Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

Blair’s Blindness on Torture

From our UK edition

There's lots of interesting stuff in Martin Kettle's Guardian interview with the Maximum Tone but this struck me as a telling, revealing moment: One thing I want to say before the Guardian readership particularly is that this notion that I have ever condoned or would ever condone torture in any circumstances is complete rubbish. I totally disagree with it and I would never condone it, not in any set of circumstances. I think it is not just morally wrong. I think it is an extremely foolish and stupid way to try to gather information. I don't know where this has all come from. I don't know whether people in other countries, like the US, were doing these things. I honestly don't know. And therefore when people say "Will you condemn it?

Alex Massie

Politician of the Year

From our UK edition

Andrew Stuttaford says Alexei Kudrin is Finance Minister of the year but, surely, that understates matters? Russia’s finance minister has told people to smoke and drink more, explaining that higher consumption would help lift tax revenues for spending on social services. Speaking as the Russian government announces plan to raise duty on alcohol and cigarettes, Alexei Kudrin said that by smoking a pack, “you are giving more to help solve social problems such as boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates”. “People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state,” he told the Interfax news agency.

Alex Massie

Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Revolutionaries

From our UK edition

Larry Sabato's latest forecast predicts that the Republican party could pick up as many as 47 seats in the House of Representatives this November. He also thinks they have an outside shot at retaking the Senate. This is the background to Conservative Cabbie's post tweaking me for this blog's previous - and many! - suggestions that the GOP was in heaps of trouble. He's right. I didn't anticipate unemployment remaining close to 10% through the mid-terms and I didn't think that Pat Toomey, for instance, would be well-placed to win in Pennsylvania. And he's also right to suggest that I under-appreciated the impact the Tea Party movement might have, not least the effect it has had on the prisms through which the mid-terms are going to be viewed.

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Feeble Mugabe Gotcha

From our UK edition

Step forward the FT's Jim Pickard: Some sceptics have often asked why Tony Blair was happy to help rid the world of some dictators and not others. The example most often cited is that of Robert Mugabe, who could have been deposed with even less effort than Saddam Hussein. Blair tries to justify the contradiction in his book, far from convincingly. “You need to ask if such action is feasible and practical. People often used to say to me: If you got rid of the gangsters in Sierra Leone, Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam, why can’t you get rid of Mugabe?

Alex Massie

Memo to the Left: Blair Won Because He Hated You

From our UK edition

Over at Liberal Conspiracy our old friend Sunny Hundal calls out Tony Blair: It was always obvious that Tony Blair hated the left. His recently published book said nothing new on that front. What’s staggering is how easily he dismisses even close Labour colleagues and ministers. [...] What does it say about Tony Blair’s loyalty to the party and the movement? What does it say about his committment to pluralism within the party? What it says is that Tony Blair was interested in winning elections. This is not rocket science. We may not like this aspect of British politics but, at the moment anyway, the public is extremely wary of political parties. That's one reason, aming many, why the combined Tory-Labour share of the vote has fallen from 90% of voters to 65%.

Alex Massie

The Hague Affair

From our UK edition

This so-called story is fast becoming an ideal case study for any student of politcs and the British press. Neither party comes out of it looking especially good. I'm sure James is correct: the press wins (or loses, if that's how you view it) either way. If Hague ignores the innuendo then it's fodder for bloggers and diarists (and eventually columnists) and if he addresses the matter then that means that it's "officially" a story fit for public discussion. Heads gossip wins, tails Hague loses. If the rumours about Hague's relationship with his young and now-former SpAd were true then, yes indeed, you'd have a scandal that would cost the Foreign Secretary his job. But as best one can see there's no evidence that there's any truth to the rumours at all.

