending financed by more borrowing. For the first time in this financial turmoil, there is now clear blue water between the two main parties. Cameron argued that such a move would only prevent the Bank of England from reducing interest rates—which he seems to regard as the most important step that can be taken at the moment—and lead people to believe that taxes will rise in time. Labour, I suspect, will not be displeased by Cameron’s opposition; they will see this as an opportunity to fight another Labour investment versus Tory cuts campaign. The challenge

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obamas Money Mountain

Blimey: Obama’s September fundraising explains why he’s been able to outspend John McCain so widely: He raised over $150 million in September alone, adding 632,000 new donors. At some point it becomes difficult to actually spend all this cash. Hence reports of Obama advertising on country music stations in Miami or on video games. Anything to, you know, get rid of all this cash… Notable too that the Obama campaign is expanding its list of target states once more, this time buying time in West Virginia.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Status: Enraged but Unsurprised

OK, this is from the Sunday Times so the usual weekend caveats apply. But a) this story does seem to be confirmed by official sources and b) it turns out it isn’t actually April 1st: Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society. A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Has the financial crisis catalysed the globalization process?

Thomas Friedman argues in his New York Times column today that the end result of this financial crisis will be more globalization not less. “The real and sustained bailout from the crisis will happen when the strong companies buy the weak ones — on a global basis. It’s starting. Last week, Credit Suisse declined a Swiss government bailout and instead raised fresh capital from Qatar, the Olayan family of Saudi Arabia and Israel’s Koor Industries. Japan’s Mitsubishi bank bought a stake in Morgan Stanley, possibly rescuing it from bankruptcy and preventing an even steeper decline in the Dow. And Spain’s Banco Santander, which was spared from the worst of this

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Powell backs Obama

Colin Powell’s decision to endorse Barack Obama is a blow on a personal and a political level to John McCain. Despite being on opposite side over the best way forward in Iraq, the two men remained close. When McCain’s primary campaign was in deep trouble, Powell donated to it. Cynics will accuse Powell of trying to cleanse his reputation of the stain of his UN presentation on Saddam’s WMD. But to my mind, it is typical of Powell’s mo of moving cautiously and ending up in the establishment consensus position. So, he fully backed the invasion of Iraq once war was perceived to be inevitable and now endorses Obama once

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Office of Budget Responsibility could be a very useful political shield for the Tories

As Pete notes, Darling has committed the government to a Keynesian stimulus package. This is going to be funded by yet more borrowing, worsening the government’s already bad debt problems. If the Tories win the next election, this spending spree is going to leave them facing some tough questions about cutting public spending. This is where the Office of Budget Responsibility, largely derided as a gimmick when it was announced just before conference, comes in. If the OBR demands spending cuts to reduce government debt, it will give the Tories cover for taking some of the tough decisions that are going to be needed to reduce what by 2010 is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The real economy will soon be hit by the crisis

The Sunday Times reports that by 2010 2 million households will be in negative equity based on current trends. This is a further reminder of how the politics of the crisis are going to change once the real economy starts to be hit by it. As Matt puts it in his Sunday Telegraph column, “it is much more likely time will be Gordon’s enemy. The disclosure that the state-owned Northern Rock is now twice as likely to repossess homes as other banks is deeply symbolic. In the Thatcher era, the state liberated voters by selling them their council houses. Now the state has turned into repo man. And as the

Saturday

Alex James

Slow Life | 18 October 2008

I was in a meeting a year or so ago about a charity record for Darfur. Mick was on board. Bono was confirmed. It was all looking good — good for Darfur, as the benevolent gods of rock assembled to come to the rescue. Amy Winehouse’s name was mentioned. ‘Isn’t she a bit tricky?’ said someone. Then an executive I’d only ever met after midnight, someone I’d always privately believed to be a simpleton, said something I’ll always remember. ‘People say she’s difficult. That means she is brilliant. It always does. You can’t be difficult and not be brilliant in this business. No one will tolerate it.’ I recalled those

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 18 October 2008

I owe English Heritage an apology. In last week’s column I was scornful of the content of the short historical documentary they show every half hour on a screen suspended above the ruins of Lullingstone Roman Villa. Specifically, I took issue with the idea expressed in the film’s narrative that Romans — or Romanised Britons — were social climbers obsessed with material gain, upward mobility and dinner parties. My objection was based not on historical knowledge to the contrary, but on a suspicion, sometimes amounting to wild paranoia, that our communist rulers are pointedly insinuating their miserable secular morality, their vulgar materialism and their anti-English sentiment even into the public

