Dave's bike
I'm glad David Cameron has got his bike returned. When he was pacing up and down and demanding Sharia law, I had visions of him becoming London's version of The Batman, a mild-mannered Leader of the Opposition by day, and caped vigilante crusader by night.
Labels: Cameron
Orwell's diaries online!
Here. Some excerpts:
Putney, December 12th, 1940Cold. Wet. Tobacco in short supply. Spent day at home hoping that in 62 years' time UK will join USA in liberating Iraq and freeing its people.
Colchester, March 18th, 1942Raining, dreary. Islamonazis everywhere trying to blow us up. Rory Bremner on the wireless, useless as ever.
Euston, October 4th, 1943Took lunch in pub. Strange Irish feel but not threatening. Began writing a manifesto.
Lord Ashcroft to speak for the first time in two years
Isn't
that remarkable? I once asked a friend to try not speaking for one minute, and she could't manage it. I wonder what his first words will be?
Labels: conservatives
David Cameron is right!
It probably is
time for a general election. I, for one, can't stand much of the newspapers being full of such speculation.
Labels: Brave calls that no-one listens to
You'll get equal pay when you get off the beach
"Women shortchanged on pay" is common cry from groups like this, complaining the women's earnings are at a large discount to men's. Well it's not surprising is it when they spend so little time in the office? Article such as
this, to be found in every tabloid newspaper today and tomorrow, are pretty damning evidence that groups of women tend to hang around beaches on work days. And it's the younger generation that seem particularly workshy. Note you don't seen any rapidly approaching middle-age men like myself in those pictures.
Labels: Economcs
The Anthony Browne twins
Nick Cohen - he never changes, does he?
A few years back he
attacked a man called Anthony Browne:
This line of cant has been developed by Anthony Browne, an occasional contributor to this paper, and a writer for the Times and Spectator, elite journals both. "Blair's epidemics" of Aids, TB and hepatitis B are being spread by asylum-seekers, he has asserted to great acclaim. You can understand the reasons for the applause. Browne has moved the debate on. Asylum-seekers are not only scroungers and terrorists but plague carriers, like the rats that brought the Black Death.
And ended the piece with a warning about what could happen if recession hit.
Today he declares his support - not in a shy way - for another Anthony Browne.
Browne has stood up for free speech and against liberal alliances with radical Islam, and exposed the civil servants who were pretending that a rise in HIV was due to poor sex education rather than immigration from African countries where the virus is raging. A former press officer at the Department of Health staff told me that his arguments caused consternation, not least because they were true.
And he ends the piece with a warning about what could happen if recession hit.
How spooky is that?
Labels: Nick Cohen
An unfortunate way to go
The
comments are good too.
Labels: Daily Mail
The Times today
No Oliver Kamm contest as I think it is too easy. But I actually bought The Times today so some links to some stories, good and bad.
Daniel Finkelstein makes the
excellent point that the Right's constant criticism of crime statistics, refusal to believe it is falling (in most areas, not all) and reliance on 'common sense' is making them look a bit silly, and could be self-defeating. Of course to some extent it is simply an attempt, as on the economy, to talk things down for electoral gain and so things can be painted as worse when/if they takeover, which all parties in engage in when they can. His points echo those made earlier by Liam Murray over
here.
This is a
silly piece on Satellite Navigation (for some reason I hate the shortened sat-nav). Obviously it has its limitations, but there is no doubt it makes navigation, particularly when not on trunk routes, easier and also I'd say, safer.
On Zimbabwe, Jonathan Clayton
argues that increasing sanctions is counter-productive. This is obviously a common view, and one that I imagine has some merit (the most effective policy is not always the most palatable) but seeing it in The Times is a bit surprising.
In the business section it is
argued that McDonalds has finally conquered France - an odd assertion given its business there has for a long time been very successful.
And a strange letter. Measurements do seem to bring out some weird views, and
this letter is illustrative (Jonathan Miles is informative).
Sir, We have had to suffer many changes being a member of the EU but the latest directive 80/181/EEC is, in appropriate farming terms, “the last straw”. I have a good idea of the size of an acre, having being told at school that a nearby public park was 15 acres. But 6.069 hectares doesn’t create the same mental picture.
Peter A. Rushforth
Cullingworth, W Yorks So Mr Rushfort can mentally divide a park, which presumably isn't a perfect rectangle, into 15 bits and hence gauge the size of an acre, but he can't divide it into 6? I think he might think the park has actually
changed size if you talk about it in hectares.
