A dangerous escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict this morning, as rockets are fired into northern Israel from Lebanon. As far as I can tell, no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks – although suspicion has to fall on Hezbollah. The fear now is that this represents the opening of another sustained front
Gordon Brown’s interview with Sky earlier today is significant insofar as it represents the latest front in his war of words with the Tories. Our PM’s central claim was that the key dividing line between him and the Cameroons is over unemployment; with – suprise, suprise – Labour wanting to “help people get back into
Alistair Darling goes into full “blame the world” mode in his interview with the FT today – saying that international coordination will be “crucial” to get credit flowing through the financial system and to help our economy recover from the recession. As Iain Dale noted, similar claims littered Gordon Brown’s weekend interviews; so we’re seeing
Team Cameron will be delighted with the news that Caroline Spelman is to be cleared of any wrongdoing over the ‘Nannygate’ affair – the Tories can well do without any “sleaze” accusataions being fired in their direction – and the expectation now is that she’ll be kept in the shadow cabinet, although not necessarily as party chairman. To my mind,
One of the charges most frequently levelled at the Tory shadow cabinet is that their commitment to the cause isn’t quite great enough; that they lack the same out-of-power-obsessiveness that drove New Labour between 1994 and 1997. Revelations about second jobs and the like have often made this argument quite persuasive. But Tory supporters can take
I missed Robert Kaplan’s latest dispatch yesterday, but this passage is still worth flagging up: “How do you fight unconventional, sub-state armies empowered by ideas? You undermine them subtly over time, or you crush them utterly, brutally. Israel, unable to tolerate continued rocket attacks on its people, has decided on the latter course. Our own
A typically insightful piece by Rachel Sylvester today; this time on the Obama administration’s precarious commitment to the “special relationship”. The key revelation is about a report doing the rounds among British defence and diplomatic officials: “Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America – which has cemented the political alliance
I wrote yesterday that the race is on between Brown and Cameron to appear the best to lead us through the post-recessionary landscape. That race became even more competitive today, with both Brown and Cameron serving up their “optimistic” visions for the future. Our Dear Leader’s came in a speech to the Regional Economic Council,
Although I agree with the ultimate conclusion of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s column today – that we shouldn’t, as a nation, “blame the outsider,” and that we should work towards greater integration – the tirade she launches before it is astonishing, and not in a good sense: “A new government report finds that [the white, working classes]
Optimism, optimism, optimism. That’s the line that Gordon Brown pushes in his interview with the Observer today. He quotes Barack Obama; says he’s going to create jobs the Roosevelt way; claims that British goods are “the products the world will want to buy”; and seems dismissive of any black clouds on the horizon, as in
Thanks to David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, I’ve just caught up with Michael Lewis’s article ‘The End’, which appeared in Portfolio magazine last month. It’s one of the most incisive and exhaustive pieces on the credit crunch that I’ve read so far – exactly what you’d expect from the man who wrote the supremely readable account
So there we have it. The first substantial rumblings that Alistair Darling’s going to sanction a second banking bailout, after the first one didn’t free up credit as intended. According to the Times, the Chancellor will “decide within weeks” whether to pump £billions more into the sector. One option being considered is the creation of
What’s this? Yet another delay to the publication of ministers’ private interests? Yep, and this time it’s because some of the “new minsters” introduced during the last reshuffle have – according to the Times’s source – “required quite a bit of investigation”. The Times adds 2 + 2 together and comes up with Peter Mandelson;
Over at Conservative Home, Jonathan Isaby flags up George Osborne’s response to some of today’s gloomy economic and financial indicators. Here are the shadow chancellor’s words: “First we discovered that there were fewer shoppers in December despite the VAT cut, now we discover house prices are falling sharply and mortgage approvals at a record low
Peter Oborne makes a bold prediction in today’s Mail: that the Euro – ten years old yesterday – won’t live to see its twentieth anniversary. Whether or not you agree with that prognosis, Oborne’s case is compelling: “Indeed, far from being the staggering success its supporters claim, the euro-zone is already inflicting huge damage on
Among the things to look out for in 2009 is whether – and when – our economy starts to recover. Thanks to Alistair Darling’s optimistic prognoses in the Pre-Budget Report, there’s already plenty of room for embarrassment for the Government over this. Their growth forecast for 2009 (of between -0.75 and -1.25 percent of GDP)
A useful piece of research in today’s Mail: “The financial crisis has slashed an average of £60,000 from each family’s wealth over the past year, it has been claimed. Sliding equity prices and dramatic falls in property values have shaved more than 18 per cent off savings and assets, according to estimates by Capital Economics.
There’s very little to add on the situation in Gaza that hasn’t already been said by James and Daniel, both today and yesterday. Although I would like to remind CoffeeHousers of the post I wrote earlier this year from the Israeli town of Sderot – you can read it here. For those who haven’t heard
Iain Dale’s ten predictions for 2009 are well worth a read. One, in particular, jumped out at me: namely, Iain’s suggestion that “Ed Balls will be Chancellor by the end of the year”. Now, I think that’s an unlikely scenario; especially given that a change of Chancellor (or Shadow Chancellor) is often taken as an
We all know about the damage the credit crunch has wreaked on financial institutions, but this anecdote in Anatole Kaletsky’s column today is still pretty astonishing: “An even more spectacular case came to my attention in an e-mail I received in mid-November, when global stock markets hit their low-point (so far). Royal Bank of Scotland,