Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

Provocation of the Day

Andrew Sullivan issues it: Obama reminds me of a one-nation Tory, refitted for the austerity era. David Cameron would fit very easily into his cabinet, and vice-versa. I fancy some of this magazine's readers, to say nothing of less literate parts, headbangers True Believers elsewhere on the Tory right, worry Andrew may be right about this. I'm not so sure. I think Cameron's instincts are very different from Obama's but that each has been forced to compromise by unyielding events. If, by some chance, they had been in power 15 years ago I suspect their similarities, such as they are, would have seemed relatively trivial compared to their differences.

Alex Massie

A Gloomy Decade?

Tim Montgomerie is in full-on never waste a crisis mode today. Given the doom plastered across all the front pages (The Sun excepted) this is a good time for wheeling out old favourites: With the world economy facing such a bleak decade this is no time for half measures. We need to be cutting taxes on business and funding them with deeper cuts in the over-sized state. We should be suspending environmental measures that are imposing heavy and futile costs on our manufacturing industry. We shouldn't be loading new regulations on our banks until the economy is strong again. We need them to be lending.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Myth of American Isolationism

I like the Economist's Democracy in America blog very much and I like my friend Erica Grieder too. But her recent post on the debt-ceiling deal, the Pentagon's budget and the resurrected "threat" of American isolationism won't wash. Contemplating some conservatives' willingness to imagine cuts to the security budget she writes: There has always been an isolationist streak in the Republican Party. It's been suppressed in recent decades, particularly during the administration of George W. Bush. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were priorities for Mr Bush, and his presidency was polarising.

Alex Massie

The Last of Mr Norris

Mary Robinson was (and is!) a woman and, just as importantly, the first President of the Republic of Ireland whose candidacy was not backed by Fianna Fail. Her successor, Mary McAleese is originally from Northern Ireland and thus, like Robinson, some kind of outsider. Both women expanded the idea of the Irish presidency and, in some small measure, helped refine the notion of what it means to be Irish in a modern european context. So you can see why some felt that David Norris, the independent Senator representing Dublin University in the upper house, would make an excellent candidate to succeed Mrs McAleese. These may be grim economic times but Ireland could make some kind of declaration about itself by electing europe's first openly gay head of state.

Alex Massie

Surprise! Another Tory Defence Shambles

First things first: defence policy is difficult. Even more than is generally the case in other departments every decision made at the MoD is a question of trade-offs. This is true of all aspects of the brief: policy, personnel, procurement and so on. If you do this you can't do that and so on. Add the timescales involved and the realities of inter-service rivalry plus some unhelpful sniping from the Treasury and you can see why the MoD can become pretty dysfunctional pretty damn quickly. Nevertheless... Is anyone impressed by Tory defence policy? No, I didn't think so. Neither the Prime Minister nor his Chancellor appear to have much interest in Defence issues and it shows. Then again, at the MoD Liam Fox is hardly master of all he surveys either.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Death Penalty: A Matter of Emotion, Not Reason

As a torch-and-pitchfork populist it's not a great surprise that Guido Fawkes is in favour of the death penalty. Nor will it be a great shock when he gathers the 100,000 signatures needed to petition parliament* to consider reintroducing capital punishment. And I agree with my old friend Neill Harvey-Smith who, while opposing the death penalty, ain't afraid of discussing the issue even though, perhaps especially because, the polls consistently suggest a majority of voters would like to bring back hanging. So be it. Nelson Jones makes an astute point: the abolitionist cause was fortunate in its timing.

Alex Massie

Department of Bad Ideas: Polly Toynbee Writes About American Politics

Surprise! Polly Toynbee's column on the Tea Party today is a mess. You wouldn't expect La Doyenne to agree with the Tea Party's thirst for deficit reduction, nor with its willingness to take the United States to the edge of a technical default. That's fine. Equally, there's certainly a strain of conservative thinking immune to logic or reason. But much the same could be said of certain classes of Guardian readers too. This, however, is dreadful or, at best, simply lazy: The founding fathers built a constitution of checks and balances believing reasonable men would agree; how could they foresee Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck? To the British eye, America was always dangerously prone to waves of populism and McCarthyite panics.

Alex Massie

There is a Government Car Parking Policy? Jesus Wept.

Blimey David, the startling aspect of Eric Pickles' announcement that central government will loosen the guidelines it issues to local councils concerning the proper provision of car parking spaces is not that this modest proposal has somehow made it through the Whitehall machine but that it was ever thought sensible for Whitehall to tell the Shires how many parkig spaces could be allocated on any given high street or what fees could profitably be levied from them. Not that this is the only example of this kind of mindless interference. There was the great question of the government's rubbish bin policy recently too.

Monday

Alex Massie

Mitt Romney’s Impressive Double-Dose of Fakery

Mind you, if Obama lost on the Debt Deal then what to make of Mitt Romney's position? As president, my plan would have produced a budget that was cut, capped and balanced – not one that opens the door to higher taxes and puts defense cuts on the table. President Obama’s leadership failure has pushed the economy to the brink at the eleventh hour and 59th minute. While I appreciate the extraordinarily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican Members of Congress in, I personally cannot support this deal. Does anyone believe Romney really believes this? As Ben Smith notes this is a statement crafted with an eye on the Republican primary, not the general election.

