CoffeeHousers’ Wall | 2 July 2008
This week’s CoffeeHousers’ Wall is here. Head over there to have your say on the week’s events and to let us know what you’d like to see on Coffee House.
Society
Wednesday
Fading memories of the Raj in the tea gardens of Assam
Richard Orange says the Indian tea industry is enjoying a revival — but that the traditional tea-planters’ way of life, established by the British, is passing into history There is not much to distinguish Dhanesheva Kurmi from the rest of the crowd at the Hautely Tea Estate, a remote garden an hour and a half’s bumpy drive from the Assamese town of Jorhat. Richard Orange says the Indian tea industry is enjoying a revival — but that the traditional tea-planters’ way of life, established by the British, is passing into history There is not much to distinguish Dhanesheva Kurmi from the rest of the crowd at the Hautely Tea Estate,
The market’s favourite scapegoat
Oh, dear, what a setback. The usual suspects have slipped through the net. They will have to be locked up in the Financial Services Authority’s waterside fortress for 42 days, while the investigators try again to find some evidence. These suspects are the short sellers: everyone’s favourite scapegoat. They are accused of rocking the banks’ leaky boats, of destabilising the stock market, of profiting from other people’s misfortunes, of driving share prices downwards to suit their own book. If it wasn’t for them, we should all be rich, or richer, at any rate, than we are now — or so we are led to believe. The textbook way to become
I was starstuck by David Cameron
It was a large thickish card. ‘180th anniversary of the Spectator’, to be celebrated at the Churchill Hotel in elegant Portman Square. It looked to be an event not to miss and I’m quite partial to a little schmoozing from the ‘Right’ since it is from within my domain on the Left that I have been the most scourged. This has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but I conclude that the Left is not quite so left as it would like to pretend it is. The traffic was horrendous, and like the maze of Theseus, each turn I took sadistically led me back via one-way streets
Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss
‘Yes, I think there are,’ replies Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, when I ask him if he thinks there are others like him who followed Bush from Texas to Washington but who are now disillusioned. McClellan was one of Bush’s Texas loyalists — he had served the then Governor in Austin, worked on the presidential campaign and then moved to the White House where he rose to become White House press secretary, the public face of the administration. But with the publication of his memoirs he has broken spectacularly with his old boss. The title of Scott McClellan’s book tells you where he is coming from: What
Tuesday
McCain’s War Record
So, General Wesley Clark mouths off about John McCain on TV today, thusly: CLARK: He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, “I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not, do you want to take the risk, what about your reputation, how do we handle this publicly? He
Statistics in a cloud of smoke
If Philip Morris commissioned research which found that the smoking ban in England & Wales, a year old today, had been a dismal failure many, perhaps even most, people would dismiss said research, considering it partial. Well they would say that wouldn’t they? So why are figures* from anti-smoking organisations such as ASH or Cancer Research UK accepted uncritically? Maybe they are indeed sound but I see no great reason for ignoring the vested interests at play on their side of the dispute while pointing out those that might influence more tobacco-friendly findings. *I should say that while I do indeed view the figures cited by Cancer Research with some
Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t…
Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online: The front page of the Washington Post (yes, I sometimes read paper newspapers) has the headline “Obama Fiercely Defends His Patriotism.” Isn’t there a problem when a candidate has to “fiercely defend” something so fundamental? Shouldn’t a candidate for president and his advisers and supporters exude such a thing? And perhaps there’s also a problem when conservatives declare – or presume to assume – that they have a monopoly on patriotism, casting their opponents as un-American and demanding that Obama make a grand speech to prove that, you know, he is comfortable being an American citizen… Not that the GOP, alas, is the
More people in America kill themselves with guns than other people
Michelle Cottle flags up a fascinating stat, 55 percent of the 30,000 plus firearms deaths in America in 2005 were suicides. I would have thought that murders would have made up the vast majority of these deaths but homicides only actually accounted for 40 percent of the total.
What will happen now?
