Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Monday

Alex Massie

A Case for Scrapping the Joint Strike Fighter?

From our UK edition

Photo: Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images Cato's Tad DeHaven and Think Defence each have good posts on the future of the increasingly troubled Joint Strike Fighter. Costs have risen by 50% since 2001 and the plane is already looking like it will be delivered years late. Since the main justification for the JSF was that it was going to control costs this is a problem. The Americans will stick with it, but does that mean we have to? At present we seem to be heading for the worst of all possible worlds. As Think Defence puts it: It does not take a genius to work out that volumes will be reduced and we all know where that ends, a procurement death spiral where increasing development costs have to be spread over fewer and fewer production orders driving the cost up and so on. Quite.

Alex Massie

Dave, California and Greece

From our UK edition

So I had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times yesterday in which, inter alia, I compared Britain's fiscal position with Greece's (but at least we have the Elgin Marbles...) and the lack of faith in the political process to California's own dysfunctional system. Matt Yglesias thinks this exaggerated and, well, "pretty flawed" For one thing, while it may be true that the British public has a California-esque level of faith in the political process, the fact is that the British political process is very different from California’s. Realistically, the next UK government’s fate will hinge on its ability to deliver economic growth.

Alex Massie

The Tories’ Second-Best Recruiting Sergeant…

From our UK edition

Things have come to a pretty pass when the Secretary of State for Education endorses ignorance and scoffs at knowledge pretending, one is given to understand, that it's just a kind of posh irrelevance favoured only by the terminally stuffy and fuddy-duddy and out-of-touch. Such, however, seems to be the case for you poor English folk, lumbered as you are with the grim Mr Edward Balls. I'd thought Boris must be exaggerrating matters in his Telegraph  column today. As the Mayor puts it: "Speaking on the radio, Spheroids dismissed the idea that Latin could inspire or motivate pupils.

Friday

Alex Massie

To Murrayfield…

From our UK edition

No blogging here until Monday: it's Calcutta Cup weekend and I'm off to Edinburgh today for the festivities. It's an odd feeling this, the notion that England aren't the obvious and heavy favourites. Two average sides will meet tomorrow and it's quite possible they will produce the worst match of the championship. How grim that would be depends, naturally, on the actual outcome. It can't be any worse than the 1988 fixture which was, quite possibly, the worst game of rugby I've ever attended. Really, we should have a better anthem than Flower of Scotland. It's a pretty rotten and, in some senses, sentimental dirge. Just occasionally, however, it aspires to be something bigger and better than that.

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Hurt Locker, the Fast Show and David Cameron

From our UK edition

Think Defence has some fun with this video, suggesting that it's a British version of The Hurt Locker. But actually, it's also a mini-exemplar of some of the debates currently being heard in Tory circles. From the perspective of the Tory grass roots and true believers, the officer in charge here not only looks like David Cameron, he proceeds with the same degree of muddling caution they find so frustrating. The Hefferite and chuntering wing of the party is more in tune with the "Sod this" type of robust approach - especially, though far from exclusively, when it comes to cutting public spending. But getting away with this in a Fast Show sketch isn't quite the same as getting away with it in a real-life general election campaign...

Alex Massie

Annals of Chutzpah: Obama Edition

From our UK edition

Thanks to Matt Welch for spotting this splendid piece of "What me?" nonsense from the President: As we were driving in, I was saying, boy, it's just good to be back in the Midwest, this is about as close as I've been to home in a while.  And part of the reason it's just good to be back is because Washington is a place where tax dollars are often treated like Monopoly money -- they're bartered and traded, and they're divvied up among lobbyists and special interests, and where waste -- even billions of dollars of waste -- is accepted as the price of doing business.  When we proposed, by the way, those $20 billion in cuts last year, we were ridiculed by the press, said, "Ah, that's just a spit in the bucket."  Now, I don't know about here in St.