Alex Massie

Andy Coulson’s Phone Problem Returns

From our UK edition

I'm not sure why the New York Times Magazine thinks its readers will be interested in a long piece about the News of the World and its history of phone-hacking but I'm glad that the Times has published this article anyway. Among the most damaging allegations: the suggestion that, for various reasons, the police limited the extent of their inquiries into law-breaking at the Screws. To wit: That fall, Andy Hayman, the head of the counterterrorism branch, was in his office when a senior investigator brought him 8 to 10 pages of a single-spaced “target list” of names and mobile phone numbers taken from Mulcaire’s home. It read like a British society directory. Scotland Yard officials consulted with the Crown Prosecution Service on how broadly to investigate.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Prohibition Doesn’t Work: Cricket & Gambling Edition

From our UK edition

The News of the World's revelations about connivance between cricketers and bookmakers is dismaying; the story can't alas, be considered wholly surprising. If proved - and on the face of it there's every reason to suppose that the allegations are accurate - then it's difficult to see how Salman Butt and the other players implicated can escape heavy punishment (and perhaps in the skipper's case a lifetime ban). The consolation, in as much as there is one, is that the evidence points to spot-fixing rather than match-fixing. Saying that the former is not as serious as the latter does not mean it's unserious. It just means that matters could be worse. And perhaps they are, given how much we don't know.

Alex Massie

To A Foulkes

From our UK edition

George - now Lord - Foulkes is taking his leave of Holyrood and returning to the comfort of the red benches in the House of Lords. It's fair to say that Foulkes's ability to wind up nationalists has not endeared him to SNP supporters. Still,  Lallands Peat Worrier is quite right that the national bard would, were he still drawing breath, have felt the need to mark this heavyweight departure with some stirring lines in the old Scots demotic. Happily LPW was on hand to take dictation. It begins: To a Foulkes   So ye're gaun at last, ye Lairdly ferlie? Your impudence protect you sairly! 'Tis time again for struttin' rarely In whitrat cape ~ Geordie, ha' no fears o' dinin' sparely In sic a place!

Alex Massie

Of Course Labour Should Pick David Miliband. Who Else is There?

From our UK edition

So, a "well-placed*" source tells the Guardian that while David Cameron would like Ed Miliband to be the next leader of the Labour party, he thinks the party would be best-advised to select Ed's brother David. This news, scarcely earth-shattering to anyone who isn't already a Labour party member (and obvious even to many of those that are) has Labour types suspecting some Deep Tory Game is Afoot. Is this a bluff? Or a double bluff? Or a diversion? Or something else entirely? Both Sunny Hundal and Labour List's Alex Smith took to their Twitter accounts to warn that this must be some devious Conservative plot. Rats are everywhere and leadership elections are especially prone to infestations. Well, maybe.

Saturday

Alex Massie

The Pity of Pakistan

From our UK edition

Broad and Trott skip on against Pakistan. Amir looks on in some pain. Photo: Clive Rose/Getty Images. One ball. One wicket. That's how far away Pakistan were from establishing a match-winning and series-squaring position at Lords. Now only god or, more probably, rain can save them. When Stuart Broad joined Jonathan Trott at the crease on Friday England were reeling at 102-7. If any one of the next, oh, 180 deliveries had dismissed either batsman England might have been dismissed for no more than 200 runs and Pakistan would have enjoyed every chance of forcing another improbable victory and, in so doing, levelling the series. Such are the margins between success and failure in test match cricket.

Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

From our UK edition

Been a long time since this pair featured in this slot. Too long. So here they are performing their already-classic I Want to Sing That Rock'n'Roll at St Luke's in London a few years ago: Bonus: There's another, perhaps even better but sadly unembeddable version, here.

Friday

Alex Massie

The Liberaltarian Future?

From our UK edition

Liberaltarianism is, in case you haven't been following this mildly esoteric debate in Washington, the notion that rather than hitch their wagons to conservativism American libertarians and libertarian-minded folk should also explore relations with (US) liberals in order to further the libertarian agenda. This has proven an oddly controversial idea and, generally, has been dismissed as a) a joke, b) a fool's errand or c) simply impossible. Now Brink Lindsey, who first coined the awkward term "liberaltarian" in a now famous-for-DC essay in the New Republic and his colleague Will Wilkinson* are leaving the libertarian Cato Institute. This has tongues wagging. In some circles anyway. See Tim Carney's Washington Examiner column, for instance.

Alex Massie

Malcolm X and Michael Gove: Big Society Brothers?

