All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It will have been a quiet morning in the Balls household. Fresh economic indicators suggest that the British economy is not in some cuts-induced recession but, instead, doing rather nicely, thank-you. As I said last week, economic health is assessed by all manner of indices – and the ONS (which is forever having to tear
The Middle East is being rocked to its authoritarian core, as pro-democracy protesters defy Hosni Mubarak’s regime for the eighth day in a row. They want an end to his 31-year-rule and, to judge by their continued defiance, are unlikely to accept anything else than his departure. The events, however, have placed European governments in
Crime maps have formally reached England and Wales. The Home Office has unveiled www.police.uk and citizens can examine incidences and trends of crime in their local area. Naturally, the website is broken at the moment. Nick Herbert, the Policing Minister, told the Today programme that the site crashed under the weight of 4 million users
I don’t know who is editing the BBC’s PM programme these days – I’ve lost touch with my old corporation mates – but whoever it was deserves a word of praise for the manner in which the show covered the death of the composer John Barry. A long montage of the man’s most gilded, and
If the AV referendum is to take place on the 5th of May, the legislation paving the way for it needs to have passed by the 16th of February. But this bill is currently being held up in the Lords where Labour peers are objecting to the ‘Tory part’ of the bill which reduces the
As Cairo smoulders, it’s easy to forget about one of the most combustible ingredients in the Middle Eastern cocktail – Iran. Yet the threat still exists, as Tony Blair and Liam Fox have been keen to remind us. James Kirkup reports that the Defence Secretary has warned a Commons committee that Iran could have a
Writing behind the paywall in today’s Times, Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, says: “In Manchester on Saturday the National Union of Students organised what was the latest in a series of protests against government plans that are allowing the burden of the deficit reduction to fall on young people. We
One of the most eyecatching political reports of the weekend was squirrelled away on page 16 (£) of the Sunday Times. It’s worth clipping out for the scrapbook, even now. In it, Marie Woolf reveals some of the fiscal sweeteners that Osborne might sprinkle into the Budget. There are two particularly noteworthy passages: i) Raising
…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson fears for the outcome of the Egyptian protests, and says that jihadis thrive on Islam’s lack of definition. James Forsyth says that Andrew Lansley needs to explain his reforms better, and watches the situation in Egypt turn from revolt to revolution.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies are out prowling the airwaves again, and they bring happy and unhappy tidings for the coalition. On the happier side, at least presentationally speaking, is their assessment that, “those being hit the very hardest [by tax and benefit changes] are those on [a] higher level of earnings” – just as
One of the most wonderful of many wonderful aspects of the anti-totalitarian uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is that they have nailed the myth that Islamism represents the “authentic” voice of the Arab street. This was always a pernicious nonsense and the diversity of those demonstrating across the Maghreb and Egypt has been one of
This has been rumoured for some time but it still doesn’t make any sense: Jon Huntsman, former Governor of Utah and currently US Ambassador to Beijing, is preparing to run for the GOP’s presidential nomination. Maybe. Politico has the latest on this madness. Madness? Well it’s certainly rum. If you think Mitt Romney is going
At last we have it: a defence of the coalition’s NHS reforms that is worthy of the name. It came courtesy of David Cameron, speaking on BBC Breakfast earlier, and you can watch it in the video above. Suffice to say, the Prime Minister dwelt on the endemic waste and excessive bureaucracy of the current
The year before I was born fewer than one in three countries in the world could be considered properly free. Today, according to Freedom House, nearly one in two can be classified as free. Despite the grinding stupidity and tedious witlessness that so often dominates our domestic politics we should remember that this is a
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no
Nobody is as associated with George W Bush’s drive to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East as former US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. His role in the Iraq War, and belief that the US should promote democracy in a part of the world better known for authoritarian rulers, remains controversial to this
Fraser asks where or who is the Egyptian Lech Walesa? Well the answer, somewhat improbably, seems to be Mohamed ElBaradei*. And he’s in Tahrir Square. Al Jazeera reports that the former IAEA chief has more backing than anyone might have expected just a week ago. The Muslim Brotherhood, secularists and socialists are all said to
