Since I discovered this interview on Armando Iannucci's Twitter feed I wondered if it was actually a spoof. But no, it seems Bill Shorten really is an Australian politician and not an Ocker Chris Morris. Anyway, for the time being it is my new favourite political interview...
On the global scale of hackish irritation, the American left's persistent determination to misdiagnose the reasons behind Britain's faltering economy cannot be considered the most grievous pundit-crime. Nevertheless, it remains annoying. Here, for instance, is Joe Klein: Word now comes that Great Britain has slipped back into recession after several years of David Cameron’s austerity experiment. It seems, yet again, that John Maynard Keynes has been proven right. Real Keynesianism–government deficit spending–is essential when economies go bottom up. This can mean more government programs or lower taxes, or a combination of the two. That would seem to be plain vanilla logic, right?
I suppose one should not be surprised that so much of the reaction to the first round of voting in the French presidential election has concentrated on Marine Le Pen. Fascists (or neo-fascists) are always good copy; far-right parties led by women are even better. Nevertheless, like so many other dramas there is less to this than might appear to be the case if you only read the headlines or listened to the BBC. Granted, Le Pen and FN won 17.9% of the vote in last Sunday's first round. But what of it? In 2002 Marine Le Pen's father won 17.8%. If this is the National Front on the march it is taking a long time to get anywhere. Moreover, the circumstances for extremist parties are vastly more favourable now than they were a decade ago.
Further to that last post, Leveson released more than 100 pages of News Corp correspondence this afternoon. Alex Salmond features in four emails sent by Fred Michel, the Murdochs' chief lobbyist and PR guy: 1. 1/11/10 - Libdem MP, former Sky employee, with major Sky customer centres in his constituency and around will contact Vince Cable to ask himm to bear in mind the economic/investment point of view rather than getting influenced by political games, especially in times of austerity and very difficult economic environment for those areas. He will also emphasise the opportunity for Cable to show the maturity of the Libdems as coalition partners, working for the long-term, and will draw from the Coaliton government experience lib-dems have had in Scotland.
One thing to be kept in mind as we consider the extent of the government's links to News International is that it helps explain why neither the Telegraph nor Mail groups are wholly in favour of David Cameron and his ministry. It is, I think, fairly clear that the Conservative leadership was happy to accede to Rupert Murdoch's attempts to purchase the shares in BSkyB that he did not already own. Following today's revelations at the Leveson Inquiry, Jeremy Hunt's jacket now rests upon a super-shoogly peg. Several bookmakers have ceased taking bets on the Culture Secretary being the next minister to leave the cabinet.
Of all the cockamamie ploys favoured by this government, House of Lords reform is close to being both the most pointless and the most aggravating. Iain Martin hints at this in his recent Telegraph post but he is, in the end, too kind to the Deputy Prime Minister. This is the sort of wheeze favoured by undergraduates blessed with second-class second-class minds. It is close to pointless because even if anyone outside the tiny world of "progressive" think tanks thought this a vital issue there is no evidence that it is in the slightest bit necessary. Which explains why it is aggravating. Th House of Lords, as presently constituted (that is, by patronage, divine blessing and a modest measure of hereditary good fortune), may not "make sense" but, despite everything, it works.
Elgar, of course, gets into my own English XI alongside the likes of Housman, Wodehouse, Shackleton*, Orwell, Turing etc etc. *Anglo-Irish, of course, as a commenter points out and so, perhaps, should not be on this list.
I've also written a piece for Foreign Policy on the great Bahrain Grand Prix controversy: The irony is that a race designed to flatter and showcase the Bahraini regime has instead become a focal point for unrest, shining a light upon a repressive government whose actions would not receive nearly as much attention in the European and international press if Bahrain had not purchased the right to host motor racing's traveling circus. That, however, is small comfort when set beside the moral iniquity of millionaires and billionaires fretting about tire temperatures and race set-ups while pretending that all is sunshine and sweetness.
I've written a column for Scotland on Sunday today looking at the SNP's transformation into a proper national party: [T]wo SNP approaches have helped the party attain its present supremacy. They can be labelled the Hampden and Murrayfield strategies. They are different but complementary, designed to appeal to different branches of the electorate. The Hampden strategy appeals to working-class and lower-to-middle-class voters. It is populist, Saltire-wrapped and keenly, proudly Scottish. The Murrayfield tranche of the electorate is older, wealthier and more likely to consider itself Scottish and British. Though outnumbered by the Hampden vote, its influence – especially in business and the media – is disproportionately powerful.
We are indebted to Michelle Mulherin, Fine Gael TD for Mayo, for offering this gem during a Dail debate on Ireland's abortion laws: “In an ideal world there would be no unwanted pregnancies and no unwanted babies. But we are far from living in an ideal world,” Deputy Mulherin said. "Abortion as murder, therefore sin, which is the religious argument, is no more sinful, from a scriptural point of view, than all other sins we don’t legislate against, like greed, hate and fornication. The latter, being fornication, I would say, is probably the single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancies in this country.” That "probably" is lovely. Alas, Deputy Mulherin did not tell the Dail what else might cause unwanted pregnancies. Even in Mayo.
