All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Really, I expected a tidal rush of new opinion polls on the death penalty after Guido launched his campaign for its restoration last week — but, strangely, that hasn’t happened yet. There is one poll today, though, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday. It suggests that 53 per cent of people support the death
As the early 1980s is recreated before our eyes, we now have a fully-fledged retro riot. Various Conservative commentators have been tweeting and blogging away about this today, including Nile Gardiner on the Telegraph blog and Iain Dale. They are right to warn against a knee-jerk reaction to the situation in Tottenham today. Clearly these
When it comes to films and television series there’s one word that usually makes me recoil in horror: remake, with English language remakes being a particular bugbear. Whether I’m too much of a purist at heart, guilty of cultural snobbery, or just tired of the seemingly endless supply of inferior versions of successful foreign language
The revolution may not be televised, but the riot was tweeted pretty well last night. I was up at 3am (don’t ask), and BBC News hadn’t even interrupted their normal programming. But turning to Twitter, it was all there. Specifically, via two reporters: Paul Lewis from the Guardian and Ravi Somaiya from the New York
London has become used to protest recently, but there was still something terrible and unexpected in the images emerging from Tottenham last night. Here we had firebombs, missiles, riot police, burning vehicles, smashed-in shops, looting and other criminality — and it has left eight policemen injured, as well as others in hospital. The cause of
A credit downgrade, unemployment at 9.1 per cent, spluttering growth — the economic cards are certainly stacked against Obama for his re-election in 2012. But here’s the thing: American punters still think that he’s more likely to win next November than not. Perhaps that’s because, contrary to Clinton’s famous slogan, it’s not actually all about
From esteemed economists to Ed Balls, everyone is wading into the Great Credit-Rating Debate today. But I doubt that anyone’s words will resonate so much as those of the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua. Through its editorials and reports, Beijing has become more and more strident about America’s debt problem over the past few weeks;
Why have we retained our AAA credit rating despite, by S&P’s figures, suffering a larger debt-GDP ratio than America? The Taxpayers’ Alliance’s Matthew Sinclair answers the question in some detail here, but one passage from S&P’s own analysis stands out. They explain that: “When comparing the U.S. to sovereigns with ‘AAA’ long-term ratings that we
The humbling of America — the cover theme of this week’s Spectator — continues with S&P stripping Uncle Sam of his AAA credit rating. The debt downgrade, it says, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary
Thanks to Guido and his co-conspirators, capital punishment is back on the political agenda. Here’s what The Spectator, under the editorship of Ian Gilmour, wrote about the hanging of Ruth Ellis — the last woman to be hanged in the UK — some 14 years before the abolition of the death penalty in Britain: The
Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk during the past week: The Spectator publishes its summer reading list, featuring the revelation that David Cameron reads books backwards. Fraser Nelson says that the ghost of Gordon Brown still hovers over the 50p tax debate. Peter Hoskin reveals which government department could be replaced with
One of the most irritating aspects of modern journalism is the tendency to make spurious connections between unconnected phenomena. The non-existent links between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda is the most obvious and pernicious of these. Many conspiracy theories originate from making connections where none exist. So when I tell you I am about to connect
CoffeeHouser ‘Ben G’ had it right in his comment underneath my earlier post: 24 hour news really does struggle in the face of economic crisis. This morning, all the talk was of a debt-induced apocalypse. Earlier this afternoon, the headlines were about the markets “rallying” after better-than-expected data on the US labour market. And now
Andrew Sullivan issues it: Obama reminds me of a one-nation Tory, refitted for the austerity era. David Cameron would fit very easily into his cabinet, and vice-versa. I fancy some of this magazine’s readers, to say nothing of less literate parts, headbangers True Believers elsewhere on the Tory right, worry Andrew may be right about
A number of papers report today that George Osborne is minded to replace the 50p tax with Gordon Brown’s original proposal: a 45p tax. How the ex-PM will be laughing. As he knows, even the 45p tax will lose money — that’s why Labour didn’t raise the top rate until the final four weeks of
I read the news today, oh boy — and it seems that Paul McCartney has waded into the phone hacking row. After claims by his ex-wife, Heather Mills, that her voicemails were accessed by the Daily Mirror, the former Beatle is now set to share his own concerns with the police. Although we cannot yet
Tim Montgomerie is in full-on never waste a crisis mode today. Given the doom plastered across all the front pages (The Sun excepted) this is a good time for wheeling out old favourites: With the world economy facing such a bleak decade this is no time for half measures. We need to be cutting taxes