Harare, Zimbabwe Post-election drama, Harare thrives once more. Market women back to selling vegetables on the street; businessmen in second-hand suits talking loudly into their mobile phones. Queues stretching round the block to use the cashpoint. The earnest business of survival begins for Zimbabweans once more. A Zanu-PF source informed me earlier today that Mugabe allies are negotiating informally with the opposition MDC over a unity government. The sticking point, as always, is Mugabe. “When will the Old Man go?” chorus the urban masses. The South Africans are pressing hard for official negotiations. But is hard to see the MDC agreeing until violence against their supporters stops. “It is about leverage,” said the source,
The smoking ban: one year on
So, it’s one year since the ban on smoking in public indoor places was introduced across England. If the latest figures from Cancer Research UK are anything to go by, it’s certainly having the desired effect. Some 400,000 people have quit smoking at the start of the ban, and an estimated 40,000 lives will be saved over the coming decade. It’s particularly difficult to argue against the second of those statistics. And – as I’m still making my mind up about the ban, one year on – I’m not going to try. But this article in today’s Telegraph does a good job of outlining who’s lost out – over 50 pubs now close each month, whilst 60
Cherie speaks sense
Cherie Booth, aka Mrs Blair, was giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee this morning. One of the MPs asked her what she would do to combat knife crime if she was Home Secretary for the day, to which she replied: “I think this idea of taking the glamour out of crime and making a highly visible police presence and harrying criminals is a good approach.” Now, this isn’t a particularly innovative approach but it does show how far the debate has shifted that an Islington, human-rights lawyers is advocating something so robust. Reading about yet another knifing in London, it is clear current policing methods are just not
We’ll go on getting bad results
Try as I might I can’t get overly excited about Wimbledon—I’m more of a football and cricket man. So Boris Johnson’s column this morning on why England under-achieve at football caught my eye. Here’s the nub of his argument: we should now launch a merciless Kulturkampf against every feature of modern Britain that is inimical to our competitive success. We should summon up our courage and tell our ballooning children to put down their beastly PlayStations and go and play outside. We should encourage them to walk or cycle to school. We should stop the sale of school playing fields. We should finally abandon the ethic of “all must have
CoffeeHousers’ Wall | 1 July 2008
This week’s CoffeeHousers’ Wall is here. Head over there to have your say on the week’s events and to let us know what you’d like to see on Coffee House.
Monday
Footballing Question of the Day
James Hamilton from the superb (if infuriatingly-often-on-hiatus) football blog More than Mind Games has a question that merits pondering: If you had to name one player who, in your opinion, epitomised the history of English football (not necessarily its ethos or its greatest moment or its values), who would that be? He doesn’t have to be English, but he does have to exemplify the way the game has developed in England. Good question! One that will take time to answer. In the same vein, then, using the same rules, which player could most reasonably be considered the epitomy of Scottish football? Or Italian?
England, Their F***ing England
Amazing. Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question. One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully. His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points. On the other hand… you might say, given that I assume that plenty of the questions (in these shabby, fallen days!)
The stars were bright, Fernando…
Memo to the Associated Press and the New York Times: describing Fernando Torres as a “slumping striker” and claiming that he had “been invisible in this tournament” makes you look like a bunch of chumps. Better, you know, to say nothing than expose yourselves in this fashion*. Anyway, having written this genially mean-spirited blast against the Germans, I’m obviously delighted that Spain triumphed. For once the best team won and now, of all the “major” european powers it’s England that have gone the longest without hauling in a significant trophy… *This sort of ignorance, of course, infuriates American soccer fans who do know their stuff, appreciating, like, that goals aren’t
Stop running
Running is not a part of my repertoire – nobody with a bosom of even a sliver above the average size would dream of subjecting it to such horrendously jolting treatment – and I am disposed to be suspicious of anyone over the age of 12 who considers it a good way of getting around except in a case of dire emergency. I am therefore a touch dubious about Martin Creed’s new work at Tate Britain, which involves runners sprinting through the Duveen Galleries – where such an activity is usually and thankfully prohibited – at 30-second intervals. All the same, it does sound slightly more sane than the activities
The beginning of the end for eco-towns?
It’s hard not to applaud those who marched on Parliament today to protest the Government’s eco-town policy. Whatever their motivations, they’ve got quite a case. As I’ve blogged before, there are several reasons to think that these towns will be neither good for the environment nor helpful for first-time buyers. Which completely defeats their purpose. The protest could even mark the beginning of end for this risky – and expensive – social experiment. The Tories have today withdrawn their support from it – meaning eco-towns are unlikely to survive the next election. As it stands, Brown may not even have time to put the foundations in place.
A question of timing
Over at Three Line Whip, Rob Winnett points out that David Cameron really needs to decide what to do about Caroline Spellman before the Haltemprice & Howden by-election. If Spellman is forced out once David Davis has been returned to Parliament, it will be hard for Cameron not to take the opportunity to bring Davis back to the top table. If Cameron does decide that he needs to ask Spellman for her resignation, then there is a simple mini-reshuffle available to him: move Eric Pickles to party chairman and Paul Goodman up to shadow Hazel Blears. Part of the appeal of this is that making Pickles, a folksy Yorshireman, party