David Blackburn

Thursday

David Blackburn

Council gorillas get on the buses

From our UK edition

The cold war in Britain’s localities is warming up. Buried in the Telegraph and the Financial Times is the news that councils are cutting local bus services, and central government is being apportioned blame. An organisation called Better Transport has launched a campaign titled Save Our Buses. It claims that straitened councils have been forced to shed £34 million from the subsidised funding of local buses; 70 percent of routes have been affected so far.   This is a prime example of local government conniving to avoid responsibility for spending contractions. With adroit calculation, councils bastardise vital services to inconvenience those they represent.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Councils are still living it up

From our UK edition

Councils are in the dog house again, following the publication of a report claiming that £7bn is wasted through ineffective land and building use. Chairman of the report, Matthew Hancock MP, and Vice-Chairman of the Local Government Association Richard Kemp debated the issue on Today and they revealed why the revolution in local government has stalled. Kemp made the most substantial point: recalcitrance and rivalry in Whitehall impairs reform of the localities. For instance, councils cannot unite libraries, Job Centre Plus and the One Stop shops into one building because the DWP has not yet begun its reform of Job Centre Plus.

David Blackburn

The genius of Raymond Chandler

From our UK edition

'I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.' Philip Marlowe had it lucky: I haven’t even got a hat. This month, Radio Four will air four plays of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Adapted by script writers Stephen Wyatt and Robin Brooks and starring Toby Stephens as Chandler’s infamous detective, the Classic Chandler season begins at 2:30 this Saturday with The Big Sleep. Make it your business to listen. Somewhere between the fish course and the appreciation of Islamophobia, dinner party guests discuss how Chandler revolutionised the detective novel. I disagree.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

When will mass protest come to Libya?

From our UK edition

As several seemingly permanent Middle Eastern autocracies tremble, Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya rolls on. So far, there have been reports of minor protests in the localities about housing shortages, nothing more. With unemployment standing at 30 percent, the Libyan people are just as impoverished as those in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt. Gadaffi’s dictatorship is scarcely benevolent, and, as for liberalisation, Libya remains one of the few completely dry countries on Earth. The secret of Gadaffi’s success then would appear to be expressing aggressive anti-American sentiment, whilst suppressing Islamism and democratic opposition at home. And all the while he entices rich Western powers (Britain) with the allure of Libya’s virginal natural resources.

David Blackburn

Book of the Month: The Slap

From our UK edition

It is shaming to stare into the mirror after a late night. Your hair is snarled and your lips are puckered. Your nose glows red. Blotches cover your skin, which is underlain by a lurid translucence. Your eyes are dull, their whites are pallid; and the bags which envelop them are puffed-up. You can’t abide yourself and that is to say nothing of the metaphysical trauma of realising how you live. Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap is the mirror into which modern society gazes, and be repulsed by what it sees. It begins with a character smacking an errant child at a barbeque and, via the inner lives of eight protagonists, reaches the grander and more repugnant aspects of the contemporary world and multiculturalism.

David Blackburn

A picture paints a thousand words

From our UK edition

Crime maps have formally reached England and Wales. The Home Office has unveiled www.police.uk and citizens can examine incidences and trends of crime in their local area. Naturally, the website is broken at the moment. Nick Herbert, the Policing Minister, told the Today programme that the site crashed under the weight of 4 million users in an hour. The government hopes that this interest will be sustained, inaugurating a revolution in transparency and accountability. People power will trump the unelected authorities of the past. Crime maps merely record the facts of crime, but extensive trials suggested that they improve peoples’ knowledge of their neighbourhood and encourage locals to influence police strategy in troubled areas.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Spelman’s a lumberjack and she’s ok

From our UK edition

The coalition’s plans to privatise Britain’s woodlands have received what is euphemistically termed ‘a mixed reception’. Caroline Spelman’s consultation document and accompanying article in today’s Times (£) may change that fact. Both are historically conscious and upholstered with reassuring pastoral interludes – an elegant departure from most ministerial rambles.   But, this government's politics breaks well clear from the literary immersion. There is a dose of Thatcherism. Spelman is adamant that the state should not be managing forests, and she wants private companies to exploit commercially valuable forests.

