Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Monday

Alex Massie

Why Fox-Hunting Matters

Members of the Bicester and Whaddon Chase Hunt. Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images. And so it begins. As a traditionalist when it comes to these matters, I think it best that parties wait until they win an election before they water down or abandon their promises. Apparently, however, that's an old-fashioned view these days. Despite repeated promises that there would be a government-sponsored bill to repeal the Hunting Act, it seems that Dave's Conservatives are preparing to abandon that commitment and leave the matter to a Private Members' Bill. According to Melissa Kite's Telegraph report: The shadow cabinet member in charge of hunting last night confirmed that the party was considering the move.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Sunday Evening Country: The Louvin Brothers

Elvis Presley once said that the Louvin Brothers were his favourite country musicians. But he nver recorded one of their songs. Perhaps because, like almost everyone else who ever had any dealings with the Alabama-born and raised brothers, he'd been cussed out by Ira Louvin.  Charlie said that his elder brother was all kinds of messed up by religion. Perhaps. But whether they were singing gospel, traditional murder ballads or their own compositions there were few better examples of harmony singing than Ira and Charlie Louvin. Here they are performing I Can't Keep You in Love With Me. Which was, for Ira anyway, kinda true: after he tried to strangle his third wife with a telephone cord, she shot him five times with a .22 pistol.

Friday

Alex Massie

The Nobel Peace Prize Jumps the Shark

I mean, really, how absurd. We are accustomed to being baffled by the Nobel committee, but the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is entirely preposterous. Apparently: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the Norwegian committee said in a statement. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population." Asked why the prize had been awarded to Mr Obama less than a year after he took office, Nobel committee head Thorbjoern Jagland said: "It was because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve".

Thursday

Alex Massie

David Cameron Prepares for Government

At first I thought it a little unfortunate that David Cameron's peroration today unconsciously - I assume - echoed the Royal Bank of Scotland's slogan "Make it happen". But actually, the rise and fall of RBS is something of a template for the rise and fall of governments. Years of promise and fat and profit encourage excessive self-confidence and over-expansion that ends with a devastating, humiliating crash. That has been Labour's experience and it will eventually be the Tories' story too, assuming that Cameron and his pals form the next government. This was a bleak, sombre speech. Perhaps even excessively so.

Alex Massie

Tories Pledge Painless Defence Cuts?

So, the headlines from Liam Fox's speech today concentrate on his pledge to reduce MoD costs by 25% without, of course, there being any impact on "front-line troops". Our old chum Mr Efficiency Savings is being asked to report for yet another tour of duty. Doubtless there are indeed parts of the defence civil service that can be pruned and reformed. But, as this post from Think Defence suggests, this isn't going to be easy. Indeed, there are probably areas of the MoD civilian service that need an increase in staff, not a cut. But, again, I still don't understand Tory priorities.

Alex Massie

Israel’s Enemy Within

I confess I don't know very much about Isi Leibler, but he's a columnist at the Jerusalem Post who wrote this week that: The exploitation of Judge Goldstone's Jewish background by our enemies intensifies our obligation to confront the enemy within - renegade Jews - including Israelis who stand at the vanguard of global efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. Such odious Jews can be traced back to apostates during the Middle Ages who fabricated blood libels and vile distortions of Jewish religious practice for Christian anti-Semites to incite hatred which culminated in massacres. It was in response to these renegades that the herem (excommunication) was introduced...

Alex Massie

Organ Markets: Still Needed

This is why we need an organ market: The number of people agreeing to donate their organs after death is growing, but at a slower rate than the number of patients who need them, a report warns. The first year of a concerted effort to boost UK donation rates did see the number of transplants rise as more co-ordinated services were implemented. But the Organ Donation Taskforce notes the waiting list continues to grow... One of the key factors behind this increase is the increasing incidence of kidney failure in the UK - particularly in the over-50s and black and ethnic minority communities. Of those on the list 1,000 will die while waiting, or are removed because they have become too ill to undergo a transplant.

Alex Massie

Story of the Day

I think this is probably the best intro you're likely to read all day week: A gay man tried to poison his lesbian neighbours by putting slug pellets into their curry after he was accused of kidnapping their three-legged cat. Fair play to the Daily Mail. This is tabloid, er, catnip. As always, the story itself is a little sadder than the lede, but that's the kind of sentence you don't get to write very often. Hats off to Jaya Narain, the hack responsible for this gem.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Modern Mysteries: Some People Take Newt Gingrich Seriously.

One of the great oddities of the moment is the apparent belief, held in some circles, that Newt Gingrich is some kind of political soothsayer. Granted, this notion is mainly fostered by Newt himself but it remains perplexing that so many people seem prepared to grant him the guru status he craves with such unbecoming, grasping immodesty. Now, you may say, Newt is merely a superior entertainer and not someone to be taken too seriously. But some people, not least Newt himself, do take him terribly seriously. That being the case, let's have a look at the interview he's just given National Review.

Alex Massie

The Man Who Would Be a Peer: General Sir Richard Dannatt

Plenty of Tories are, it seems, cock-a-hoop about the news, still to be confirmed, that General Sir Richard Dannatt is to be elevated to the House of Lords where he will become a Tory defence adviser and, perhaps, a minister in the next Conservative government. And, in fairness, one can see why the Conservatives would be so pleased. There's no-one on the Labour benches who brings as much firepower to the political battlefield as General Dannatt. Yet if the government's criticisms of General Dannatt were, at times, unseemly then so too was his very public dissension from (aspects of)  government policy at a time when he was, after all, in charge of implementing that policy. General Dannatt thought little of stepping outside the chain-of-command.