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the events in Egypt and Tunisia – but, as I say in my News of the World column (£) today, the citizens of the Arab world all too often have a choice between a Bad Guy and a Worse Guy. Egypt looks like its choice is between
Like everyone else of sense, I’m wary of people who are too certain about anything that might happen next in Egypt. That suspicion certainly extends to my own opinions. I’m not sure we even know what the known knowns are, far less anything else. That said, I think one can reasonably suspect that the appointment
So Ed Balls has made his decision. In articles and a TV interview today, he has decided that, instead of apologising for his part in bringing Britain to the state it’s in today, he will deny what he did. It was the consensus that Britain had the biggest deficit in the G7 going into the
It is imperative that the coalition keeps its nerves and its composure during the months ahead. 2011 will try the coalition’s fortitude, its deficit reduction plan and its public service reform programme will both come under sustained attack. It is vital that the coalition continues to explain clearly and patiently why it is doing what it
The Guardian’s Sarfraz Manzoor was on Aled Jones’s show on Radio Two this morning (titter ye not – it’s great Sunday music) discussing how members of his Muslim family shunned him after he married a Christian. He had this to say: “It hasn’t made me doubt my faith. What it’s made me do is feel
Nigel Lawson and Francis Maude are both interviewed in the Telegraph today, and the results are very different in each case. For his part, Lawson is in bombastic form – waxing sceptical on everything from the coalition to the Big Society. Whereas Maude is predictably more reserved and accepting. It’s the Maude interview, though, that
Ed Balls gets personal in his interview with the Times (£) today, but not in the way you might expect. For most of the piece he dwells on what the paper calls his “hidden vulnerability” – the effort to contain his stammer. And from there on, the politics seems a touch softer than usual. There
I’m indebted to my friend Neill Harvey-Smith for summing up the British attitude to politics in just three sentences: I don’t know what it is. It sounds like a good idea. It probably won’t work. That’s in response to this: And you know what? Most of the time, I don’t know what it is. It
Sitting in London it is hard to know what is going to happen next in Egypt but one particular detail in the New York Times’ latest report makes me think that Mubarak’s fall is fast becoming more likely than not: “In Ramses Square in central Cairo Saturday midday, protesters commandeered a flatbed army truck. One
The last six years have been fallow ones for the neoconservatives. From around 2005, when Iraq began its descent into chaos, the ideology that did so much to shape US foreign policy became marginalised as, first, George W Bush turned increasingly realist and, then, Barack Obama continued where his predecessor left off. While ideas are
It is 25 years, to the day, since the Challenger shuttle tragically disintegrated over Cape Canaveral. Here is the deeply poignant piece that Christopher Hitchens wrote for The Spectator at the time: The Shuttle Disaster, Christopher Hitchens, The Spectator 1 Feb 1986 Cape Canaveral was the scene of so many non-lethal disasters in the early
Hat-tip: Harry Cole; story here.
Few government jobs are as demanding as that of Permanent Under-Secretary, or PUS, in the Ministry of Defence. With Liam Fox as your boss, General David Richards as your colleague, and an exhausted, overspent department to run, it is no surprise that when Bill Jeffrey retired many of the government’s most senior officials – including,
Other sites have already covered this week’s opinion poll results, among them Labour’s largest lead since September 2007 and the public’s confusion over the Big Society. But there are a couple of findings that are worth dwelling on as we drift into the weekend: 1) Labour gaining ground in the blame game. Ok, so PoliticalBetting’s
When spin doctors become the story or spokesmen need a spokesman, we know the game is up. So say Alastair Campbell and Andy Coulson, and they should know. So what happens when journalists become the story? The re-opening of the investigation into News of the World phone-hacking case has sent a chill across Fleet
A weird, sprawling kind of speech from David Cameron in Davos this morning. It started off on an unusually, if expectedly, gloomy note: all talk of Europe’s debt-induced decline in the face of competition from India, China and Brazil. And he emphasised, of course, that Britain would, and should, stick to its current trajectory of
David Cameron and George Osborne must have hoped that their message from Davos today would be broadcast unimpeded. It is, after all, a blunt message, designed to smash through all the radio chatter: we must continue with deficit reduction, there is no alternative, etc. But, inconveniently for them, there are other voices saying what we