Society

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Is Osborne right to warn about sterling now?

So, George Osborne’s unveiled his new line of attack on the Government – warning that, in light of sterling’s recent plunge, Brown’s addiction to debt could trigger a run on the pound.  It’s a prognosis not entirely without basis, but is now the right time to make it, politically?  After all, the trends aren’t currently heading in the direction of the Shadow Chancellor’s worst-case scenario, and the devaluation of sterling could even result in a few benefits.  Gary Duncan puts it best in today’s Times: “How much does any of this really matter? There are two main dangers. First, as Mr Osborne argues, a weak pound that makes it even

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 15 November 2008

The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other claims to adversity. To me this seems, well, slightly racist. If asked to choose between a) being a black editor of the Harvard Law Review or b) spending five years of my life in a small bamboo cage being tortured by some really angry North Vietnamese, I wouldn’t think long before ticking box a). But

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 15 November 2008

In Competition No. 2570 you were invited to take any song by the Beatles or by Elvis Presley and rewrite it in the style of the poet of your choice. It’s a long way from Scotty Moore to Middle Scots but that didn’t stop Penelope Mackie, who submitted a fine rendition of ‘All Shook Up’ in the style of William Dunbar. I was also impressed by Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Yellow Submarine’ by Walt Whitman: ‘We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine./ Do I repeat myself? Very well then I repeat myself./ We all live…’ etc. etc.  Well done, too, to Ray Kelley, Michael Cregan, Gerard

Kate Chisholm

Communication breakdown

There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about the BBC’s World Service in the past week as cuts were announced in the Russian service. Isn’t it a bad time to reduce the BBC’s output in the Russian language when relations between London and Moscow are so frosty? Surely it should be broadcasting more of its impartial, informative news and current affairs to the peoples ruled by President Medvedev’s increasingly authoritarian government, not less? But the World Service has had to face up to a bit of real-economick. The service is funded not by the licence fee but by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (a hangover from the days when

Linsey Mcgoey

Doing good and doing well

Philanthrocapitalism, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green Some say there’s no such thing as pure charity. All altruistic gifts are rooted in the self-interest of the giver, whether the goal is to increase your social status or your tax portfolio. If that’s true, the only thing new about philanthrocapitalism is that people such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are being more upfront about the need to make money out of charity. And they are confident that combining business acumen with philanthropy will improve the world that made them rich in the first place. Worth an estimated $30 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had long been the largest

Eric Ellis

City Life | 15 November 2008

It was Kylie Minogue who made me think Turkey and Europe might just about be ready for each other. There was the pop poppet — well, life-size images of her — flaunting her curvaceous clunes at shoppers in the Agent Provocateur lingerie outlet at Istanbul’s Kanyon Mall. It was a shocking exhibition in a country that is 98 per cent Islamic. But the thing was, it was me who was shocked. I’d been reading press accounts of Turkey’s gathering fundamentalism: how its women had embraced the hijab, while those who were disinclined to do so were having it forcibly pulled over them by Islamist vigilantes. Once a secular standard-bearer, Turkey

Richard Northedge

Boom and bust

So many ways to say we’re in trouble Without an Inuit thesaurus I have no way of checking how many words the Eskimos really have for snow, but each day’s newspapers reveal just how large a lexicon we have for an economy going into reverse. Recession, depression, downturn, decline, disinflation, slump, slowdown, squeeze, freeze, meltdown, bust, crash, crunch, collapse, for starters. But when the economy was booming the only word we heard was, well, boom. I could add in all those euphemisms beloved by ministers such as ‘testing times’ and ‘difficult conditions’, but why are there so many terms for a shrinking economy but such little choice when it grows?

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 15 November 2008

Not long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in its power (notably longer licensing hours) to encourage drinking? After all, we agreed, drink caused infinitely more human misery, both to drinkers themselves and to their families, than cigarettes. Smoking does not produce suicides, whereas drinking does, every day. Any doctor or hospital consultant will tell you that booze kills many more people than lung cancer, and that’s not even counting road deaths caused by drunken drivers. Above all, smoking does not lead to crime, whereas over 50 per cent

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 15 November 2008

I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg of Florida. I’m wondering, these Americans, can they really only have a handful of words for ‘fat’? Forgive the predictable observation, but there are just so many different types. I can see many from the window of my hotel room, down there on the shore watching the startlingly noisy, don’t-book-a-room-next-door, annual Key West World Championship

Emily Maitlis

Chicago Notebook

In the end, it really was a fairytale. A story of hope conquering belief. The journey few believed would be completed. One man — aided by the most advanced viral campaign in history, and carried along on a mantra breathtaking in both its simplicity and its boldness: ‘Never gonna give you up never gonna let you down never gonna run around, desert you’. With that one lyric — indeed I am hard pushed to think of a single other — Rick Astley ran off with the much coveted MTV award for Best Ever Act, sending his reputation as ‘naff Eighties pop crooner’ into the stratosphere. His loyal fan base admitted

