Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Liberal Democrats and the Fallacy of Sunk Costs

From our UK edition

John McTernan makes the case: Paradoxically, it is the increaing unpopularity of the Liberal Democrats that will bind them closer to the Tories. It’s illogical, I know. Being in the Coalition has halved their support, so really they should leave as soon as possible. But they won’t, they’ll cling on for dear life. Economists know this as the “sunk cost fallacy” – ordinary people use the phrase “good money after bad”. Essentially, most of us have an aversion to loss, so we tell ourselves any stories we can think of rather than do the logical thing and cut our losses. For sure, some Lib Dems think that there will be an upside.

Alex Massie

A Real Coalition, Not a Sham One

From our UK edition

Mind you, Ed Miliband doesn't understand coalition either. Fair enough. It's not what he's paid to understand. Still, according to Miliband (whom I keep forgetting is actually leader of the Labour party): Secretly recorded comments by Liberal Democrat ministers show the coalition government is "a sham," Labour leader Ed Miliband has said. He described Vince Cable as "a useful prop for David Cameron as he seeks to pretend this is something other than a Conservative government". "These are decisions of a Conservative-led government propped up by Liberal Democrat passengers. Passengers not in the front seat, not even in the back seat of the car, passengers who have got themselves locked in the boot," Up to a point.

Alex Massie

Who’s Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?

From our UK edition

Everyone, obviously. But if it weren't Rupert Murdoch trying to purchase BSkyB would anyone care? Thought not. But since the Dirty Digger already owns 39% of Sky, what harm can it really do to let him buy the rest of a company he, more than anyone else, is responsible for making a success worth purchasing? Our friends at the New Statesmen do not appear convinced by this.

Alex Massie

Cable’s Survival is a Sign of Cameron’s Strength

From our UK edition

James understands the dynamics of coalition government rather better than Simon Heffer. This may not surprise you. Mr Heffer complains that by letting Vince Cable survive - albeit in gelded form - while dumping the likes of Lord Young for other more trivial indiscretions, the Prime Minister is guilty of setting double standards. One would be appalled if this were not the case. And the double standard - for such there certainly is since Lib Dems may, indeed must, be opposed to at least some parts of coalition policy - reminds us that this is a Tory government leavened by the Liberal Democrats, not a Liberal Democrat government with added bits of light blue. For 80% of the country this is not news.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Sunday Morning Country: Steve Earle & Emmylou Harris

From our UK edition

A great song from Mr Earle's terrific album Train A Coming which was also covered by Emmylou on Wrecking Ball. Here they are together performing Goodbye: UPDATE: This post is now, alas, dedicated to Julian FitzGerald, old friend from Trinity days and much missed by all who knew him.

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Greatest Englishmen XI

From our UK edition

17th September 1932: Members of the MCC cricket team aboard the liner 'Orontes' at Tilbury, en route for Australia (left to right) Walter Hammond, Douglas Jardine (captain), Brown, Bowes, Duckworth (head turned), Harold Larwood, Leyland, Mitchell, Paynter, Herbert Sutcliffe, Verity, Voce and Wyatt. Photo by H. F. Davis/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images. No, not this lot - though they were so good they might have beaten Bradman and Australia in 1932-33 bowling to "ordinary" fields. At the start of the tour, however, Jardine's men travelled from Perth to Adelaide by train across the Nullarbor Plain. It was a long, often tedious trip. To while away the time they picked various All-Time XIs.

Alex Massie

Department of Human Resources: Yahoo Edition

From our UK edition

From a memo sent by Yahoo CEO Carol Bentz: Yahoos, I want to share some tough news with you. Today, we began notifying some Yahoos that they will lose their jobs. Most of the reductions will come from the Products org and, when completed, will affect about 4% of the company. I know this has been rumored for some time. It’s disappointing when things like this leak, and it certainly doesn’t make it any easier for anyone involved. This was a tough call, but a necessary one. We need to make these changes now to ensure that Products is structured and running the way we want as 2011 begins. And that means we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others. Like Johnson, one can't help but enjoy the Swiftian brilliance of this.