David Blackburn

Nimrod: from a symbol of pride to one of decline

From our UK edition

There are contrasting images of Nimrod the Hunter: the mighty king of the Old Testament, and the less fearsome figure of Elmer Fudd. Through no fault of its own, the Nimrod spy plane, the most advanced and versatile aircraft of its type, seems destined to belong in the Fuddian category. Several senior officers have written to the Telegraph, urging the government to reconsider its decision to scrap the aircraft. They argue, not for the first time, that Britain’s defence capabilities are being pulverised by political calculations. (Con Coghlin adds his strategic concerns in the same paper.) The top brass have found an ally in Unite, some of whose members build and maintain the aircraft for a living.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Much ado about Israel

From our UK edition

Ian McEwan is in hot water with some of his lesser known fellows. A group of self-styled ‘pro-Palestinian authors’ wrote to the Guardian on Monday, and expressed their regret that McEwan will accept the biennial Jerusalem Prize. They averred that the prize, which is awarded to those who explore the theme of individual freedom in society, ‘is a cruel joke and a propaganda tool for the Israeli state.’ Some politically strident people have been cracking that cruel joke: Jorge Luis Borge, Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Miller, V S. Naipaul and J M. Coetzee. However, as you may have noticed, these tools of perfidious Israel’s cynicism are all dab-hands with a pen and a sheet of paper.

David Blackburn

From control to surveillance

From our UK edition

Like husband, like wife. Yvette Cooper has begun shadowing Theresa May where Ed Balls stopped: by lacerating Nick Clegg’s naïveté in believing that control orders should be abolished. There is a faint note of animus in her politicking too. ‘National security,’ she said, ‘should not be about keeping Nick Clegg safe in his job.’ The government invited Cooper's charge with its own crass political calculation. Spinning the new measures as a Liberal Democrat victory could only elicit that response from an opposition that is intent on exploiting the government’s broad weakness on law and order. In fact, as Lord West has remarked, the government has not even come close to rescinding the substance of New Labour's control orders.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Everyone got the invitation, but the Tories had omitted the dress code

From our UK edition

ConHome has published its latest members’ survey. Its (admittedly unscientific) findings into respondents’ recollections of floating voters at the last election have reopened the debate about why the Conservatives didn’t win. In a combative piece, Janet Daley insists that the results ‘stand the modernising argument on its head’. These findings look more inconclusive to me. 85 percent of respondents were told that the party and its leadership were ignorant of ordinary concerns, supporting David Davis’ insinuations that the party is out of touch with the common man.

David Blackburn

Walcott wins

From our UK edition

At last, Derek Walcott has won the T S. Eliot Prize for poetry. Walcott’s latest collection, White Egrets, was described by chairman of the judges, Anne Stevenson, as a “moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet; in the best traditions of the Eliot Prize.” Walcott overcame some renowned competition – including his fellow Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage – to secure Britain’s most prestigious poetry award. The panel of judges is comprised of poets and academics, bestowing professional recognition on the winner, who also collects a handy cheque for £15,000.

Monday

David Blackburn

Outgoing head of the CBI slams the government on growth

From our UK edition

Richard Lambert has launched an uncompromising but constructive assault on the government’s growth strategy, or lack of it. He said: “The government is…talking about growth in an enthusiastic and thoughtful way… But it’s failed so far to articulate in big picture terms its vision of what the UK economy might become under its stewardship. “What I feel is that a number of their initiatives – I’m thinking of the immigration cap, I’m thinking about their move on the default retirement age, about the carbon reduction commitment - have actually made it harder for companies, or less likely for companies to employ people. And what we want, actually, is a sense of direction, a sense of ambition.

David Blackburn

Blast at Moscow airport

From our UK edition

A suicide bomber has killed more than thirty people at Moscow airport. This is the third major terrorist attack on Russian soil in the last year. Islamist groups were responsible for the previous two attacks and, I imagine, will claim proprietorship this one also. It is a telling reminder that the domestic threat faced by Russia and NATO are becoming more aligned, which should lead to greater co-operation between the two in the coming decade. Already, NATO Secretary General, Anders-Fogh Rasmussen (not a man to cower before the pernicious Islamist menace) has said that his organisation will stand together against terrorism.

