Society

Saturday

18 Oct 2008

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

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

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

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

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

17 Oct 2008

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

Alex Massie

An Alaska-Stockholm Summit?

It’s too late now, of course, but there’s at least one head of state Sarah Palin has something in common with. King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden who has just come out in favour of shooting wolves. Bonus: Sweden’s moose-hunting season opened last week, and moose – or elk – hunting is increasingly popular amongst women: Some 300,000 moose, or elk as they’re known in Europe, roam Sweden’s woods during the summer months, and about a third of those are killed off each autumn during the hunt. “Society has changed over the years. Now people can pursue their interests, regardless of gender and there’s nothing stopping them…” Anja Kjellsson, a

James Forsyth

High noon on Wednesday is Cameron’s next chance to change the narrative

PMQs is frequently derided as something that is only of interest to the Westminster Village. That may be true but it helps frame the way that political reporters and commentators see the battle between the parties and plays a crucial role in determining the mood of the parliamentary parties. This week’s clash will be one of the most important in a while. The consensus in Westminster is that Cameron’s speech today was too small for the moment—though, it is worth noting that the Standard’s write up is positive and the odd conversation about it that I’ve overheard on the train to the north that I’m on has been fairly warm

The Spectator

The week that was | 17 October 2008

Fraser Nelson reveals Gordon Brown’s new plan to bring down national debt, and begins the illustrated guide to the Brown bust. James Forsyth asks whether there’ll be a manifesto commitment to privatise the banks, and reports on the demise of 42-day detention. Daniel Korski says the appointment of Sir General David Richards as head of the British Army is a good thing. Stephen Pollard laments the awful West End. Melanie Phillips analyzes the culture war for the White House. Clive Davis imagines Gordon Brown as Sonny Liston. Trading Floor writes on environmental crime. And Americano asks whether John McCain’s performance in the latest Presidential debate was too little, too late.

James Forsyth

Which Obama will we get if he is elected?

No conservative columnist has better understood Obama than David Brooks and his column today on Obama sums up both Obama’s strengths and his weaknesses quite brilliantly. Here’s how he concludes: “He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan. This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a

James Forsyth

Buffett says buy

The Sage of Omaha takes to the New York Times to explain why he is moving his personal investments from US government bonds to shares, a move that is the opposite of what most people are up to: “The financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary. So … I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but

James Forsyth

What ‘big’ thing should Cameron do?

Steve Richards’ column this morning is thought-provoking. Here’s the central plank of his argument: “In some ways there are parallels for Cameron in the dilemmas Neil Kinnock faced during the miners’ strike under Margaret Thatcher in the mid 1980s. Kinnock was torn as to what to do. He instinctively sympathised with the miners, but disapproved of the leadership and strategy of Arthur Scargill. He was scathing about what he saw as Thatcher’s ruthless brutality and yet appreciated some of the arguments she was deploying. He wanted to say more, but knew that his party was largely in favour of the strike and felt constrained. Later he was to reflect that

James Forsyth

The cease-fire is over

The Tories returned to the fray on the economy with David Cameron’s speech in the City this morning. There is much to criticise Gordon Brown for in terms of his economic management but Brown has done a brilliant job in the last couple of weeks in setting out a narrative that because he can’t be blamed for everything that has gone wrong with the financial system, he shouldn’t be blamed for anything. One respect in which Brown is Churchillian is in his view that history will be kind to you if you write it. The Tories need to puncture this bubble with a set of clear and lucid arguments that