Alex Massie

David Cameron & the Special Relationship

The FT's Philip Stephens gave the traditional fretting over the future of the Special Relationship a novel twist yesterday: Tory hostility to the EU threatens the transatlantic relationship too. Actually, there's something to this. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf summarises how the London-Washington axis may look if Cameron is elected next May: U.S.-U.K. history and cultures are such that the relationship will always be different from that we have other countries. But it seems quite possible that with an unsentimental post-modern president in the White House who seems destined to have a chilly partnership with the odds-on favorite to be the next Prime Minister of the U.K.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Does Obama Care About Human Rights in Iran?

As readers know, in general terms I think the Obama administration has taken a fairly sensible, moderate approach towards Iran. Nevertheless, it's possible to take this too far. And this seems, on the face of it, to be one example of when carefulness crosses the line and becomes craven: For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.

Alex Massie

CCTV Britain: Welcome to our Dystopia

Then again, if things are bad in Ireland, they're also pretty ghastly here too. Consider this story from the Times today: Britain, already one of the most snooped-upon nations on Earth, is about to become a nation of snoopers. A network of citizen crimewatchers will be given the chance of winning up to £1,000 by monitoring CCTV security cameras over the internet. The cameras’ owners will pay a fee to have users watch the footage. The scheme, Internet Eyes, is being promoted as a game and is expected to go “live” next month with a test run in Stratford-upon-Avon. Subscribers will be able to register free and will be given up to four cameras to monitor.

Alex Massie

Department of Things Could Be Worse: Irish Edition

George Osborne may be warning of austere times ahead, but the situation is much graver on the other side of the Irish sea. Yesterday's Irish Times revealed the startling details of a new plan to resuce Hibernia. Even the cute hoors are cheap hoors now. [Hat-tip: BadJournalism via Twitter. My Twitter feed is here.

Alex Massie

Despite Pundits’ Best Efforts, Afghanistan Stubbornly Refuses to be Obama’s Vietnam

So, you see, Barack Obama is a Democratic president just like Jack Kennedy and LBJ and, right, there's a war going on in Aghanistan which is in asia, just like Vietnam! So the parallels are just uncanny. Right? Wrong. It's time, people. for a comprehensive ban on making facile comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Prospect's Tom Streithorst is only the latest fellow to warn that Afghanistan "could destroy Obama’s presidency, as Vietnam did Johnson’s." This seems extremely unlikely. Let's trot through some of the reasons: 1. 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam. The current figure for Afghanistan? 796. There may be quite a number of troops involved but Afghanistan is, by the standards of these things, a small and non-deadly war.

Monday

Alex Massie

Leaking Anti-Leaking Advice

Sweet. This had to happen: A Ministry of Defence document giving advice on how to stop documents leaking onto the internet has been leaked onto the internet. ...The 2,400-page restricted document has found its way on to Wikileaks, a website that publishes anonymous leaks of sensitive information from organisations including governments, corporations and religions. Known in the services as Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP 440), it was published in 2001. As Wikileaks notes, it is the document that is used as justification for the monitoring of certain websites, including Wikileaks itself. Also: The document is particularly keen to avoid the attentions of journalists, noting them as "threats" alongside foreign intelligence services, criminals, terrorist groups and disaffected staff.

Alex Massie

School’s Out: The Swedish Model is Not the Only One.

Like other sensible people I'm encouraged by the Tories plans for education in England. The Swedish system of Free Schools has a lot to be said for it. Still, I wonder why the Tories have chosen Sweden as their role model rather than, say, the Netherlands or New Zealand both of which also have extensive school choice programmes. As you can see, both those countries score very well on the PISA* scale (generally seen, I think, as the best international comparison) and do markedly better than the UK. Of course, Michael Gove's writ runs out at the Tweed. Which is a shame, since education policy in Scotland remains wholly in hock to the EIS and the other teaching unions.

Alex Massie

Ignore the Party, You should Vote for the Best Candidate

For some time since I came of voting age I took the view that it was more important to vote (when I bothered to vote) for the party, not the man (or woman). A lot of people, perhaps even a majority of the electorate, think this way. But I  now think I was wrong and they are wrong too. Voting for the party, regardless of the inadequacies of your local candidate, is easy. Taking the time to learn which of your local constituency candidates most deserves your support takes, well, effort. But I think that effort is worthwhile. The expenses scandal may have brought some welcome clarity to this view. There are plenty of incumbent charlatans and rogues  who deserve to be turfed from office, regardless of their party affiliation.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Wodehouse vs Wodehouse

OK, some Sunday fun and games. A wee while back Patrick Kidd had a nice item in which Henry Blofeld listed his all-time cricket XI drawn from PG Wodehouse characters. This is the sort of throoughly entertaining, pointless exercise Wodehouse would have relished himself. And, for that matter, the sort of un-made challenge that cannot be resisted. I have, therefore, selected an XI of my own to battle Blowers' team. A Gold Bat should be awarded to the winning side, methinks. First, the Blofeld XI, with Henry's annotations: 1. Bertie Wooster. A bit of a flasher with the bat, I think. 2. Roderick Spode. Also known as Lord Sidcup, the only man in the books who never has one single redeeming feature, unless you include making women's underwear.