David Blackburn

The coalition needs to address bonuses

From our UK edition

Much ado about bankers’ bonuses this afternoon. Tim Montgomerie reports that the proposed banking deal has run aground in Whitehall. The timing is inconvenient: Cameron and Clegg are due to fly to Davos to attend the World Economic Forum. The government hopes to allay public resentment by coercing banks into increasing their lending; which is also a crucial part of its nascent growth strategy. It adds to the impression that the government is failing to make progress in any other realm than cuts. For the time being, Tory spinners are content to distract attention by telling anyone that will listen about Ed Balls’ record on bank regulation and boundless enthusiasm for spending other people’s money.

David Blackburn

Sexism is a red-herring; it’s family that matters

From our UK edition

I'm afraid that women have been faking it, having us men on. You see they understand the offside rule and always have done. How could they not? It’s so simple that even a brace of abject football pundits know that an actively involved player is offside when he is closer to the opponent's goal line than both the ball and the second-to-last defender, but only if he is in his opponent's half of the pitch. Messrs Keys and Gray may not be too sharp on interpretation – unlike the ‘young lady’ (£) they berated - but they’re smoking hot on the theory. So do me a favour love and drop the act. We’ve busted your ditzily saccharine ruse and now you must live Saturday’s trials and tribulations with me.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 24 January 2011

From our UK edition

The New York Times’ Janet Maslin reviews Frank Brady’s review of Chess playing wild child Bobby Fischer. ‘It’s no exaggeration to call Bobby Fischer both one of the most admired and one of the most reviled figures in American history. The admiration is prompted by his precocious rise to the pinnacle of the chess-playing world and his galvanizing 1972 cold-war-era triumph over Boris Spassky, the Soviet champion. The vilification stems from the monstrousness he exhibited in later years. On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio interviewer, “Yes, well, this is all wonderful news,” and, “It’s time to finish off the U.S. once and for all.” Thanks to the Internet, those comments will live forever.

Sunday

David Blackburn

The Irish government folds

From our UK edition

Yesterday, Brian Cowen resigned; today his government has imploded. The Green Party, which was bolstering Cowen’s ruling coalition (if such a phrase is applicable in this instance), have left the government. The Fianna Fail-led coalition is now two votes short of a majority, and therefore the finance bill may not pass in its current form. If that is so, Ireland may return to the precipice on which it found itself a couple of months ago, and its principal creditors and trading partners with it. But there is more to this than balance sheets. In his statement, the leader of the Greens said that the people had lost confidence in the political process. It’s hard to demur.

David Blackburn

Free speech dies another death in Burma

From our UK edition

The joy of Aung San Suu Kyi being given Internet access for the first time on Friday has proved transient. Time magazine reports that Irrawaddy, Burma’s premier English language magazine, has been forced to close its print operation for financial reasons.   Irrawaddy is a clandestine publication, revered as an ‘open window into an opaque country’ by observers of South-East Asian politics. Burma’s stringent censorship is enforced with determination, but the demise of Irrawaddy’s deadwood edition is a telling reminder that penury is the best form of censorship. Irrawaddy’s circulation was tiny, and the magazine relied on donations from pro-democracy groups in the West, whose coffers are empty and resolve shaken by the rise of authoritarian Asia.

Friday

David Blackburn

What the Dickens?

From our UK edition

It was the literary equivalent of Gordon Brown’s Arctic Monkeys moment.  Disgraced American politician Michael Steele was asked to name his favourite book. ‘War and Peace,’ he said, aghast that anyone could have imagined anything else. He then illustrated his mastery of Tolstoy with the following quotation: ‘It was the best of times and the worst of times.’ This must be the age of foolishness rather than wisdom. To have misattributed a famous quotation is one thing, to have bastardised it another. Anyway, this slip reminded me of Robert Gottlieb’s wonderful and extensive examination of Dickens, published by the New York Review of Books last July.