Alex Massie

Gordon’s McCavity Days Are Ending

From our UK edition

Watching the news last night, I was struck by how little one had seen of Gordon Brown on TV recently. No wonder the polls have tightened. But the Prime Minister, alas, cannot play McCavity forever. The "bullying" allegations weren't as damaging as they might have been in other circumstances because, for many, they merely confirmed that Brown is an impossible individual and, frequently, an unpleasant one too. But people already knew or suspected that. Instead, the papers and the teevee have been dominated by Ashcroft and the Tory wobble. In a sense this was a verdict on the government too: since few people expected Labour to win, it's sensible to tak a long look at the opposition.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Brown in the City

From our UK edition

A telling anecdote from Andrew Rawnsley's book: Subjects that interested him [Gordon Brown] - such as welfare reform, employment and poverty- received enormous attention. Ministers in areas which did not engage him, such as financial regulation, barely saw him. Ruth Kelly, a young and abl junior miniter put in charge of the City, was labelled a Brownite by the media simply because she worked at the Treasury. In fact the City minister had one ten-minute conversation with Brown a fortnight after her appointment and then did not have another one-to-one conversation with him for two years. That's on page 69 and the source is given as "a cabinet minister".

Alex Massie

The Limits of American Power: Israel and Iran Editions

From our UK edition

I agree with Melanie Phillips that the principle reason there's no middle-east preace prcess worth the name is the Palestinian's reluctance to recognise and guarantee Israel's security. I believe there are other reasons too, mind you, that help to obstruct any path towards a proper and just settlement. Still, since Melanie doesn't believe there should be a Palestinian state, what does she think should be done? However much some people might wish it, the Palestinians cannot be wished away. They're not going anywhere. Right? And if this is so, then at some point some kind of a deal will have to be reached. Perhaps not for many years, but sometime for sure. Meanwhile, I'm somewhat perplexed by her estimation of American power.

Alex Massie

Karl Rove’s Idea of the Special Relationship

From our UK edition

Dave Weigel has an entertaining takedown of Karl Rove's new memoir Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (a title that, oddly, is simultaneously vainglorious and reeking of self-pity). Meanwhile, here's a snippet of the Rovian style, as relayed by Andrew Rawnsley in his new book*. It's December 2000 and George W Bush has just become President: [Sir Christopher] Meyer [then British ambassador to Washington] had done his best to cultivate relationships with the Bush team. Karl Rove, Bush's senior political strategist sent both encouragement and a warning, via Meyer: "You're going to start with a blank sheet of paper. By your works shall ye be known." Blair's critics might contend that he took this warning to heart and held it there too close and for too long.

Alex Massie

Let us now praise Simon Hoggart

From our UK edition

Simon Hoggart remains a treasure. His sketch in today's Guardian begins thus: It's going to be an awful campaign, awful. Yesterday we were at Labour HQ (they still have a smart new building in Westminster, but after the election they may move to a scout hut in Streatham) to see a video. It was introduced by the home secretary and by Harriet Harman, glossier than ever. Her eyes were like French-polished lentils. I spoke to colleagues afterwards, and we agreed that she seemed to be staring balefully at each of us. Like a very cross Mona Lisa, her eyes follow you round the room. Alan Johnson has been buried deep in the Home Office for months now.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Obama is Pot Committed

From our UK edition

Tony Blair used to say that "The job of being Labour leader is to save the Labour party from itself." Right now, I suspect that's how the Democratic Leadership in the House of Representatives feels about trying to rustle-up 216 votes for health care reform*. Defections from Blue Dogs in Red States are one thing; threats from safely-ensconsed left-wingers for whom the bill doesn't go far enough are quite another. Verily, there will be much lamentation if the left kills the bill and thoughts will quickly turn to vengeance. So will the damn thing pass or not? Jonathan Bernstein says he thinks it will, Karlyn Bowman says it would be remarkable if it does, given the ferocity of the opposition to the bill, leading Megan McArdle to act as umpire: They're both right!

Alex Massie

Waterboarding for Slow Learners

From our UK edition

Astonishingly there remain some people who don't think that waterboarding prisoners rises to the level of torture. In Dick Cheney's off-hand formulation it's merely "dunking in water" - as though the process was some kind of ride at the funfair or comparable to having a bucket of gloop tipped over you in a TV game show. Helpfully, Mark Benjamin has a piece at Salon explaining how it really works: Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show.

