Society

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Never mind me mate, what about the other mob?

Commenting on this post Ian Leslie – aka Marbury – argues that we’re on the brink of a new era and that just as Callaghan was right to appreciate that one era had ended in 1976, so Darling and El Gordo may be correct to suppose that another has been shipwrecked now. Maybe. Look, I’m not sure this will work, and if it does work it might be partly by accident and yes I know that Brown hasn’t really earned his authority over the last ten years. This is a gamble. But taking a gamble at this stage is better than doing nothing and hoping things will return to normal,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Quote for the Day

Chris Dillow – always worth your time – casts a weary eye over a number of government policies and concludes: What this shows, I think, is that New Labour’s claim to believe in technocratic, evidence-based policy is a sham. They are not technocrats at all, but either priggish moralists or cowardly panderers to mob prejudice. Quite so. And as he says, we may need a revolution. Lord knows, however, where that might come from.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sexy Horse Noises!

Another lovely obituary from the Daily Telegraph (of course) that is, as always, written with panache: Nick Mills, who has died aged 54, was a country vet with a practice which took him across the world as an anaesthetist for wild animals, an insurance adviser to the racing industry and a “sex therapist” to thoroughbreds at stud. Among the famous racehorses he examined before they were purchased or put out to stud were Epsom Derby winners such as Galileo and Benny the Dip. When the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem showed a lack of interest in the opposite sex, Mills made several journeys to Japan (where the horse was

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Have Brown and Miliband sold out Tibet for Chinese cash?

Robert Barnett, the Tibet expert, has a commentary in The New York Times that claims that Britain has changed its position on Tibet in exchange for China giving more money to the IMF. Here’s the key part of Barnett’s argument: “Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share. Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys

Peter Hoskin

Put your questions to Grant Shapps

Grant Shapps – the Shadow Minister for Housing, and MP for Welwyn Hatfield – has kindly agreed to a Q&A session with Coffee House. Just post your questions for him in the comments section below.  And, on Friday, we’ll pick out the best ten and put them to him.  He’ll get back to us with his answers a few days later.

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why Russell Brand so upsets us

While I admire Charles Moore’s willingness to inherit the mantle of Mary Whitehouse, I don’t think he has quite put his finger on the essence of the Brand-Ross business. The large public outcry provoked by the call to Andrew Sachs can’t be channelled into a general war on smut at the BBC. I don’t think there’s a public appetite to see Ross as the personification of BBC smut, who must never be re-employed by the corporation. Though Ross was involved in the incident, it wasn’t really about him. And it isn’t quite right to see it as an acute example of a general smut problem. It was really about Russell

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris v. Brown

The free sheets in London are leading on Boris’s attack on Gordon Brown in his Telegraph column this morning. The column is full of good knock-about stuff but what has attracted the papers’ attention is this passage—the banner headline on one of them ‘Like a drunk’: “He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well. He is like a drunk who has woken to the most appalling hangover, and who reaches for the whisky bottle to help him dull the pain.” One of Boris’s gifts is that he is a politician

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What New Labour would have done yesterday

With The Sun, The Times and The Daily Mail declaring the death of New Labour, it is worth thinking about what a New Labour government PBR would have looked like. For an idea you can look at a PQ that Stephen Byers, someone who has kept and advanced the New Labour faith, asked back in April. Byers wanted to know how much it would cost to lift half a million people, a million and a million half out of income tax altogether. Interestingly, the cost of lifting a million people out of income tax  altogether for one year—by raising the personal allowance by £960—was £11.1 billion. Now, the cost of

Lisa Hilton

Every artist’s favourite conversation topic

Commerce has always deferred conversationally to art.  It’s assumed that painters and writers are fascinating talkers, but from the Mermaid to the Colony room, I think they’ve only ever had one subject: money and their lack of it, or the outrageously unfair amounts of it bestowed on (naturally) less talented peers. The legendary wit of the Algonquin was a myth fabricated to cadge martinis: Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald weren’t doing anything at the Round Table other than slagging off their agents”. One effect of the credit bore though, is to induce a positive perkiness amongst creative types. At dinner at silkmaker Felix Spicer’s  boho-baroque railway arch last week, a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The let them eat cake award

Polly Toynbee’s column in The Guardian today contains these jaw-dropping couple of sentences: “Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs. Most people will suffer not at all in this recession: on the contrary they will do well as prices fall and the real value of their earnings rises.” Can any Coffee Houser remember any serious commentator dismissing the prospect of mass unemployment so casually before? Hat Tip: Alex Massie

Peter Hoskin

Is Darling backtracking already?