David Starkey's declne from competent historian to reactionary nitwit has been a sad business. I'm afraid it shows no sign of abating either. The Huffington Post has this: Historian Dr David Starkey has compared Scottish first minister Alex Salmond to Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler. "If you think about it, Alex Salmond is a democratic Caledonian Hitler, although some would say Hitler was more democratically elected," he said. "[For him] the English, like the Jews, are everywhere" he added to gasps from the audience. Starkey was speaking at a debate, hosted by the Bow Group think tank, on the teaching of British history in UK schools. Oh dear.
Commenting on the publication of photographs of American soldiers in Afghanistan posing with the severed limbs of their dead Afghan opponents, Andrew Sullivan says this is "What Empire Does": The sickening pictures speak for themselves. At what point will we recognize that inserting ourselves into places like Afghanistan and Iraq will change us, has changed us, and will change us. Mercifully, this latest inhuman excrescence is not government policy, as at Abu Ghraib. But it exposes even more deeply the inherent failure and moral corruption of occupying Afghanistan and the need to withdraw sooner rather than later. Oh please. This is what war does to men at arms.
As Pete said yesterday, the arrest and presumed deportation of Abu Qatada to Jordan is worth a cheer or two. So too is the fact that the British government orefers to act within the law, not outside it. The government insists it has received assurances from the Jordanians that Qatada will face a fair trial (or, perhaps more accurately, as fair a trial as can reasonably be expected). This is also worth a cheer, even if one cannot be wholly confident of the worth of these assurances. Most of all, however, these developments are a victory for the too-often-maligned European Court of Human Rights. Granted, this assumes the Court will eventually rule that Qatada can be deported to his homeland but, presuming this is the case, far from impugning the court's worth the Qatada saga justifies it.
Sure, the Economist's cover story has received heaps of attention these past few days but it's not the most interesting or even the most important cover story published by a British political magazine last week. Though I would say this, Neil O'Brien's "Planet London" article for the Spectator is the piece the Scottish National Party should be more interested in. O'Brien makes a compelling case that London is now, more than ever, a place apart. Its triumph is both magnificent and dangerous. Magnificent because London is, in ways scarcely conceivable forty years ago, a global behemoth; dangerous because of the distorting effect this must have on British politics. In significant ways, O'Brien suggests, London has left the rest of the United Kingdom behind.
Crivvens, what a stramash there's been over the cover of the Economist's UK edition this week. Skintland is a pretty feeble effort, really, and one not entirely supported by the evidence the Economist brings to support its case. Nevertheless, the dismal chippyness of much of the nationalist reaction to this was more offensive than anything any London newspaper could say on the subject of Caledonian indepndence. There was talk, on twitter admittedly, of reporting the Economist to the Race Relations Industry as well as the Press Complaints Commission. The cover illustration was reputed to be grossly offensive (to all Scots, no less) and, worse still, it was said to be a classic example of Little Englander imperialism.
For political types there's little doubt about the publishing event of the year: the fourth volume of Robert Caro's mammoth biography of Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times published a swell piece at the weekend which, as such pieces must, made it clear that Caro is the most unusual, and perhaps the best, biographer of our age. If it is madness to spend nearly 40 years writing about LBJ then it is a special and useful madness. The new volume, The Passage of Power, is only 700 or so pages long (compared to the 1,200 pages of its predecessor, Master of the Senate) but only covers six years: It begins in 1958, with Johnson, so famously decisive and a man of action, dithering as he decides whether or not to run in the 1960 presidential election.
If this has been a disappointing spring for David Cameron, it has been a calamitous season for George Osborne. The notion of Prime Minister Osborne has always struck me as odd but, on present trends anyway, it is one that need not trouble us any longer. I fancy many voters are able to resist the Osborne charm and though the "common touch" is not essential to success some basic understanding of how your decisions may be perceived surely is. And Osborne appears utterly deficient in that department. For a so-called master strategist he appears hopeless at tactics and, perhaps, strategy too. As Andrew McKie, writing in the Herald, puts it today: The reality is that Mr Osborne's roles as principal strategist and chief tin-rattler for the Exchequer are fundamentally incompatible.
Well, that was a longer hiatus than had been intended. Back now, however. While I was loafing taking a break, this blog quietly celebrated its fifth birthday. Some of you patient or long-suffering sous have been here from the start. Many thanks to you and your more recently-arrived brethren for, well, just for being here. Thanks also to Megan McArdle and Garance Franke-Ruta who were among those pals chivvying me to start a blog back then. Equally, hosannas to James Forsyth who brought the blog into the Spectator's fold and, latterly, to Pete Hoskin and David Blackburn for all their help and so on.
I'm awa to Jura for Easter and posting is likely to be light. This will probably be the case even if there is electricity on the island this time. I trust all readers will enjoy a splendid Easter. See you next week.
Since he has previously been elected in Glasgow and London, I don't know if it is so astonishing that George Galloway won a by-election in Bradford. Anyway, if you have a couple of hours to spare ou might enjoy this debate between Galloway and Christopher Hitchens. As Christopher put it: "The man's hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends. The Soviet Union let him down, Albania's gone. Saddam's been overthrown. But on to the next, in Damascus." Quite.