Alex Massie

British Tea Parties?

From our UK edition

Rod Dreher had a good post riffing on David Brooks column last week which is in turn well worth reading. Brooks argues, astutely in my view, that the Tea Party movement is in many ways the flipside of the 1960s New Left: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it. Indeed. And since many American political trends end up crossing the Atlantic it's probably not a great surprise that there are, or there want to be, British Tea Partiers too.

Alex Massie

The DNA Database Con

From our UK edition

What the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee gives with one hand: "The current situation of indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted is impossible to defend in light of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and unacceptable in principle," the committee says in a report published on 8 March 2010. [Emphasis added] It takes away with the other: Although the committee does not want a return to the pre-2004 situation of DNA being collected only on charging and not on arrest, it says that it should be easier for those wrongly arrested or who have volunteered their DNA to get their records removed from the database. Sigh. So it's the storing and not the collecting that is unacceptable? Half a pie is better than no pie, I suppose.

Alex Massie

Alice in Ulster

From our UK edition

A quick coda to this earlier post on the Tories and the Northern Ireland peace process: the approach taken by the Guardian (and others) is that the Tories must be a neutral, honest broker for the process, otherwise the whole thing may collapse. And how must the Tories demonstrate their honesty and neutrality? By chivvying, hectoring, persuading, bullying Reg Empey and the remaining official Unionists to support the deal on the devolution of policing and justice. In other words, by abandoning (at least one sense of) neutrality.

Alex Massie

An encouraging poll for the Tories?

From our UK edition

Over the course of the past year some people have, from time to time, been wise enough to remind us of just how difficult it will be for the Tories to win a majority. That's a consequence, of course, of their past anaemic performances (and a further reminder that the base is far from enough) and of the way that the current constituency boundaries are stacked against them. Nevertheless, I suspect many of us have under-estimated those warnings thinking that this Labour government is so-clapped out and unlikeable that surely the electorate will turn on them.

Monday

Alex Massie

When is George W Bush not the villain? When David Cameron is.

From our UK edition

Not the least of the entertainments* between now and polling day will be seeing how the Guardian manage to keep up their exhausting warnings of the dire consequences that will inevitably follow any Conservative victory. Nothing but nothing will be too trivial for the paper and that's fine: free press and all that. The best so far was the suggestion that the Tories are extremists who favour US-style gun laws so their youthful paramilitaries can storm NHS hospitals to control costs by executing anyone a) who voted Labour or b) looks like they might have voted Labour. Today's effort is only marginally less ridiculous. Apparently the Northern Ireland "peace process**" will be wrecked if the Tories get in.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Red Meat Toryism? Part 2.

From our UK edition

Commenting on this post, Tim Montgomerie writes: Did you actually read what I wrote Alex? Not once did I call for an end to the new Toryism. I advocated blending new and old messages. I did not suggest "banging on" about immigration but as voters' number two issue it should be part of the mix. I didn't even advocate talking about Europe at all. I said our three main messages should be (1) the economy, debt and regulating the banks; (2) immigration and crime; and (3) protecting the NHS and the vulnerable. Your readers who read what I actually wrote will get a very different sense of my argument. Now Tim's general point about "broadening" the party and its appeal is well-made and there is, as always, some perceptive stuff in his original post.

Alex Massie

Bravo Iceland!

From our UK edition

Our plucky friends in the north have done the right thing: Icelanders have overwhelmingly rejected a plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of pounds lost when Reykjavik's banks collapsed in 2008 Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93% opposed the deal and less than 2% supported it. The rest cast invalid votes. Good for them. Quite why the Icelandic government should be liable for the UK's entirely voluntary decision to bail out Icesave customers is a mystery. Still, it was the use of anti-terrorism laws to seize and freeze Icelandic assets in the UK that was especially disgraceful and, of course, a reminder of how draconian and open to abuse such laws are.