Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Uselessness of Meaningless Polls

From our UK edition

Sunny Hundal says this YouGov approval tracker is "the graph that has the coalition worried". Up to a point. It would be worrying if there were an election this autumn. But there isn't and there won't be. If, as the coalition hopes, we're four and a half years away from an election then this polling, while momentarily diverting, is essentially meaningless. And while a +1 approval rating is hardly a matter for rejoicing one could argue that it's surprising the government remains in the black given the sloppiness of much of its political - as opposed to policy - operation. Eventually these numbers will slip into the red but I hazard they'd already be there if, say, the election had gone a little differently and we'd ended up with a Labour-Lib Dem cohabitation.

Alex Massie

Cuts? What Cuts?

From our UK edition

Government wants to steal milk from children! Coalition wants to ban playgrounds! When-oh-when will the government call off its War on Kids? Well, that's been the hysterical tone of much of the coverage in recent days. Even allowing for the feather-headed excesses of August this is becoming silly. No-one disputes that there will be some difficult decisions to be made in the comprehensive spending review this autumn. But while the coalition is still in the business of softening up the public for leaner times ahead there will come a point when ministers will have to fight back, pointing out that despite everything public spending is still rising. (Whether you think this a good thing is, for now, a dfferent matter.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Prime Minister Tony Hayward?

From our UK edition

How many Americans know anything about David Cameron? Well, back in early July not many of them - or at least not many of those sampled by Pew - could identify the Prime Minister of Great Britain*. On a multiple choice question. When the other choices available were: Richard Branson, Tony Hayward or Angela Merkel. Only 19% selected Dave... Yes, yes, it's meaningless. But it's August people. This is the time for meaningless nonsense. *It's not impossible that if the question had been about the "Prime Minister of England" a few more people might have come up with Cameron's name. Then again, looking at the cross-tabs, only 38% of college graduates surveyed chose Dave.

Alex Massie

Know Your Readership

From our UK edition

Meanwhile, in other Glasgow news the city's evening paper makes its readers an offer they can't refuse. I believe this exhausts my annual quota of posts making gentle fun of Glaswegians.

Alex Massie

Jimmy Reid, 1932-2010

From our UK edition

  If Jimmy Reid, who died overnight aged 78, hadn't existed he might have had to be invented. For 40 years now he has been the image of a certain Scotland. The "dignity of labour" is a much abused phrase that often drips with sentimentality, but you didn't have to share Jimmy Reid's political views to recognise his virtue*. Nor did you need to be there at the time to appreciate, even all these years later, that there was something noble about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in back in 1971. The work-in and Reid's famous speech have assumed almost mythic status, representing all that was best about the Scottish, and specifically the west of Scotland's, industrial tradition.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Fox’s Radical Good Sense

From our UK edition

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of our drug policies, I hope we may agree that they're much less important than drug policy in the United States or the countries that produce narcotics. Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the "War on Drugs" was re-militarised in 2006. Now former President Vincente Fox is the latest Latin American statesman to suggest that the war is a pointless, murderous folly that weakens civil society while empowering the very people it's supposed to be fighting: "Legalization does not mean that drugs are good ... but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs) as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits," Fox wrote in a posting over the weekend.

Alex Massie

Strippers vs Christians

From our UK edition

As a Michigan man, Jon Chait naturally takes a great interest in monitoring life in the World's Worst State the great state of Ohio. Hats-off to him for alerting me to this story that, with its elements of absurdity and obsession, bloody-mindedness and defence of free expression is, in a small way, a quintessentially American tale: WARSAW, OHIO: The owner of an Ohio strip club and a few of his dancers have been protesting the services at a church that has kept heat on the club. Women in bikinis sat in camp chairs Sunday outside the New Beginnings Ministries church in Warsaw, about 60 miles northeast of Columbus.

Alex Massie

A Graduate Tax is a Bad Idea

From our UK edition

But not because of the argument Iain Dale makes here: Just a thought on the graduate tax. We already have a graduate tax. It's called income tax at 40 per cent. This is an off-hand comment, sure, but it would also be a better argument if it were true. There are about 31.7 million taxpayers in Britain; only 3.8 million of them pay any tax at 40%. I'm all for widening tax bands to take some people out of higher tax rates but there are millions of graduates who don't earn enough to pay higher rates of tax. Nevertheless, the belief that everyone pays tax at 40% is a constant feature of press and metropolitan opinion.

Alex Massie

Is the United States Senate Broken?

From our UK edition

In one sense, yes it is. The Senate may be the world's most exasperating deliberative body. As with it's Roman counterpart there's a growing sense that the Senate has outlived its usefulness, that it can no longer function effectively and that there's no reason to suppose anything will change for the better. In Washington folk connected to the House of Representatives point out that their enemy is the Senate, not the opposition party. That's what happens when you have a Republic, not a Democracy. And, as George Packer's excellent New Yorker article amply demonstrates, the Senate is a ridiculous, infuriating place filled with puffed-up mediocrities unfit to inhabit offices once filled by rather more illustrious men.