Labels: The Times
Royal banquets
I should have
read on, but I had to look up apian. I thought possibility it meant ape-like.
Labels: Lack of education
Tory candidate quits
A rather unusual story over in Watford about a Tory election candidate who it is
alleged (he has not been charged) has been criminally harassing his opponents. It'll be interesting to see his battle to clear his name.
Labels: conservatives
IMF raises UK growth forecast
It now expects the UK economy to record growth of 1.8% in 2008, up from April's forecasst of 1.6%. It expects 2009 growth to be 1.7%, up from 1.6% in April. Q4 on Q4 growth, which might give a slightly better representation of the slowdown was 2.8% in 2007, and is forecast to fall to just 1.3% this year, then rebound to 2.2% in 2009.
Labels: economics
Times leader competition
A. “We are all minorities now,” declared Jeremy Thorpe after the inconclusive general election of February 1974. The Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg enjoy a poll rating comparable to that achieved by Mr Thorpe. At the time this figure was seen as a breakthrough. Now there is a sense that the Lib Dems remain stubbornly ensconced as a minority, while the other parties enjoy alternating large majorities. Mr Clegg's leadership is not regarded as providing a way out.
B. For her meeting with Janice Turner, of times2, Mrs Gül was a picture of cheerful optimism. Yet if the judiciary that regards itself as custodian of Turkish secularism has its way, she will not be First Lady for much longer. Despite the solid parliamentary majority that enabled her husband to become President, the country's Constitutional Court is determined to press ahead with a case intended to outlaw the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and ban its leading members from politics.
C. Yesterday was a day for bogeys and yips, not birdies and eagles. Phil Mickelson is the world No 2. So, in the absence of Tiger, he is the favourite on paper. But even he managed a triple bogey seven on the 6th, which is some sort of dystopic score for him and the Open. Nevertheless, it was understandable but wet of Sandy Lyle to chuck in his putter and walk in at the 10th. He had reason: “My hands were hurting from a few real skanky shots.” He was 11 over par after a string of bogeys. At the 8th his ball had bounced on top of his partner's, and ricocheted 30 yards through the green. And the 10th is a sharp dogleg to the left through a Himalaya of dunes.
Mmm, well we can rule out C, I think, as Oliver has never expressed any interest in any sport as far as I am aware. B or A? A might be considered too nice to the Lib Dems, whilst B uses the style times2, which I expect Oliver would have avoided if he could. I disagree with something in A, by the way (not in the excerpt there). The leader writer criticises the Lib Dem proposal to cut the number of MPs (of which I am only aware because he/she (or are they all hes?) mentions it) but this has always seemed to me the only proposal that would increase the power of the legislature vis-a-vis the executive, and indeed perhaps that is why the writer doesn't support it?
Labels: The Times
Will the last person to leave turn off the lights?
Good god
no. Milburn?
Labels: Dunkirk
Times leader comp
I've let you down...I forgot.
Here's
a) “Die, my dear doctor?” Palmerston asked on his deathbed. “That's the last thing I shall do.” Very shortly afterwards he did. At home, in his bed. In the 19th century most people did. Today most of us say that we, too, wish to die in our own beds, in familiar surroundings, warmed by the love of our families and by our memories.
b) A melancholy line was drawn under Israel's 2006 war with Lebanon yesterday when two black coffins were unloaded at a United Nations base on the Israeli-Lebanese border and the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers were returned to their homeland. In exchange for the remains of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, army reservists whose seizure by Hezbollah sparked the 34-day conflict in Lebanon, Israel released a terrorist serving a life sentence for the deaths of four Israelis as well as four other Lebanese prisoners.
c)The future doesn't look red for phone boxes, or even rosy. It looks black. BT has plans to remove 9,000 of them that have long since stopped making money. But the problem is not that people hardly use them any more for making phone calls. It is that neither BT nor its customers have bothered to think outside the box and reimagine them as strategically located, multi-purpose, public interest booths.
Good grief. Surely (c)?
Labels: The Times
Is it Right to be Anti-American?
I spent my summer holiday reading Tony Judt's book on post-war Europe. That's hardly a fanatically pro-USA tome, but it does make one pause, and wonder exactly what motivates people like
Nick Cohen when they declare it is 'Right' to be
Anti-American.
Labels: Nick Cohen
Times leader competition
1.