From our UK edition

A splendid spot by Dave Osler at Liberal Conspiracy: Malcolm X's ideas about education in Harlem and Brooklyn aren't so very different from those Michael Gove has in mind for Haringey or Toxteth. As Malcolm X wrote: The Board of Education in this city [New York] has said … there are 10 percent of schools in Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant community in Brooklyn that they canot improve. So what are we to do? ‘This means that the Organization of Afro-American Unity must make the Afro-American community a more potent force for educational self-improvement.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Oh Caledonia!

From our UK edition

Paul Higgins as William Paterson in Alistair Beaton's Caledonia. To Edinburgh yesterday to see the flagship indigenous production at this year's Festival: Alistair Beaton's play about the Darien misadventure in the late 17th century. For a dramatist this should be much more fertile ground than were the mangrove swamps of Panama for the poor would-be colonists. It was a national adventure swallowing up, by some estimates, as much as half the national wealth which makes it all the more infuriating that Caledonia is both so glib and so very heavy-handed. Leaving the theatre my immediate sensation was one of a great opportunity badly, foolishly missed.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Everything is Relative…

From our UK edition

From today's Telegraph letters page: Comparatively ungallant nickname for a military hero SIR – Those with experience of the old Stock Exchange floor will readily recall some of the nicknames (Letters, August 22) bestowed upon its habitués. Among them were two brothers, both with highly distinguished military careers and both winners of the Military Cross, one with bar and one without. The latter acquired the sobriquet of “The Coward”. Quentin Smith, Dunley, Hampshire [Many thanks to AH for the tip.

Alex Massie

The Gospel at Colonus

From our UK edition

Taking Sophocles' least-known play and reinterpreting via the hymns and songs of gospel music is, damn it, just the sort of thing that you expect from Edinburgh* in August. Thankfully, Lee Breuer's plundering - adaptation is too limited a term - of Oedipus at Colonus is a monumental success. If you ever get the chance to see it in London, New York, DC, Chicago or wherever then for god's sake get yourself a ticket. Most of the reviews of the Gospel at Colonus have focused, understandably, on the music and, unavoidably, on the tensions between Christian and classical Greek theology and you can certainly argue that the production loses some of its force in Act Two as Oedipus prepares for and accepts his end.

Alex Massie

Faisal Abdul Rauf: Neoconservative?

From our UK edition

I continue to be impressed by how thin the case against Faisal Abdul Rauf is. You'd have thought that by now the staunch defenders of liberty crazies would have found either a smoking gun or a ticking bomb. To be fair, Pamela Geller* certainly thinks she has found evidence that he's just as bad as his critics would have us believe. Or maybe even - and this may make your (my!) weak dhimmi-flesh creep - worse... But, actually, all she has unearthed from a 2005 talk Rauf gave to, of all places, the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, is evidence that Faisal Abdul Rauf could be considered a neoconservative. That is, he shares a central neoconservative insight: How many of you have seen the documentary: Fahrenheit 911? The vast majority - at least half here.

Alex Massie

What Does Ed Miliband Know of Liberalism?

From our UK edition

As if to prove the point of this post, Ed Miliband pops up in the Guardian to treat Liberal Democrat voters as though they're lost sheep who should return to the Labour fold. Apparently the Lib Dem leadership has led the party into government and abandoned its members who should, natch, return home to Labour. Why you would want to swap power for opposition remains mysterious but there you have it. One thing Miliband does make clear, mind you, is that he has no understanding of what the term "liberal" means. )Or, to be fair, perhaps just a different understanding from me.) In Miliband's World markets are a betrayal of liberalism. Indeed he goes further: free markets "devastate the proud legacy of liberalism". This must count as news for many of us.

Alex Massie

Hating on Clegg? Why?

From our UK edition

The left can't forgive him and the right still can't quite take him seriously but it seems to me that Nick Clegg is playing his hand with some gumption. Plenty of pundits and political enthusiasts - on all sides - still can't quite take the Liberal Democrats seriously but the days when the party was happy with the comforts of opposition have passed. Clegg, like it or not (and some Lib Dems, being children, don't) has made his choice and made his party make choices of real consequence for the first time in at least thirty years. That is, and regardless of whether you agree with his choices, no small thing. It could even be considered courageous. And what part of this is incorrect? The Labour Party has become consumed by collective bile towards … the Liberal Democrats.