Alex Massie

In Praise of… Bob Ainsworth

From our UK edition

Hats-off to the former Home Office Minister and Secretary of State for Defence who will use a Westminster Hall debate today to say: “I have just been reading the Coalition Government’s new Drugs Strategy. It is described by the Home Secretary as fundamentally different to what has gone before; it is not. To the extent that it is different, it is potentially harmful because it retreats from the principle of harm reduction, which has been one of the main reasons for the reduction in acquisitive crime in recent years. However, prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Reality-Based Fiscal Conservatism

From our UK edition

Bully for George Osborne. His interview with James and Fraser contains heaps of good sense. Most especially when he defends his attitude towards tax: Asked if he regards Britain as an over-taxed country, he hesitates: “That’s a good question. I would like to reduce taxes - so, in that sense, it would be good if we could bring taxes down. But I’ve always believed the only way to do that is to have sound public finances. I am a fiscal Conservative, I’m not a Reaganite deficit-funded tax cutter. I am actually in that sense more the model that Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson pursued. That means sorting out the public finances - and if there is a surplus, then use that to reduce taxes. That’s what he did in the late 80s.

Alex Massie

Barnett’s Beastly Treatment of Barnet

From our UK edition

Tim Montgomerie's response to Danny Finkelstein's column is, as was expected, interesting and challenging. For now, however, let's focus on just one line: Mainstream Conservatism is also more pro-poor because it's the poorest Britons who suffer most from crime, uncontrolled immigration and the unfair deal that London's lowest income boroughs get from the Barnet [sic] formula. Emphasis added. One hears this sort of thing quite frequently. Which is fine. But three points: first, over time Barnett is designed to actually reduce differences in spending allocations. It may do so more slowly than some would like but that's a different argument.

Alex Massie

Only in America

From our UK edition

Ben Smith has this snippet from Rahm Emanuel's fledgling campaign to become mayor of Chicago: Bob Sirott (and Playbook) channel the candidate: Only in America can someone be in the Oval Office negotiating with leaders of the free world one minute, and the next -- in a Loop basement being degraded by rejects from an old "Let's Make a Deal" audience. As usual, any time you see the phrase "Only in America" you should prepare for some preening and baseless piece of self-regard. "Only in America" is almost always used to describe things that are perfectly normal and found in any number of western democracies. It's one of the ways in which American Exceptionalism tries to redefine the ordinary. This is one such example.

Alex Massie

The Tories’ Lib Dem Dilemma

From our UK edition

Danny Finkelstein's Times column (£) today is typically smart. I doubt any leading political columnist in Britain enjoys paradox more than the Fink.  Consider this, he suggests: the flak the Lib Dems have taken for their reality-based flip-flop on tuition fees is, on the surface, a blessing for the Tories. But that masks another fact: the students and their cheerleaders aren't upset with the Tories because, deep down, they expect them to be heartless, cut-throat bastards. Worse still, the coalition could reframe and reinforce that view: everything nice and cuddly will be due to the moderating Liberal Democrat influence; everything brutish and reactionary the proof that Tory blood still runs nasty. This may be unfair but that's a different point entirely. So far so easy.

Alex Massie

Lucky Strikes in the War on Terror

From our UK edition

Yesterday I suggested that the War on Smoking should be considered one theatre in the War on Drugs. Silly me for forgetting that it's actually a subset of the War on Terror. Here's ASH's Cecilia Farren talking on the Today programme about some recent modest amendments to Holland's smoking laws: "It's a very backward step. For me, on the side of keeping smokefree law is public opinion, public health, workers health, equality of access. There's just so many reasons and on the other side it's just long campaigning by the tobacco industry, frightening businesses. It's an absolute terror campaign and I think you've got to have backbone to stand up to them or actually back down in front of their campaign." Emphasis added.