Alex Massie

Alex Salmond’s Women Problem

From our UK edition

No, not that kind, the vote-winning kind. Despite the fact that the party itself has honoured or at least admired warrior queens (in the members' estimation) such as Winnie Ewing, Margo MacDonald and even Nicola Sturgeon, the fact remains that women are much less likely to support the SNP than men and, furthermore, this gender gap causes the party some problems. As Lallands Peat Worrier reminded us: On the constituency ballot, 41% of the male electorate supported the SNP, compared to only 32% of women voters.  On the list, 35% of men voted for the SNP, but only 27% of women. That's a significant gap. Jennifer Dempsie, a former Salmond SpAd, recently had a piece in Scotland on Sunday addressing this very issue.

Monday

Alex Massie

If We Kill America, We Can Save It

From our UK edition

Sensible opponents of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" have been careful to argue that it's not the idea of the mosque per se that offends them but the sensitivity of it's location. Not everyone bothers with that distinction: In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting. In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby. In Sheboygan, Wis.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Headline of the Day | 8 August 2010

From our UK edition

Obviously it's from Western Nevada County, California: SWAT Team Requested for Violent Midgets Details, alas, remain sketchy but here's what we have so far: At 12:32 p.m., a caller from West McKnight Way reported steroid-using body-builders from Reno had beaten up the caller's son and might have killed him. Midgets from Fulton Avenue had been following and trying to poison the caller. The body-builder and the lead female midget, who the caller reported as being “really violent,” allegedly had been driving the caller's truck. The caller wanted the Nevada County Sheriff's Office to activate the SWAT team. God bless America.

Friday

Alex Massie

Heffer’s Style Notes

From our UK edition

This is good: the Daily Telegraph has published Simon Heffer's back-catalogue of style notes in which, with exasperated patience, he points out the paper's mistakes. Read too many of them and you might form the impression that the Telegraph no longer employs sub-editors. Nevertheless, Heffer's advice is mostly good and, I'm pleased to see, the subject of a new book. I particularly enjoyed the note which began: There are many reasons to avoid using long sentences when writing. An obvious one is that the message is transmitted to the readers most easily when it is concise. Another is that an array of clauses can sometimes cause confusion.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Ground Zero Mosque: Another Moment of Truth for the Open Society

From our UK edition

A good number of readers  - or those readers who left comments* - didn't much care for my post on the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque". Revolting [and] symptomatic of the imbecilic scramble to dhimmitude widespread in liberal circles... The Muslim colonists push and the gutless West meekly gives way, as usual... It will be seen in the world for the symbol of what it really is; a victory for resurgent Islam and a defeat for the Christian West...Hopefully this symbol of Islamic supremacism will be strangled at birth. You get the idea. There's a cultural war wrapped inside a psychodrama here. Or perhaps it's the other way round.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Hitch and His Cancer

From our UK edition

He's not named it Henry yet, preferring to speak of it as "the alien", but Christopher Hitchens on his cancer is worth your time and, perhaps, that of anyone you know with any of those diseases: Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week. Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear.

Alex Massie

Ireland’s Tipping Point

From our UK edition

  Was it Warren Buffett who said investors should be wary of any company that decides it needs to spend huge amounts of cash on swish new corporate headquarters? If it wasn't the Sage of Omaha then it was someone like him arguing that this is often a warning sign of a company behaving recklessly and with little regard to its shareholders' interests. (Hello RBS!) Anyway, I thought of that when I saw, again, this sign at County Galway Cricket Club. Though there is record of cricket being played in Galway as far back as the 1830s (the original garrison game!) the present club dates from the 1970s. Recently they received a significant grant from the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.

Alex Massie

The Price of Nick Clegg’s Success

From our UK edition

As Pete says, Danny Finkelstein's column (£) today is characteristically excellent. The problems facing the Liberal Democrats now and, perhaps, at the next election are problems caused by success, not failure. The Lib Dems had three options after the votes had been counted: do a deal with the Tories, try and cobble something together with Labour or remain aloof from the hurly-burly and leave the Tories to govern as a minority - perhaps on a supply or confidence basis. Given those options Nick Clegg followed his own instincts (and those of the country as a whole) and opted for the Tories. This was both the right thing to do and the couragous choice.

Alex Massie

Deepwater Horizon Latest: Perhaps Tony Hayward was Right?

From our UK edition

A remarkable headline in the New York Times today: Oil in Gulf Poses Only Slight Risk, New U.S. Report Says, The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil rom the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm. A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places. [...

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Ground Zero Mosque? Build It.

From our UK edition

Yes, when I first read about plans for a mosque "at Ground Zero" my initial reaction was to wonder why, whatever the merits of an Islamic Cultural Centre in Lower Manhattan, such a project had to be built in such a location. It seemed likely to cause offense even if none were intended. The reaction to the Cordoba House initiative, however, has changed my mind: I now think not only is there no reason not to carry on with the project but that, contra its critics, it now must be built a couple of blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. The people responsible for changing my mind are those Republicans and cultural conservatives most opposed to the plan.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Gone Cricketing | 25 July 2010

From our UK edition

All will be quiet here this week. I'm heading offline and, more importantly, to Ireland for a week of cricket. Six games in six days across three provinces is a punishing, even optimistic schedule. Then again, it can't go any worse than it did on Saturday when my two overs were walloped for 29 runs. Anyway, see y'all next Tuesday.