All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I wrote yesterday that the race is on between Brown and Cameron to appear the best to lead us through the post-recessionary landscape. That race became even more competitive today, with both Brown and Cameron serving up their “optimistic” visions for the future. Our Dear Leader’s came in a speech to the Regional Economic Council,
Fraser is at David Cameron’s event so he’ll have more on the Tory announcement that they’ll abolish the basic rate of tax on savings and raise the personal allowances of pensioners by £2,000 My initial reaction is that it is a savvy political move, the population is getting older and old people vote in higher
The whole economic meltdown is less of an opportunity for the left in Britain than the US for the simple reason that Labour was in power here in the years leading up to it. Today, Jackie Ashley bemoans that Brown’s refusal to admit that mistakes were made means that the left might miss the opportunity
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 – provided 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
Although I agree with the ultimate conclusion of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s column today – that we shouldn’t, as a nation, “blame the outsider,” and that we should work towards greater integration – the tirade she launches before it is astonishing, and not in a good sense: “A new government report finds that [the white, working classes]
Will anyone take Gordon Brown’s claim to create up to 100,000 jobs seriously? As a statistician will tell you, “up to” includes the number zero. And as any economist will tell you, government can’t create jobs. The best it can do is move jobs, from the private to the public sector via tax – or
There were all manner of reasons for Barack Obama to pick someone other than Jim Webb as his running-mate (though there was a case to be made for Webb too). But, via Ross Douthat, here’s a reminder of why Webb is, as he might put it himself, a serious politician: This spring, Webb (D-Va.) plans
Some New Year cheer, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph’s obituaries column. The deceased, in this instance, is Lady Anne Cavendish-Bentinck, one of Britain’s largest landowners who, had she not been born on the distaff side, would have been the Duke of Portland. Anyway… Her grandfather, the 6th Duke, a younger half-brother of the Countess of
You probably heard about the new school in Sheffield that won’t call itself a school because that word has “negative connotations”. Watercliffe Meadow will instead call itself a “place of learning”. Seriously. It’s all very Decline and Fall : “We class schools, you see, into four five grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, School
We were here for the primary debates last year. We covered Obama vs Clinton. We live-blogged the Presidential debates and we dared not miss Biden vs Palin. But all of that was but a warm-up for the main event tonight. Yup, taking live-blog absurdity to new heights, we’ll be live-blogging the final of the World
In general, I suppose I don’t have too much against the idea of a cricket Hall of Fame though given that we’ve managed to get along fine without one for centuries there doesn’t seem any pressing need for one. But if you are going to have such a Hall, then for god’s sake include the
Until today the transition had gone pretty much perfectly for Obama. His appointments were impressive and warmly received, his poll numbers have risen to record levels and the scandal about Governor Blagojevich allegedly trying to sell off Obama’s Senate seat has not hurt Obama or any of his staff. But today the transition hit a
There is a classic example of government waste and arrogance in today’s Observer. The Department of Health has taken to paying celebrities to appear in public health announcements. The thinking (and it is rather dubious if you ask me) being that a celebrity is more likely than anyone else to persuade us to eat five
In The Observer today, Peter Oborne argues—as he has in the past—that David Cameron is far more of a radical than most people realise: “[Cameron] has been accused, especially by supporters, of being long on ambition, short on principles. This is almost the complete opposite of the case. I have read most of his speeches
In his speech to the Labour conference, Gordon Brown launched a highly personal attack on how David Cameron treats his children: “Some people have been asking why I haven’t served my children up for spreads in the papers And my answer is simple My children aren’t props; they’re people” But Brown seems to have no
Optimism, optimism, optimism. That’s the line that Gordon Brown pushes in his interview with the Observer today. He quotes Barack Obama; says he’s going to create jobs the Roosevelt way; claims that British goods are “the products the world will want to buy”; and seems dismissive of any black clouds on the horizon, as in
There are times when it’s good to be away from the hurly-burly of American politics. Doubly so when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Here, for instance, is a story it is hard to imagine happening in the United States: Nick Herbert, the Conservative party’s Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member