Alex Massie

Obama Loses

Hurrah! We have a deal! Financial meltdown has been avoided! Well done Congress! As has to be the case in these circumstances it's a case of making the best of a rotten and also ridiculous situation. Whether it lasts is a different matter, not least since this Congress cannot bind its successors. In the larger scheme of matters it's a smaller deal - $900bn in cuts now and, perhaps, $1.5trillion in the future - than most of what has been proposed in recent weeks. That's not a surprise. Nor is it a great shock to discover that President Obama - and Congressional Democrats - have been forced to accept a compromise that offers them much less than it does the Republicans.

Alex Massie

Ian Bell and the Spirit of Cricket

On balance, I agree with Sir Geoffrey: Ian Bell was out and the Indians had nothing for which to feel ashamed. On the contrary, it is England whose reputations are, to my mind, (slightly) diminished by this incident. To recap: batting for England in the second test against India yesterday Ian Bell believed his partner Eoin Morgan had either hit a boundary or that, the players having run three, the umpires had declared the Over finished and announced it was time for tea. At this point Bell was sauntering down the pitch, miles out of his ground, and unaware that a) the ball had not reached the boundary rope, b) the Umpires had not called tea and c) the ball was still live.

Saturday

Friday

Alex Massie

Was the Coalition a Mistake?

Tim Montgomerie is a bonnie fighter but his essay in this week's magazine (Subscribe from as little as £1 a week!) is a splendid example of the pundit's fallacy: if matters were arranged as I think they should be everything would be for the best and David Cameron would have a thumping majority. Well, maybe even if past experience suggests the kind of "Mainstream" Conservatism (has that label been ditched, yet?) Tim favours had a limited electoral appeal. That was then, however, and this is now. (It's also fair to note that Tim accepts a good deal of the Cameron Project). Tim complains that "The Cameroons' mistake was to combine a moderate leader with a milk-and-water agenda".

Alex Massie

How A Mensch Responds to the Press

Journalist seeks to embarrass politician for crime of enjoying themselves before they became a politician and, apparently, must expect to have their every move vetted by prudes and scolds. Said hack wants to know if it is true that: Whilst working at EMI, in the 1990s, you took drugs with Nigel Kennedy at Ronnie Scott's in Birmingham, including dancing on a dance floor, whilst drunk, with Mr Kennedy, in front of journalists. Photos of this exist. Blimey! Photos exist! Whatever next? So hats-off to Louise Mensch for her reply: Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Nigel Kennedy, whom I remember with affection.

Alex Massie

U-Turns in the Government’s DNA

But first, another grubby little piece of u-turning from this government. You might think that a commitment to remove from the DNA database the details of more than a million innocent people was both simple and easily honoured. Such a suspicion fails to appreciate the so-called complexity of the matter and, one must presume, the deviousness of civil servants. Consequently the promise is not being honoured. Or not to the letter anyway: However, Home Office minister James Brokenshire admitted to MPs on a committee which is considering the legislation that police forces will retain innocent profiles. Mr Brokenshire said he had won agreement from the information watchdog that the DNA profiles could be retained by forensic science laboratories.

Alex Massie

Hello Again | 29 July 2011

As you may have noticed it's been pretty quiet around here. That's what weddings, cricket matches, some unseasonal sunshine and, most of all, being swamped by family will do for you. Those waters are receding now and there's time and freedom to blog again. Hurrah. Plenty to write about too, including the test match, Norwegian events and the debt-ceiling debacle in Washington... But how has your summer been?

Saturday

Friday

Alex Massie

The East-West Divide

Perhaps it is time for Glasgow to become a Charter City: More than a third of people in Glasgow North East have no school qualifications. A table published by the University and College Union (UCU) showed 35.3% of those of working age left school without passing a single examination. The result gives the area the lowest rating in the UK. Every Edinburgh constituency was placed in the top third for educational achievement. Every constituency in Glasgow was below the British average. No matter how many allowances you make for Glasgow's peculiar circumstances - post-industrialisation, redrawn city boundaries that exclude middle-class suburbs and so on - this is depressing stuff.

Thursday

Alex Massie

1999 not 2000

I was going to write something about the 2000th test match but was distracted by Murdochpalooza. Happily this is not actually the 200th test. Or it should not be. The ICC, reliably mistaken as ever, have given test status to the (disappointing) 2005 match between Australia and the Rest of the World. The Bearded Wonder and his successors do not approve of this and there has, consequently, been much chuntering about the matter in scoreboxes across the land as this trivial-yet-oddly-significant landmark approaches. It is not the fact that the 2005 match was a marketing ploy that rankles, it is the inconsistency.

Alex Massie

The Political Speech of the Year

Enda Kenny, Taoiseach, delivered an astonishing speech to the Dail yesterday during which he lambasted the Vatican in ways unprecedented in the history of the Irish Republic. It was, indeed, a republican speech of the best sort during which the Taoiseach asserted  - reasserted would, alas, be too innacurate a way of putting it - the primacy of the state over canon law. At long last a senior politician, responding in this instance to the Cloyne report into clerical child abuse in that diocese and the church's willingness to cover that abuse up, has stood up to the habitual denial, obstructionism and duplicity of the church in these matters.