Society

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 18 October 2008

In the banking chaos, we should recall the words of the American president Thomas Jefferson: ‘The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a grand scale.’ There was no such swindling in the ancient world because minted coin was the sole monetary instrument, and there was no machinery for creating credit. So there were no banks in our sense, and only two sources of wealth: agricultural and mineral, the former far more important, but the latter having more dramatic instant consequences. For example, in 483 bc, it would never have occurred to the Athenians to borrow the money

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Darling–not Brown–came up with the plan to save the banks

There is a great tick-tock in The Times this morning about how the bank recapitalisation plan came into being. The take-away point is that the Chancellor was much more the driving force behind it than the Prime Minister. Here are the key extracts: The Times can reveal today that the Chancellor believed that recapitalisation was the “only show in town” some time before Gordon Brown and that the Prime Minister signed up only after the intervention of his ministerial fixer and enforcer, Baroness Vadera. … Mr Darling had first started plotting his move in mid-September, hiring the legal firm Slaughter and May to carry out contingency planning. He quickly became

Dan Gilgoff

Getting closer to God

Dan Gilgoff on how Barack Obama has narrowed the ‘God gap’ Virtually no political experts saw it coming, but religion was one of the biggest factors in George W. Bush’s 2004 election victory. Bush, who had used evangelical Christian language and championed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage — a cause pushed by the Christian Right — won 78 per cent of the evangelical vote, a group comprising almost a quarter of the American electorate. Republican presidential candidates had won the evangelical vote ever since Jerry Falwell launched his Moral Majority in the late 1970s, but no presidential candidate on record had ever achieved this level of support. John Kerry,

Michael Steinberger

A good election to lose

Michael Steinberger says a hefty defeat might be the best result for the Republicans Political parties exist to fight elections, and with the presidential campaign now in its climatic weeks, Republicans are gamely battling to keep the White House. Barack Obama has opened a large, possibly insurmountable lead over John McCain, whose every gambit, not least his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, has failed amid the relentlessly dire news about the economy. But it is not just McCain who is facing possible humiliation on 4 November; the entire Republican party, weighed down by George Bush and beset with profound internal divisions, may be headed for electoral armageddon. As

The Spectator

The electoral map

States with their respective electoral college votes — 270 votes are needed to win Click here to download the map which featured in the US Election supplement. Nevada:This has been the fastest- growing state in the union since the second world war. McCain used to have a comfortable lead here but with almost half of voters saying that the economy is the most important issue, Obama has surged. McCain needs this state to come back into his column before election day. Colorado: The Rocky Mountain west is regarded as the emerging battleground of American politics. The Democrats cleverly decided to hold their convention in Denver, winning acres of positive local

Erica Grieder

Campaign Diary

Erica Grieder follows the US Presidential campaign My favourite souvenir from the campaign season is a nine-page handout on ‘The Nature & Activity of Demons’. This was provided during a sort of adult Sunday school at John Hagee’s mega-church in San Antonio, Texas. Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and Baptist pastor and candidate for the Republican nomination, was there for a guest-preaching stint, and gave a colourful explanation of why we should strive to be less like Herod and more like Jesus. It was sound advice, but perhaps not as immediate as the lesson that preceded it. Satan is engaged in guerrilla warfare: his minions systematically invade the

Reihan Salam

Not what we were expecting

Why have Barack Obama and John McCain run such drearily conventional campaigns? Hard though it is to remember those halcyon days, informed observers once believed that Obama and McCain would barnstorm the country together, flying on the same plane and taking part in Lincoln–Douglas-style debates over war and peace and the meaning of life itself. In fairness to both candidates, there has certainly been plenty of tactical innovation on both sides. Flush with money, the Obama campaign has embraced sophisticated technologies and management techniques. The McCain campaign has gone for death-defying stunts, up to and including the nomination of a largely unvetted unknown for vice president, that are far from

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 18 October 2008

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and then died. I duly performed a hard reboot (that’s the technical term for ‘switching it off and on again’) only for the same thing to happen again. And again. With hindsight, of course, I should have simply called the government pretending to be a banker and explained that I had bought something that at first

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 18 October 2008

In Competition No. 2566 you were invited to submit a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first. Many of your entries struck a grimly topical note with key lines such as ‘Greed driven swine’ and ‘Gordon Brown is mad’. Others turned their attention to the natural world, but here too the tone remained downbeat and melancholic: ‘So autumn closes in’; ‘The falling leaves’; you get the idea. I was cheered, though, by some of the quirkier openings; in particular, Celeste Francis’s intriguing ‘I’d give you a kidney’ and Martin Elster’s ‘Fido chased a doe’. The assignment was too easy for clever

The Spectator

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards | 18 October 2008

The financial crisis is affecting the nominations for the inaugural Spectator Readers’ Representative with Vince Cable receiving more support than a semi-nationalised bank. Dr Peter Roberts sums up the sentiments of many when he proposes Cable on the grounds that he is ‘the only British politician who has emerged with any credit from the recent (and continuing) debacle’. A. Warmington nominates that supposed man of the hour Gordon Brown for ‘the deft footwork and brazen chutzpah whereby he now is claiming credit for fixing the banking crisis and being the Great Helmsman guiding us through these choppy waters — whereas in reality he is saddling us all with mountainous debts

