Society

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Darling’s survived a lot, but could he survive another 10p tax rebellion?

The New Statesman’s Martin Bright writes a more positive account of the Pre-Budget Report than you’ll find in most other places.  But he does highlight one potential problem with the package:  “There is at least one area where Darling remains vulnerable, however, and that is over the policy to abolish the 10p tax rate, which he inherited when his predecessor left for No 10. In the PBR, Darling announced an increase of personal tax allowances by £130 a year to soften the impact on those who lost out. But the real question for the Labour high command should be whether this will be enough. If backbenchers feel renewed pressure from their constituents

Peter Hoskin

Mumbai crisis: hostage update

The BBC are reporting that the hostages in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel have now been rescued.  There are still thought to be hostages in the Oberoi Trident hotel.  We can only hope that this situation resolves itself without further loss of innocent life. UPDATE: The BBC are now reporting the situation at the Taj as “uncertain” – although a number of hostages have been freed. 

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Kingsley’s Rules

Roger Scruton reviews Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking, now happily reissued: At the start, Amis announces certain ‘general principles’ to be followed in creating drinks, all of which can be derived, by natural drinkers’ logic, from the first of them, which holds that ‘up to a point [i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like], go for quantity rather than quality’. Spirits prevail over the stuff that might soften their impact, as illustrated by the Lucky Jim, which consists of 12 to 15 parts vodka to one part vermouth and two parts cucumber juice, and there is a drink

Matthew Dancona

The Mumbai Atrocities

When I was in Mumbai in February I stayed at the Taj and ate the best fish curry I have ever tasted at Leopold’s: both targets in tonight’s shocking attacks. Even as the angry flames light up the sky of this extraordinary world city, it is clear that this was, at least in part, a strike aimed at Westerners staying in Mumbai and, with an eye to the future, an attempt to spray psychological shrapnel in the direction of those planning to go there. The city has a long and bloody history of religious cantonisation and gang warfare. There have been worse outbursts of violence in the recent past. But

Peter Hoskin

Do Labour MPs have faith in Brown’s response to the crisis?

The Standard’s keen-eyed Paul Waugh has already flagged it up, but it’s still worth highlighting Frank Field’s assessment of the PBR in his latest blog post.  Even coming from Labour’s insurrectionist-in-chief, some of the remarks are surprisingly cutting.  Take this passage, for instance: “Will the package work? I dearly hope so, but I doubt it. It is not just the size of the injection of demand that troubles me. It is also the means by which that increased demand is being delivered to consumers. At the end of yesterday’s emergency Budget I was left with a flat feeling in that the Chancellor’s presentation hardly enthused backbenchers, let alone consumers. Only

Daniel Korski

Tibet may be important – but so is the world economy

Today China cancelled the long-planned EU-China summit because French President Nicolas Sarkozy was planning to meet the Dalai Lama later in the year. Such short-sightedness serves no one. Though it appears to be shielded from the financial tumult, China will eventually be hurt by the current crisis. China needs 9-10% growth if it is to absorb 24 million new labourers a year. To keep this rate of expansion, China’s economy relies on exports, real property growth and government spending. But US and European consumers can no longer consume at the debt-supported levels they have at the past. When exports market disappear, normal economies rely on domestic consumption. But China has

Lisa Hilton

Another Johnson triumph

Nice to know that frivolity still has a function in politics, if only as admirable sang froid in the face of Armageddon. The Bad Sex awards at the In and Out club last night had a Regency air, from the torches outside to the Rowlandson physiques of the burlesque group Satanic Sluts. Accepting her award for Shire Hell in suitably spunky style, Rachel Johnson whooped up the triumph of a Tory chick over NewLab ninja and Bad Sex also-ran Alastair Campbell. David Cameron’s congratulatory text didn’t quite have the élan of Wellington rising from the Duchess of Richmond’s supper table and asking if anyone had a map, but it was

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The signs are that Brown will be undone by his PBR

The revelation that a rise in the VAT rate was being considered by the government up until the very last minute, and apparently in the PBR figures themselves, is part of a greater truth that the level of borrowing that the country has embarked on means that taxes will have to rise considerably or there will have to be radical cuts in spending. Brown hopes that delaying until after the election the planned combination of spending cuts and tax rises means that the public won’t cotton on to what is going to happen before they cast their ballots. But the signs are that this is not going to work; the

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 26 November 2008

Welcome to Coffee House’s live blog of PMQs.  After Monday’s PBR, you can expect the economy to be the main topic of debate – with Cameron and Clegg trying to highlight the weasels and tax bombshells that Brown has in store for us.  Things will kick off at 1200, so join us then. 1203: Here we go. 1204: First question from Sir Peter Tapsell: “Will the PM apologise to the public for wrecking the British economy?” 1205: Important point from Colin Burgon on money lenders targeting young people. 1206: Cameron now. “If the government doesn’t have a secret plan to raise VAT why did the Treasury Minister put his signature to it?”  Brown talks about

Peter Hoskin

Will Labour’s poll gains unravel with the PBR?