Should women planning to have children expect to be assessed by prospective employers on exactly the same basis as candidates not planning to have children? Should women returning to their jobs after maternity leave expect the same pay and status as they had before? Should employers be penalised for discriminating against women in either case.
2.
“Opening doors” was once the slogan of the US Federal National Mortgage Association, colloquially known as Fannie Mae. American taxpayers now face the displeasing irony of playing an involuntary role in keeping the doors open at Fannie Mae and its sibling, Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation).
3.
They should, perhaps, have seen it coming. Christians have been speaking out in public ever since the Pentecostal gift of tongues demolished the language barrier and spread the good word around the world. And was it not from the aisles and pews of St Mary the Virgin in Putney beside the Thames that Cromwell and the Levellers went back and forth in 1647, ranting and praying, on universal suffrage, God's place in civil society and what should be done about the King?
Mmmm...tricky one. No.2 is the obvious choice because of the subject, but it doesn't quite seem right.
Labels: The Times
Tomorrow's Times
Congratulations to
Oliver Kamm, who from tomorrow is going to write some of the leader columns in The Times. It's a far cry from where he began his 'old media' career, as the Noam Chomsky Affairs
columnist on Frontpage magazine, and a vindication of the power of blogging, a subject I know he has been very forthright on.
This also allows us the chance of a game - '
Guess the Oliver Kamm leader'. I believe there are three a day on the Times, and I presume Oliver won't write all of them. So from Tuesday we'll have a go - if it's about Noam Chomsky we'll start on Wednesday. The prize, now Mick's album is on every Daily Mail reader's CD shelf, is a copy of John Lloyd's great work, 'W
hat the Media is doing to our Politics'.
Labels: Games, Stars
A message to potential Tory voters and homeowners!
Well actually to opinion poll respondents, but it's much the same thing. It seems to me that the 'hardworking families' of Great Britain have given themselves to the Conservative Party too easily. When things were looking less good for the Tories, they made large cuts in inheritance tax. This is not likely to benefit many households, but it was popular (partly I think because of confusion over the incidence of the tax). Even more popular, and with far greater benefits to far more households, would be the reintroduction of mortgage interest tax relief. This has been abolished entirely since 2000-01, and was at steadily reduced rates from about 1990 (and only on £30,000 of mortgage loans, a rate that itself was hardly changed from the 1970s; before then it was unlimited althogh slightly different in application).
Scaling that £30,000 up by house prices, we get about £90,000, so call it £100,000. At the current mortgage rate that is an interest bill of about £500/month. Tax relief on this at the lower rate would be something like £100/m and at the higher rate £200/month. Outstanding mortage debt is over £1tr, so if all of these got basic rate tax relief it would cost something like £12-15bn. Not all mortgage payers would be eligible, and of course a £100,000 cap would mean much lower figures - i.e. easily affordable for a Conservative opposition looking to make a splash, even if extended to higher-rate taxpayers.
But it's too late now - perhaps Gordon will consider it?
Labels: conservatives
Holiday reading fact no.2
By the early 1960s, the private micro-farms that Kruschchev had sporadically encouraged in the Soviet Union and accounted for 3% of cultivated soil were yielding over 33% of the Soviet Union's agricultural output, and by 1965 2/3rd of the potatoes and 3/4 of the eggs.
Source: Same as below.
Labels: Economcs
A Tory landslide
If the opinion polls remain as they are the Conservatives are likely to have a larger majority than Labour did in 1997. Most of the Conservative MPs will be very anti-European, and it seems possible, if still not likely, that the UK will leave the European Union. Which got me wondering - does out 'Citizenship of the European Union' automatially end if we were to leave, or could we have dual citizenship? The concept wasn't around when Greenland left, which is the only example of a country leaving (I think). The
Wikipedia page is not that helpful in answering this question, and I imagine even if the UK government was happy the other countries wouldn't be. But as individuals do we have a say (of course the UK government could say they were incompatible, in which case presumably most people would renounce their EU citizenship).
Labels: EU, Tories
Holiday reading fact no.1
In 1947, after war demobilisation but before the defence budget increases of the Korean war, the UK had:
A full naval fleet in the Atlantic, another in the Mediterranean and a third in the Indian ocean, together with a permanent 'China station'.
120 Royal Air Force squadrons worldwide.
Armies or part of armies in Hong Kong, Malaya, Persian Gulf, North Africa, Trieste, Austria, West Germany and the UK.
[in reply to which members of the H'S'JS might say 'and what has changed?']
Source: Post War by Tony Judt
Labels: Books, War