Alex Massie

Baby Steps in the Provinces

From our UK edition

One of the good features in the government's Localism Bill is the proposal for referenda on more directly-elected mayors. At present it seems only a dozen English* towns and cities are taking advantage of these plans but one hopes more will do so in the future. Contemplating this, Bagehot chews on centralisation and London's hegemony in British (and especially English) life. As he observes, generally speaking London has been the dominant city in England for centuries, dwarfing its rivals. But there was a spell when this wasn't the case and one need only look at Town Halls and Corn Exchanges and museums and galleries and Assembly Rooms across Britain to appreciate that there was an era when provincial towns and cities boasted a confidence expressed in brick and stone.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Swings and Roundabouts in the Great, Endless Drug War

From our UK edition

There's good and bad news this month. The disappointing news is that the latest surveys suggest only one in five American high schoolers smokes tobacco even occasionally. The good news is that one in five smokes marijuana from time to time. According to this year's official figures: For 12th-graders, declines in cigarette use accompanied by recent increases in marijuana use have put marijuana ahead of cigarette smoking by some measures. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent smoked cigarettes. This is good news? Yes it is. For one thing it shows that teenage stoners have a better grasp of risk than the United States government.

Alex Massie

The Wikileaks Double Standard

From our UK edition

You don't need to share Julian Assange's politics or his objectives to think that he's the victim of at least one double standard. If he's guilty of betraying secrets and endangering lives and making diplomacy more difficult and everything else then so are the publishers of the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde and every other media outlet worldwide that publishes, or republishes, anythnig to do with the leaked American diplomatic cables. A few weeks ago I suggested that Assange really is a newsman. Even if you dispute that, however, it's hard to see how anyone can deny that he's a news publisher. So the State Department's PJ Crowley made a fool of himself last week by claiming: “Mr.

Alex Massie

Richard Holbrooke: Last of the Big Beasts?

From our UK edition

In a sense, Richard Holbrooke is one of the few American foreign policy hands of recent years whom one can mention in the same league as the Big Beasts that prowled through the Cold War and the Vietnam disaster (Holbrooke was there too: he wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers). His death - as Brother Korski says - is a great loss for American diplomacy and the Afghan effort. Holbrooke's last words (as reported by his family) were "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan" have occasioned much comment. Blake Hounshell, for instance, considers Holbrooke's views on Afghanistan and asks if, latterly, Dick Holbrooke had discovered a dovish side. I don't know.

Alex Massie

Vladimir Putin’s Eulalie Moment

From our UK edition

You can be dictator of All the Russias or you can be the kind of fellow who sings Blueberry Hill. In public. But not both. That's the theory anyway. It's hard to believe this is real but, yes, it is. Which reminds me: Wodehouse is immensely popular in Russia. I'd have thought the old boy well-nigh on untranslatable but perhaps life in Russia runs to grimness so completely that novels offering music come as a welcome relief given the native scribes' fondness for delving deep into the mire without so much as even a cursory damn. Even Vladimir Brussilov admitted that Wodehouse, like Tolstoy, was "not bad". And he would know.

Saturday

Alex Massie

Public Services vs Government Services

From our UK edition

During the latest bout of America's interminable health care wars, Fox News decided that its presenters should refer to the "public option" as the "government option" or "government-run health insurance". Big deal, you may say and you would have a point, but this has people in a tizzy about Fox's "bias". As if this had previously been a mystery! Happily Jack Shafer is on hand to defend what Andrew Sullivan calls, oddly, the "indefensible": The call to refer to the program as the government option instead of the public option came from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Media Matters and Kurtz report. But this shouldn't disqualify the new term from the Fox News stylebook.

Friday

Alex Massie

When Bubba Came Back

From our UK edition

Can you imagine Gordon Brown holding a meeting with Tony Blair in Downing Street, then agreeing to share a the Prime Ministerial podium with his predecessor and then disappearing to another engagement, leaving Blair to hold court for half an hour? No, I don't think so. And not just because Brown hated Blair's guts. Even Gordon might have appreciated that this might lead to unflattering comparisons. People might even find themselves thinking, Golly, what ever happened to that guy Tony? He was awfully good wasn't he? This, basically, is what happened at the White House this afternoon. For half an hour Bill Clinton seemed to be President. Now it's a Friday afternoon and a trivial thing of no great importance. But, still, rum you know.