What to make of the YouGov poll in today’s Telegraph?  It was conducted in the aftermath of Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report statement – on Monday evening and throughout yesterday – and came out with the following headline figures: Conservatives — 40 percent (down 1) Labour — 36 percent (no change) Lib Dems — 14 percent (no change) The question now is whether this means the PBR has actually gone down well; whether it means that the public haven’t quite yet digested the Government’s measures; or whether the poll’s just an outlier.  The thing with Brown’s Budgets is that they tend to unravel swiftly enough, and this latest certainly looks like

Lisa Hilton

Society news

Despite its increasing resemblance to ‘Heat’ magazine, I was reassured on Tuesday morning that my beloved Guardian has not lost the courage of its convictions. Running an ill disguised-spoiler of next month’s Tatler cover (ha ha, vile toffs, we know who Daisy Lowe is, too!), Hadley Freeman pondered “that almost parodic monthly recorder of Britain’s class system’s” new best friendship with Peaches, Pixie and co. – that’s Bob Geldof’s daughters for those of you who have lives- over more traditional aristocratic totty. The Guardian seems a teeny bit obsessed with the Tatler at the moment; Charlie Brooker was banging on about its list of  “waddling bags of arseflesh” aka eligible

Matthew Lynn

General Motors must be allowed to crash

There is probably no company in the world as iconic as General Motors. As the manufacturer of Cadillacs, Buicks and Chevrolets, as well as Opels in Europe and Vauxhalls in Britain, it would be no exaggeration to describe GM as the corporation that perfected 20th-century industrial capitalism. Henry Ford created the first mass-production car 100 years ago but it was GM, under the leadership of Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, that completed the package. Easy credit, brand segmentation, mass advertising, conspicuous consumption, built-in obsolescence: the tools of the modern multinational were hammered into shape by Sloan, then deployed to crush all opposition as the first truly global manufacturer. GM became

Elliot Wilson

A new job for the IMF: as global policeman

In early November the head of the world’s leading multilateral agency made a remarkable public bid for survival. Speaking in São Paulo, addressing the world’s most powerful finance ministers, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, announced that his institution was the right one to lead us out of our financial and economic malaise. Conveniently overlooking some uncomfortable facts — that the IMF must at least share responsibility for getting parts of the world into this soup, and that it failed to predict the coming financial storm — Strauss-Kahn told his audience that the world needed ‘a stronger IMF, particularly as far as early warnings are concerned’. In

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case Like me, you may well have received a text message or a spammed email recently providing you with the full names of the adults held to be responsible in the appalling case of ‘Baby P’, the small child subjected to the most dreadful physical abuse resulting in his death. The details of these phone messages are usually accompanied by a demand for ‘justice’ for ‘Baby P’, by which is meant the deafs

Matthew Castray

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little Federal elections come around quickly in Australia. With a maximum term of three years, the average since 1975 has been about two years and nine months. So new Australian governments have an incentive to implement reforms in their first year — or do they? The one-year anniversary of the Rudd Labor government this week gives pause to consider another incentive — one probably familiar in the United Kingdom: to do very little for fear of jeopardising a second term, but maintain the mirage of reform.

Dylan Jones

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat To Sofia, then, on a ten-seater NetJet Falcon from Farnborough, accompanied by Bryan Ferry and a small coterie of GQ apparatchiks, including the best-dressed man in Shepherd’s Bush, Nick Foulkes. Some of my friends are big in Japan, some of them are big in America and some of the larger ones are big all over the world. Me, I’m big in Bulgaria. Not as big as government corruption or the drug cartels, but big enough to warrant a mention

Nancy Dell'Olio

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

I am an optimist. One of the reasons why I have always been a fan of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes is that he too was an unashamed optimist who believed in the power of money for making things better. Unemployment, recession, deflation — if we were to believe all we see and read from the courts of the media kings, we might all be depressed into thinking there is no way out. Born in Cambridge in the year that Karl Marx died, Keynes was a much more intriguing figure than his grey cadre of contemporaries. He brought flair and style to a dull establishment. A friend of

Margaret Macmillan

The done thing

The Politics of Official Apologies, by Melissa Nobles George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future. We all call a lot on history these days as the impartial tribunal which will eventually dole out the gold stars and the black marks. We also seem to think that we set past wrongs right by making apologies to groups and individuals. A descendant of that Elizabethan freebooter, Jack Hawkins, has apologised for slavery; post-war Germany apologised and made recompense for the Nazi crimes against the Jews; and the Australian and Canadian