One of the most dangerous elements of yesterday’s Pre-Budget Report for the Government was Alistair Darling’s claim that the economy would start recovering by the third quarter of 2009.  It’s an optimistic prognosis, and gives the Tories an open goal if things aren’t on the up by then.  But has Darling already started backtracking on it, to limit the damage?  I may be reading too much into this, but here’s what he told the Beeb earlier: “I do believe towards the end of next year things will improve.” Now – as James Kirkup usefully points out over at Three Line Whip – the Chancellor’s claim yesterday was effectively that the

Peter Hoskin

Pre-Budget Report: the morning after

Flicking through this morning’s papers, it’s even clearer how much of a flop the Pre-Budget Report was.  Sure, it has some cheerleaders (cf. Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton and Steve Richards).  But the best thing that most of the papers can bring themselves to say about it is that it’s a “gamble” – whilst a few brand it the “The Death of New Labour”.  Gushing praise, this is not. The tone of the newspaper coverage reflects how big an opportunity this is for the Tories.  Osborne performed superbly yesterday, and the public will now be more receptive to what he has to say.  Good thing, then, that’s he’s continued the attack

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Not with a bang but a whimper

Today was meant to be the start of a fiercely contested general election campaign. Last night, the mood in centre-right circles was grim—the feeling was that Brown was about to pull off another Houdini act. But instead today has ended with Labour routed. Tories are striding around Westminster tonight with renewed confidence while Labour MPs look downcast. So comprehensive has been the rout that the news that the 45p rate will raise less than a billion pound just seems like a small detail. The genuine concern in Conservative circles that this tax rise would seem like a plausible way to pay for the borrowing binge has been forgotten. The political

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Could You Go A Chicken Supper, Bobby Sands*?

Exciting fast food wars update: faithful reader MT alerts me to something I should have known myself. Not only is the British embassy in Tehran located on Bobby Sands Street, there is a Bobby Sands burger joint in hip and happening Tehran too. Andrew McKie has also considered the ideological implications – nay, temptations – of the chip shop wars. As he suggests: “Fish supper, chicken supper. A theological and geopolitical minefield. This calls for a book, really.” Quite so. *Explanatory note: During Bobby Sands’ hunger strike fans at Glasgow Rangers and Heart of Midlothian, among, I think, other clubs, would sing, to the tune of “She’s Coming Round the

Matthew Dancona

A thin offering

So what’s left? Bits have been falling off New Labour like body-parts off a leper. Prudence is long gone. Today, as I blogged earlier, we lost the all-important principle that wealth creation is the basis of enhanced social justice. Which leaves the famous statement of ideological eclecticism that defined Tony Blair’s premiership if not his record: What Counts is What Works. And I cannot see how today’s package will work. This was an overwhelmingly political PBR, as one would expect of Gordon Brown: its ideological centrepiece was the fiscal stigmatisation of the well-off and the overt declaration by Alistair Darling that, since these voters had supposedly “done best out of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour fails to get bang for its borrowed buck 

The Tories must have been tempted to roar across the Chamber, that all you got Darling? There was little in the speech that we did not know was coming and the overall effect was underwhelming. Indeed, the only numbers that grabbed one’s attention were the debt figures. Also Darling by announcing that the economy will be growing again by the third-quarter of next year has created a yard-stick against which this PBR can be measured. The opposition will be justified in saying that it has failed by the government’s own criteria if Britain is not out of recession this time next year. To further improve the Tory mood, George Osborne

Peter Hoskin

Will Darling’s gamble pay off?

A good post by Nick Robinson, outlining the gambles that underpin Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report: “What’s more the chancellor’s bet depends on other risky gambles. First, that the British economy will recover as early as the second half of next year. Second, that the government can deliver a major clampdown on spending and huge efficiency savings. Thirdly, that the electorate will support a significant rise in taxes targeted at the wealthy but which will hit those on middle incomes too.” For me, it’s the first of these that represents the biggest – and riskiest – gamble.  The Treasury’s tax receipt and net borrowing figures always tend to be optimisitic.  The

Peter Hoskin

Darling leaves a lot of room for the Tories

Now that’s what I call a damp squib.  There was very little in today’s PBR that wasn’t trailed over the weekend, and most of the new things were – of course – tax rises that Number 10 was hardly ever going to trumpet.  In fact, for all of the pre-report debate over unfunded tax cuts, Brown and Darling have delivered a Budget which represents the worst of all possible worlds – net tax hikes coupled with massive borrowing.  The announced tax increases of around £40 billion were more than double the stimulus package of around £20 billion.  Whilst national debt could well be tipped over £1 trillion. Of course, it should normally be little

Peter Hoskin

Pre-Budget Report live blog

Welcome to Coffee House’s live blog of Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report speech.  Things will kick off at 15:30 and end at around 16:30.  We’ll be following it up with plenty of analysis.  Stay tuned. 15: 35 Brown is grinning away as the Tories barrack Darling for saying that the Americans admit this all started in America, a distortion of the quote–JGF 15: 40 Darling admits that ‘regulation needs to be made more effective’–JGF   15:42: The volumne level rsies as Darling, incredibly, claims that Britain is ‘well-placed’ to handle this crisis–JGF 15:43 Excellent to see Tories very noisy, shouting down Darlings more preposterous claims “living within our means,” “blame it