It has, to paraphrase Margo Channing, already been a bumpy night — and it’s only going to get bumpier today. The latest news is how the Asian markets have trembled at what’s happening in the West. Japan’s main stock index is down 3.7 per cent. Australia’s is down 4.2 per cent. Hong Kong’s 5.3 per
The Spectator this week contains a brilliant piece on the crisis in Somalia by our Kenyan columnist Aidan Hartley. The Daily Telegraph today reports that voters are extremely sceptical about Cameron’s aid policy, wary of shovelling cash overseas when we’re hard-up at home. Aidan’s piece proves the voters absolutely right (no surprise). Not only would
Yesterday’s defence select committee report provoked stern critiques of the government’s defence policy from Alex Massie and Matt Cavanagh. It is hard to dissent from Matt’s view that Cameron, Fox and Osborne will be defined to some extent by how they handle the defence brief, which, as Alex points out, also proved to be Gordon
There were rumours flying around Whitehall this morning that the EU leadership was feeling the strain from yesterday’s rise in Spanish and Italian borrowing costs. Both stand rather too close to 7 per cent for comfort, and the price of insuring against sovereign default in the two countries also soared to its highest level in
The Liberal Democrats are in something of a purple patch at the moment, dominating aspects of government policy in the media. Last weekend, Danny Alexander broke his usually modest mould to stand square behind the 50p rate, in contrast to Boris Johnson and George Osborne. The debate encapsulates the current vogue for the coalition partners
Sir George Young has graced the pages of the Daily Mail this morning, arguing that MPs cannot ignore the clamour for a debate on the death penalty, as examined in depth by Pete last weekend. The Leader of the House’s intervention is the greatest indication yet that parliament will discuss the issue for the first
Business Secretary Vince Cable was on strident form this morning, pledging to drop controversial web-blocking from the government’s plan to tackle internet piracy. But his Conservative colleagues at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt, disagree. Ed Vaizey, the minister responsible for the creative industries, is to chair a meeting
I like the Economist’s Democracy in America blog very much and I like my friend Erica Grieder too. But her recent post on the debt-ceiling deal, the Pentagon’s budget and the resurrected “threat” of American isolationism won’t wash. Contemplating some conservatives’ willingness to imagine cuts to the security budget she writes: There has always been
As the headline suggests, what follows is a list of summer reading recommendations from Spectator staff members and writers — with more to come shortly. Although, it must be said, there is one contributor who doesn’t really count as a Spectator staff member or writer… David Cameron: I’ve been reading a book called Skippy Dies
Mary Robinson was (and is!) a woman and, just as importantly, the first President of the Republic of Ireland whose candidacy was not backed by Fianna Fail. Her successor, Mary McAleese is originally from Northern Ireland and thus, like Robinson, some kind of outsider. Both women expanded the idea of the Irish presidency and, in
As an accompaniment to the unique photo-history of the Egyptian revolution currently being shown on the Books Blog, here is Channel 4’s latest footage of the invalid Hosni Mubarak being brought to trial. This is a momentous moment in Egypt’s rebirth as a nation, but one denuded of dignity if these images are anything to go by.
First things first: defence policy is difficult. Even more than is generally the case in other departments every decision made at the MoD is a question of trade-offs. This is true of all aspects of the brief: policy, personnel, procurement and so on. If you do this you can’t do that and so on. Add
Yesterday’s leak of Vince Cable’s response to the Hargreaves report into the Digital Economy Act (DEA) set tongues wagging. The headline was as expected: ‘web-blocking’, the practice whereby copyright infringers are barred from internet access, will be dropped because it is unworkable. In line with Hargreaves’ recommendations, Cable also plans to remove restrictions on using copyright
The House of Commons Defence Committee moves at a stately pace. Two weeks back, it gave us its considered view on the British military campaign in southern Afghanistan – a report which might have been quite useful a couple of years ago. Today it has published its verdict on October’s National Security Strategy and Strategic
…or why the US cuts are actually faster than, and just as deep as, ours. Dear Will, We hope you don’t mind us writing a letter-form response to your latest post on Left Foot Forward, which argues that the “coalition government’s cuts are deeper and faster than the Tea Party’s”. But, as we see it,
Israeli politicians have been worrying that the Palestinians would join the protests sweeping the Middle East. So far, this has not happened. But now the Israeli leadership is facing something it probably never expected: an Israeli Spring. Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets last weekend to protest against the high cost of
As a torch-and-pitchfork populist it’s not a great surprise that Guido Fawkes is in favour of the death penalty. Nor will it be a great shock when he gathers the 100,000 signatures needed to petition parliament* to consider reintroducing capital punishment. And I agree with my old friend Neill Harvey-Smith who, while opposing the death