Society

Saturday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 26 July 2008

I am still waiting for an enterprising research company to publish honest readership figures for British news-papers. Not the boring stuff about what we read at the breakfast table or flourish at our desks, a decision driven by badge value. No, what I want to know is which papers people reach for in private when they find themselves on the loo with a full selection of news media to hand. You see I’m happy to bet that, in such circumstances, even Paul Johnson or A.S. Byatt reaches for the Sun or the News of the World first, and the Pope keeps a sneaky copy of Bild tucked behind the cistern.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

My big worries

Have you ever noticed how the Islamist terror threat has been ridiculously overplayed by the government? I have. I’ll be standing with my kids on a crowded Tube, looking at the 20-year-old with the beard, the knitted cap and the classic Bin-Laden-style salwar kameez/combat jacket combo and thinking, ‘Well, he’s a lovely devout bloke from the Religion of Peace, so he’s definitely not going to blow us up.’ And I’ll read those depressing MI5 estimates that there are at least 2,000 home-grown Islamist terrorist plotters dotted around Britain and not be depressed at all. Why? Because I get my facts from the BBC. When, for example, I’m watching an episode

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life

Laikipia With a concussive ‘thunk’, another bird flies against our new farm house on the African plains. This happens a dozen times daily. They must be following flight paths established long before a human home went up. I designed our place to be solid. Construction used up 555 tonnes of sand, 1,476 bags of cement, 688 kilos of nails, 1,235 cedar poles, 16,500 running feet of timber, 1,833 wheelbarrow loads of rock ballast and 47 wheelbarrows (since it was all built by hand). An atom bomb could not destroy it. But Nature rudely ignores our claim over home. Tap! goes the bedroom window at dawn. Taptaptap! Pull back the curtains.

Liz Brocklehurst

Marking Sats has always been a total fiasco

The Sats disaster is depressing, but I’m afraid that as someone who’s marked them for ten years, it’s not altogether surprising. In the early days of the National Curriculum tests — the Sats — I was a Key Stage 2 Science marker, sworn to Masonic-like secrecy about this mysterious testing process. In my innocence I had expected it to be a straightforward procedure, but I hadn’t allowed for the serial incompetence, the human error, the vagaries of postal deliveries, and most important: the political pressure. Several times my expected parcels of scripts were initially sent to another marker by mistake, and I received scripts for the wrong subject; scripts of

James Robertson

A monkey business

‘To philosophise,’ Montaigne once wrote, ‘is to learn to die.’ He was paraphrasing Cicero and making an ancient point — only by leading examined lives can we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of our deaths. The legendary sanguinity of philosophers such as Socrates and Epicurus on their deathbeds seems to bear witness to the truth of the aphorism. In Mortal Coil, however, David Boyd Haycock has written a compelling history of man’s scientific search for longer life, one that reminds us of the many enlightened minds who wanted more than the consolations of philosophy. Setting aside questions of the immortal soul, this brief study details the search for physical longevity

Friday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 25 July 2008

Monday Everyone assuming I’ve been keeping up with Events during my horse holiday with Sesame but as I explained to Nigel I was in a very remote part of the Isle of Wight. Must say, it’s all a bit different from when I went away. Lots of American flags about the place and ‘Obama For President’ banners. What happened to the man whose family invented oven chips? Also, empty desks everywhere. Apparently, Jenny, Jilly and Janey have all gone to Google. Dave now thinking of offering us all promotions to keep us. I asked Gary whether we couldn’t just have a bit more money but he said I should keep

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

And so it begins

Oh, joy. It has all started. I’m in the BBC News studios, reviewing tomorrow’s papers – and there is plenty to savour. The Indy says Purnell has cut a deal with David Miliband not to stand. The FT has Jack Straw who is shocked – shocked – to find talk of mutiny. It emerges that “several Cabinet members and senior MPs privately urged Mr Straw to lead a coup against Brown in the autumn” but his “allies” say he loyally told them to “calm down”. The object of briefing this story, of course, is to get across the point that Straw is the man to whom people are looking. Take that, Milipede! First mover advantage to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Darling makes sense backwards

Melissa Kite has a quite brilliant post up on Three Line Whip about the nonsense government ministers have been spouting as they attempt to defend the Prime Minister. Mr Darling goes on: “He has a very clear sense of direction where he believes we as a country ought to go.” Again, he misses the point which is surely that this sentence would make much more sense if it was turned the other way around: Britain has a very clear sense of the direction it believes Gordon Brown ought to go. Do read the whole thing.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

No message, no chance

In politics you need an effective positive message about yourself and a negative message about your opponent hat resonates. At the moment, Labour has neither. Its attempt at a positive message is to say ‘we’re on your side’ but this claim now just gets laughed out of court. To borrow a word from the Chancellor, people feel too “squeezed” for this message to be credible. Labour’s negative message about Cameron is all over the place. Until a few weeks ago, he was shallow salesman. But now Labour seem determined to attack him as a closet right-winger with Brown saying that he did not want to “wake up 24 months from

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The personal is now the political