The Spectator

Cutting logic

The hint of tax cuts made by Gordon Brown this week is a piece of political audacity which could only be matched were the Conservatives suddenly to commit themselves to the common ownership of the means of production. This is a Prime Minister who for years has sought to beat down the opposition by claiming that the meanest of tax cuts would result in havoc in schools and hospitals; who suddenly, facing a budget deficit of at least £100 billion this year, has decided that, after all, there is some money in the kitty to reduce the tax burden. It is scarcely necessary to point out that any tax cuts

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 15 November 2008

Anyone who doubts that, at least from the cultural point of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health Service (and organisational changes are always impending in the NHS). There he will be convinced that every doctor will soon have a political commissar working alongside him to remind him of his wider responsibilities to government and party. Doctors in Britain are now roughly in the position of Tsarist generals, scientists and ‘specialists’ in the first phase of the Russian Revolution: necessary but distrusted, hated and feared, and to be eliminated altogether

Elliot Wilson

Britain cannot afford a failed Pakistan

Pakistan is a failing state, and barring a mammoth bail-out few can now afford, it will become the world’s first bankrupt nuclear power. Bowed down by our own financial crisis and an economy teetering on the edge of recession, should we care? In sovereign terms the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which last year celebrated its 60th birthday, is into its adolescent years, now something of a cross between a prodigal son and the family’s black sheep. A major exporter of fertiliser, potash and terrorists, it is also the world’s only Muslim nuclear power. The country’s ruling authorities, supported and undermined in equal measures by a raft of millionaire military officers,

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Probable Hiatus

Another mini-break: I’m heading north to visit my sister. I’ve said it before, but it deserves saying again that she’s the person to contact if you need or even just feel like commissioning a painting. As a rather eminent Fund Manager said to me the other day, “Art may well be a safer investment than anything in my portfolio.” And you can look at paintings too…

Peter Hoskin

Your questions for Francis Maude

It’s been a few days now since we asked CoffeeHousers to put forward their questions for Francis Maude.  We’ve since picked out the best five, which have now been put to the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office.  He’ll get back to us at the start of next week. Here are the questions: David Lindsay Why did you sign the Maastricht Treaty? Gawain As Coffee House has highlighted, Brown is winning the propoganda war with a stream of dodgy statistics, particularly his debt figures and dubious economics. He is getting away with blue murder (pun intended). Is there anything the opposition can do to use Parliament to expose this and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The party chairmanship just got a lot more attractive

Ever since the Parliamentary Commissioner began his inquiry into Caroline Spelman she has been in an odd political limbo land, neither sacked nor acquitted. Now, Sam Coates reports that we might not know the commissioner’s verdict until the New Year. One thing that has changed during the inquiry is the desirability of Spelman’s job. A few months ago the party chairmanship was a much diminished role, there was even talk that some shadow cabinet members wouldn’t take it as they considered the job to have become pretty much meaningless. This was an understandable point of view. George Osborne was doing the party’s political strategy, Andrew Feldman was running CCHQ and Lord Ashcroft

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Defender of (the) faith?

Prince Charles has re-announced his desire to be ‘Defender of Faith’- to drop the definite article that ties this title to a particular church (or indeed a particular religion). He first announced this in 1994, in that embarrassing interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. Of course this title is not the only thing that ties the monarchy to the established Church: he would still be ‘supreme governor of the Church of England.’ (Or maybe he wants to be known as ‘the supreme governor of faith’?) Why does this definite article bug him so? Is it because he disapproves of the monarchy’s role in the establishment of the Church of England? It seems

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State?

Mike Allen has the latest on the rumour that Washington is obsessing over: “Even officials who like the idea threw up strong “caution” flags. Fresh off his electoral triumph, Obama does not feel he needs the Clintons. The president-elect has never liked the idea of former President Bill Clinton as a back-seat driver. The former president has had many tangled foreign business dealings that could complicate his wife’s entry into an administration that is promising transparency. And at most a few people, none of whom are talking, know what Obama really thinks about all this. But some Obama advisers argue that Clinton would be an ideal fit if Obama concludes

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Baby P says about our society

The case of Baby P is stomach-turning, it is hard to conceive of how anyone could do such things to a child. It is a tragic illustration of more general problems, though. There is the incompetence and seeming unaccountability of the local authority and the whole issue of how society reached a place where something as awful as this can happen. Camilla Cavendish, in a quite brilliant column in The Times, writes that: “In my bleaker moments I feel that the welfare state has pulled off a truly brilliant stunt: not only has it managed to institutionalise shamelessness among people who might once have been forced to take heed of

Peter Hoskin

A warning ignored

“Our client whistle-blew the fact that the sexual abuse [of certain children in Haringey] had been ongoing for months and the new management brought in post-Climbie had not acted … We write to ask for a public inquiry into these matters.” As the Independent reveals this morning, those words formed part of a letter that a whistleblowing Haringey social worker sent to Patricia Hewitt, then Health Secretary, some 6 months before the death of Baby P.  The letter was also sent to David Lammy, then culture minister, as well as the junior health ministers Rosie Winterton and Ivan Lewis.  Sadly, though, the calls for an investigation were ignored, and Haringey