Taki

High Life | 18 October 2008

New York Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is a graceful essayist and good Catholic lady who happens to be a political conservative. I haven’t seen her in years but sometimes we exchange emails. She has written a book about how badly Americans need Patriotic Grace, the title of her opus, and I bought it just as the news of a Catholic archbishop being found strangled on the Brighton Beach boardwalk came in. The killers took his wallet, his cellphone and his shoes. Peggy thinks that Washington is a city run by two rival gangs who have a great deal in common with each other, ‘including an

Ursula Buchan

Gardens

We can all think of discoveries, which made little impact at their first introduction, but which changed the ways people worked or lived for ever, nevertheless. Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ of 1840 must be the most strikingly impressive example of this. But I think I may have spotted one in the gardening sphere as well, with the recent harnessing of a scientific discovery of 1885. That discovery concerned the role of mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. When, some five years ago, I first sprinkled some rootgrow (yes, I know, proper names put in the lower case is annoying and unhelpful but it’s not my fault) in a hole in the

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 18 October 2008

Was that the chairman of Coutts I saw emptying his pockets of wads of twenties round the Ascot betting ring on Saturday? Was that the CEO of HBOS in front of me in the Tote queue investing exclusively on 100–1 shots? Illusions, of course. It must have been the unaccustomed glare of sunshine which greeted us punters on Willmot Dixon Group Day. But in a world in which only sock and mattress salesmen can be turning a profit it scarcely seemed like gambling any more to be going to the races. Who could say that a 7–2 shot like Emma Lavelle’s much-touted Champion Hurdle hopeful Crack Away Jack at Chepstow

The Spectator

Letters | 18 October 2008

Our story Sir: Your political editor writes (‘Peter v. George is the key battle’, 11 October) that Peter Mandelson’s conversation on Corfu where he ‘dripped pure poison’ about Gordon Brown was leaked to the press within hours and only later became front-page news. In fact only one paper broke the story initially, the Sunday Times. This is an interesting example of what is known in the trade as the Watergate defence. Everyone ‘knew’ American presidents authorised bugging so Woodward and Bernstein’s stories were no stories at all. There may be a difference in the scale of the revelations but the same principle applies. A scoop is a scoop. Martin Ivens

Philip Hensher

Diary – 18 October 2008

Louise Doughty, one of the judges of this year’s Man Booker Prize and a fine novelist herself, said it best. Novelists, she remarked, are generally shy-ish, observing sorts of people; pushing them on stage, or under a spotlight, is a bit like asking a badger to tap-dance. My tap-dancing badger moment began ten weeks ago, when at a computer in an internet café in a remote Swiss valley I discovered that my novel The Northern Clemency had been longlisted for the Booker. The badger went into double time when it got on the shortlist, and now I’m writing on the afternoon of the dinner itself. (I feel quite safe sucking

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 October 2008

Nearly 20 years ago, after the Tiananmen Square massacres, The Spectator campaigned for all Hong Kong people to be given British passports. Part of our argument was that, if they all had the passports, very few of them would want to come here: they would have the confidence to stay. That, in essence, is the same reasoning that the governments of the Western world are using when they prop up the banks. Banks only lend because they can get their money back, yet if they all try to get their money back, they cannot lend. When they are all terrified, therefore, some external agency has to remove the fear. That

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 18 October 2008

I have been reading with interest the articles in the press about the Afghan family that is supposedly living in a £1.2 million council house. You see, the house in question is just round the corner from mine and if it really is worth £1.2 million that means Acton has been unaffected by the credit crunch. On the contrary, if the papers are to be believed, property prices in Acton have actually increased in the past 12 months. As someone who bought an almost identical property in the area last year, that came as an enormous relief. When the story broke, I called Christian Harper, the Oliver Finn estate agent

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 October 2008

I had not realised that T.S. Eliot was a Sherlock Holmes fan until I thought to look up the word grimpen, which occurs in ‘East Coker’, in the Four Quartets: ‘On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.’ We take grimpen to mean ‘a bog’. The OED undogmatically gives the meaning as ‘marshy area’, and the etymology as ‘uncertain’. This is no surprise since the word, it appears, was made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Watson is on Dartmoor with Stapleton the naturalist. ‘“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said he. “A false step yonder means death to man or

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 18 October 2008

Your problems solved Q. When my 16-year-old son has friends round I fill the fridge with beer for them. The other night, for example, ten boys came over. I know for a fact that only five of them really drink, yet after they had gone I found all 25 bottles had been opened and about ten left with just a couple of sips taken out of them. I think this is because the boys all want to pretend they drink but keep mislaying their bottles and opening another one. I had to throw all ten bottles away. In the credit crunch I would like to crack down on this waste