Whether Gordon Brown survives or not is going to turn on the question of how many Cabinet ministers—if any—are prepared to tell Brown that he must go or they will. Brown’s personal standing with his colleagues is now key to his future. So, it was fascinating to see that it was Des Browne who was sent onto the Today programme, and the other morning shows, to gamely try and spin last night’s result. Browne has been appallingly badly treated by his near namesake. First of all, Brown lumped responsibility for the Scottish Office on Browne despite the fact that Browne was Secretary of State for Defence at a time when

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour in crisis: Brown’s leadership is now Topic A

Labour’s loss of Glasgow East will put rocket boosters under the speculation about Gordon Brown’s future. If Labour under Brown can’t win in Glasgow East, where can it win? MPs are now away from Westminster which makes plotting more complicated. But after this result, various Labour MPs are going to be seized by—to borrow a phrase—the fierce urgency of now. If Labour’s 25th safest seat can be lost to a three figure majority, then you can count on your fingers the numbers of Labour MPs who can have total confidence about keeping their seat. Even if Brown survives the summer, tonight’s result guarantees that leadership speculation will be a major factor

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour in crisis: Union boss tells Brown to declare Blairism dead

Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of Unite, has an op-ed in Friday’s Guardian demanding that Gordon Brown declare that “Blairism is dead”. Woodley claims that “Brown has one last window of opportunity. Face down the Blairites within. Clear the apologists for the big bonus brigade out of the cabinet and make Labour once more the party for state intervention for social justice.” Now, it is no surprise that Woodley—who is a long standing opponent of Blairism—is calling on Labour to move to the left. But given Labour’s current difficulties both electoral and financial, Woodley’s words matter more than they did in the past. If the leadership go to Warwick

James Forsyth James Forsyth

SNP: “We have had a very good day in Glasgow East”

The coverage is increasingly tilting to the idea that the SNP has pulled off a remarkable upset in Glasgow East. The SNP MPs being interviewed are sounding confident while the Labour MPs are on the defensive. I’ll now be surprised if Labour hold on. For the record, turnout was 42.5 percent.

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Crick: Glasgow East wil be “very, very, very close”

On Newsnight just now, Michael Crick—who is at the count in Glasgow East—reported that the result is going to be very close. The Guardian is reporting a rumour that the SNP has won. If Labour has lost its 25th safest seat, then Gordon Brown is in even bigger trouble than we thought.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Not up there with Kennedy or Reagan’s but Obama’s Berlin speech did its job

‘Politics stops at the water’s edge’ is one of the most frequently invoked rules in US politics, so giving a campaign speech overseas carried a risk for Obama. However, he carried it off fairly well and his campaign will have been delighted by the visuals; the paean to America with which he ended the speech was pitch-perfect for campaign ad. The Obama campaign’s decision to start the speech with the Berlin airlift was astute as it allowed Obama to praise the city he was speaking in and deploy some good old fashioned anti-Communist rhetoric. Indeed, several times Obama flicked at phrases from the great Cold war speeches that Kennedy or

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A failing mark

Liz Brockelhurst, who marked Key stage 2 papers for a decade, has done a great piece for the magazine this week on the marking process for Sats. She points out that the “marking process itself was also dictated by idiotic rules, designed to help children scrape through.” Two of the examples that Liz gives, illustrate just how rigged the whole mark scheme is:  “And if the child wrote the correct answer, but then, on second thoughts, decided it was wrong and crossed it out, the crossing-out still gained the mark. On one paper this was carried to ludicrous extremes. A child had written an answer in pencil but then rubbed

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The People’s Party

MPs who return from canvassing in Glasgow East are full of talk about the broken society or the challenges of urban regeneration, depending on which party they belong to. But Kevin Maguire rather wickedly reports that the Labour deputy leader had a very different experience: “To the Glasgow East by-election, where Labour foot soldiers swap stories of a 90-minute state visit by Hattie Harperson. The multitasker was directed to a swanky road in the deprived constituency where detached houses nudge a million quid each. Up the gravel drive she went, past the new 4x4s, to canvass. Twenty minutes later she returned. What did Hattie discuss with the owners? Tax credits?

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Facebook fun

A wee reminder: Facebook now permits you to sign up as a “fan” of this blog. It’s not altogether clear what the point of this is but it seems certain that there must be one. Perhaps you can sign up and be entered into a draw to win exciting Debatable Land merchandise. Or something. Anyway, you click on a button here.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Appalling Self-Promotion

Iain Dale wants you to vote for your favourite political blogs (written by Britons or furriners resident in the United Kingdom). Obviously this means you can vote for this one. All you need to do is go here or (better) email Iain here and leave your list of ten blogs in the comments section. What could be simpler than that? And if you felt like mentioning this one somewhere in the upper echelons of your list, well, that would be dandy…

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A breathtaking mix of incompetence and inertia

The minutes of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority board meeting on the 21st of May have just been published and they show a complete failure by the board to engage with the Sats crisis. This meeting occurred just after David Laws, the Lib Dem education spokesman, had questioned Ed Balls in the Commons about the “shambles that we have seen over the past couple of weeks in the marking of 1.2 million key stage 2 and key stage 3 test papers”. But the minutes record that David Gee, the acting managing director of the National Assessment Agency, informed the board that:  “the school experience had been good; that there had