Politics

It is one of the oddities of politics that a Labour government can sometimes get away with announcing policies which, had they come from the mouth of a Conservative minister, would have provoked howls of anger. So it is with welfare reform. Whenever Mrs Thatcher’s government proposed to make benefit claimants actually do something for their handouts rather than languish in bedsits in Hastings and Margate, as was the common practice in the 1980s, the resulting rage and charges of heartlessness smothered serious reform — with dreadful consequences. In pockets of the country unemployment has become hereditary, and the idea of working for a living an entirely alien concept. The

A good old-fashoned rumpus is developing. Seems as though the Germans, fed up with being sneered at by Godron Brown and irritated by the Prime Minister’s pretensions to have “saved the world” have decided to poke the PM in the eye. As Peer Steinbruck, the SPD Finance Minister told Newsweek: We have a bidding war where everyone in politics believes they have to top up every spending program that’s been put to discussion. I say we should be honest to our citizens. Policies can take some of the sharpness out of it, but no matter how much any government does, the recession we are in now is unavoidable. When I

You remember the line don’t you? “Flash, Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth.” And you’ll remember the Labour posters promising “Not Flash, Just Gordon”? Well, they ditched that idea today. Or at least the Prime Minister did as this unfortunate slip at Prime Ministers’ Questions demonstrates: Now Labour’s approach to the financial maelstrom is pretty simple: find something to do, do it and then accuse anyone who asks any questions of adopting a “do-nothing” approach. Never mind that do-nothing might be preferable to punting everything on black or, rather, red. Still, the Tories are in a minor pickle: Jeremy Paxman gave wee

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected. New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected. All the other institutions of society — above all, Parliament — are ‘superstructure’, so much flim-flam to be insulted, ignored and, if the chance presents itself, kicked into ‘the dustbin of history’. Everything about the arrest of Damian Green shows the effects of this process. Thus the police, corrupted by years of political pressure,

Commenter Rab O’Ruglen  doesn’t have much sympathy for the crisis afflicting the Tartan press: While I have every sympathy for those who find themselves in employment difficulties through no fault of their own I cannot say I have any sympathy for the Scottish print medium whatsoever.  If you are looking for an example of a people less well served by its press than Scotland’s, you have to go to totalitarian states to find it. It is incredible that when the Independence movement has reached the stage of forming a government, all-be-it a minority one, that every single one of Scotland’s public prints is pro-Union.  Sometimes vitriolically so.  These instruments in