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Ashley Cole deserved to be booed for all that he personifies

An important question of etiquette. Is it ever permissible to boo, barrack or hurl abuse at an English sportsman when he is representing his country in some battle against wily and devious foreigners? This is what happened to Ashley Cole, an England defender, who was playing at Wembley for his country against the might of Kazakhstan last week. ‘Booooo!’ the crowd went when he touched the ball. ‘Booooo!’ According to everybody after the game — and I mean everybody, apart from the English public — this was disgraceful, crass, boorish and unforgiveable behaviour. The booing was condemned in every morning newspaper by the broadsheets’ boring football reporters and condemned once

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 18 October 2008

The ticking parcel I failed to spot and the oil-price prediction I got spot on Last week’s global stock market panic, the overture to this week’s astonishing round of state interventions, was in part provoked by fear of humongous losses in something called ‘credit default swaps’. These arcane inventions by Wall Street rocket-scientists are a form of derivative contract — or ‘weapon of financial mass destruction’, as Warren Buffett put it — akin to debt insurance. A ticking parcel of at least $400 billion worth of them relates to bonds issued by Lehman Brothers before it went bust. Since Lehman paper is now priced at only 8 cents on the

The Spectator

Keynesianism isn’t the answer

From their vantage point in the celestial senior common room, John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith must be observing current events, if not with pleasure, then at least with the satisfaction of those whose ideas have unexpectedly been retrieved from history’s wastepaper basket. Having watched financial markets repeat the spiral of recklessness, delusion and collateral damage that he first observed in 1929, Galbraith will no doubt have recalled his condemnation of ‘the euphoria of self-conceit’ and his view that free-market economics were never more than a rationalisation of vested interests by a greedy elite. Keynes will have been particularly pleased by Gordon Brown’s nationalisation of Royal Bank of Scotland

Richard Northedge

Socialism seizes the City

To anyone born before 1980, the idea that the state would own a large part of the economy was normal. The ‘mixed economy’ was a typically British compromise between American cut-throat capitalism and the incompetent communism beyond the Iron Curtain — or at least a compromise between the socialist leanings of the Labour Left and the free-enterprise mantra of the Tories. Such was the tug-of-war of ideologies that the British steel industry found itself nationalised in the 1940s, returned to the private sector in the 1950s, re-nationalised a decade later and re-privatised in the 1980s. Yet despite so much of the rest of the UK economy falling into public hands

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 18 October 2008

My attitude to money is simple. I want to think about it as little as possible. So I have arranged my life with this end in view. I work hard and spend less than I earn. I put aside sums for tax and VAT and do the returns promptly. I pay bills by return of post. I have never borrowed or had an overdraft, and paid off the only mortgage I ever had at the earliest possible date. I always say to the people who look after my savings: I am not greedy and don’t want a high return, just security and peace of mind. None of this did me

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 18 October 2008

The grimmest assessment of the world economic meltdown that I have seen came not from a banker or a politician or a pundit, but from Kristian, a 53-year-old Icelandic fisherman quoted in the Times. ‘The priorities went askew,’ he sighed. ‘We thought we could have jam on our bread every day of the week.’ God. Think about that. Couldn’t the pathos of it just make you weep? Not even toast, you’ll notice. Bread. Toast is a stuff of which the Icelandic fisherman has yet to dream. Had the glacial streams run sluggish with diamonds, had the cod grown golden teeth and scales of silver, ah yes, that would have been

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 18 October 2008

All old Africa hands have a story of their narrow escape from charging elephants to tell. I have one myself, but I know from experience that such stories are usually more interesting to the teller than to the told. They are not quite as bad as big game hunting stories, however: they are the real conversation killers. I knew an African re-tread (as expatriates who cannot forget their time in Africa are sometimes called) who used to bore dinner parties with his claim to have shot 50 zebra in an afternoon. ‘What did you use?’ asked an incredulous guest (I had heard the story several times before). ‘A machine gun?’

Kate Chisholm

Silence in the air

News announced last Friday that the recent series of economic earthquakes has forced Channel 4 to withdraw from its plans to launch a digital radio network has sent shockwaves through the radio community. But what does the loss of the three new stations promised by Channel 4 — one of which, 4 Radio, was designed as a direct rival to the BBC’s Radio Four — mean for us as listeners? Would we ever have found the time to listen to them? Will we notice that they’re not there? According to the latest figures, 7.7 million of us have so far been lured into buying a far-more-expensive digital (DAB) radio receiver,

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Kids These Days… | 17 October 2008

Turbulent times in the Dreher household: Ramesh Ponnuru, seeing parents in his neighborhood encouraging their kids to be Obamatons, rightly says he doesn’t get people who delight in politicizing their children. Completely agree. For some reason, though, my two boys — ages nine and four — are crazy for Barack Obama, and have been for a long time. They’re put out with their mom and dad for not being for Obama. It has nothing to do with policy, of course; they just think he’s the coolest thing. It’s actually kind of cute, and as young as they are, I’d rather encourage them to be excited about the political process rather