Back then and not before time. Or, rather, back rather sooner from a holiday hiatus than was the case last year. Anyway, I hope you all had a splendid Christmas and New Year. Matters were quietly entertaining here. Christmas in the Borders and then Hogmanay at my sister’s place in Perthshire. All very agreeable, capped
Thanks to David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, I’ve just caught up with Michael Lewis’s article ‘The End’, which appeared in Portfolio magazine last month. It’s one of the most incisive and exhaustive pieces on the credit crunch that I’ve read so far – exactly what you’d expect from the man who wrote the supremely readable account
The Tories keep telling us that they are on an election footing. If they are, part of that must be aiming to lose as few news cycles as possible between now and polling day. There are going to be some that the Tories can’t stop Labour winning; Labour is still the government giving it the
I’ve been reading Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning by John Lukacs about Churchill’s speeches in May 1940. It is well worth reading; a fine example of microcosmic history and short at only a 140 odd pages. Reading it one particular fact stood out to me: “the British their soldiers and sailors and
A second bank bailout would, as Pete noted earlier, be a hinge moment in British politics. Anthony Wells has shown that Labour’s fortunes began to recover because people believed that Brown and Darling’s rescue plan for the banks would work. If the government have to go back and have a second crack at it that
Peter Oborne’s column today is explosive stuff. He writes that secret talks have already begun between Labour and Liberal Democrat figures about a possible coalition. He reports that as a sweetener to any possible deal the Labour Whips office is already drumming up support for Ming Campbell as the next Speaker. Oborne points to an
So there we have it. The first substantial rumblings that Alistair Darling’s going to sanction a second banking bailout, after the first one didn’t free up credit as intended. According to the Times, the Chancellor will “decide within weeks” whether to pump £billions more into the sector. One option being considered is the creation of
What’s this? Yet another delay to the publication of ministers’ private interests? Yep, and this time it’s because some of the “new minsters” introduced during the last reshuffle have – according to the Times’s source – “required quite a bit of investigation”. The Times adds 2 + 2 together and comes up with Peter Mandelson;
It now seems that Governor Paterson probably is going to appoint Caroline Kennedy to the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. The odd thing about her mini-campaign, if you can call it that, is how unnatural she has been. She has been much less assured and appealing than she was when she stumped for Obama.
Every age needs its contrary thinkers, those prepared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day. As Lexington argues in The Economist, Samuel Huntington—who died on Christmas Eve—was that for the 1990s. While others were triumphalist after the West’s victory in the Cold War, Huntington was pessimistically warning of a coming Clash of Civilizations. Huntington
Over at Conservative Home, Jonathan Isaby flags up George Osborne’s response to some of today’s gloomy economic and financial indicators. Here are the shadow chancellor’s words: “First we discovered that there were fewer shoppers in December despite the VAT cut, now we discover house prices are falling sharply and mortgage approvals at a record low
We know it’s not cool to dress like a master of the universe right now, and the lunchtime crowd at the Ivy on Tuesday were less Madoff than Man at C&A. Regulars have always been more fashionable than Fashion, considering themselves too serious and important to appear to pay attention to clothes, but the abundance
The idea that 2009 will be a good year for the Tories is fast becoming conventional wisdom. Michael Brown makes this case in typically eloquent style in The Independent today arguing that once the downturn begins to really hurt, people will turn from the government to the opposition. But what really struck me was Brown’s
Peter Oborne makes a bold prediction in today’s Mail: that the Euro – ten years old yesterday – won’t live to see its twentieth anniversary. Whether or not you agree with that prognosis, Oborne’s case is compelling: “Indeed, far from being the staggering success its supporters claim, the euro-zone is already inflicting huge damage on
I’m fairly pessimistic about the prospects for sterling – or the GBPeso as some CoffeeHousers have dubbed it. But as a counterbalance to the stuff I’ve been posting recently, here is a forecast from Royal Bank of Scotland which reckons sterling has been oversold, the turning point has arrived and that we will be able
No.10 has come up with an ingenious solution to what could have been a yearly presentational problem: to have Gordon Brown’s New Year’s Message as a disembodied voice, with no video at all. You can listen to it here. And that voice observes that an “old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered
Helen Suzman was a woman of quite remarkable character and bravery. To have been the sole anti-apartheid MP in the South African parliament for so many years must have required a level of courage and a dedication to principle that few of us can imagine. Suzman was a good liberal, in the proper sense of