All government reshuffles tend to be presented as Greek tragedies; the coverage focuses on the demeanour of sacked and promoted ministers who troop to No. 10. But this week’s reshuffle will come to be remembered less for the personnel changes, and more for the defeat of various bad ideas which characterised David Cameron’s early years
This week, the GCSE results envelope landed on doormats across the country. The results ought, on any rational basis, to shame the nation. Never mind how well or badly pupils may have done individually, taken as a whole the results point to a chillingly predictable trend for anyone in a comprehensive school. A pupil can
When Sir Mervyn King steps down as Bank of England Governor next June, even his most loyal supporters will struggle to describe his tenure as a success. He failed to spot the massive asset bubble which burst so spectacularly. His job was to keep inflation down, and Britain has instead suffered the worst inflation in
It is a paradox that the nation most committed to free enterprise — the United States — can be one of the most aggressively protectionist countries on earth. The accusations made this week by the New York State Department of Financial Services against Standard Chartered Bank are serious and deserve investigation, as were those made
An outsider viewing the Olympic opening ceremony could easily have gained the impression that Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A week on Sunday we are promised an equally spectacular closing ceremony. For the moment, the cost of staging the Olympics — £9.3 billion for the games, including £80 million for the opening
The ninth of August will mark the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the credit crunch: the day in 2007 that the banks found themselves frozen out of the debt markets, leading to the Northern Rock collapse and on to the more general banking crisis of 2008. By this stage of the Great Depression, western
Scambusters is the name of a government initiative to prevent householders falling victim to rogue traders who use high-pressure sales techniques to flog lousy and vastly overpriced goods and services. It would be more convincing if the government did not so frequently allow itself to be ripped off. At his appearance before the home affairs
This week marks 50 years since Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’, in which he sacked a third of his Cabinet. As if to mark the anniversary, Tory MPs this week sunk the dagger into the Liberal Democrats’ plans for House of Lords reform. So great was the potential defeat — the largest in
It is easy to understand Bob Diamond’s miscalculation. In the great pantheon of banking scandals, it was unlikely, he thought, that Libor interest-rate rigging would rank very high. Libor is the average interest rate at which banks lend to each other — or, rather, the rate at which they admit to lending to each other.
The NatWest banking disaster is an ominous reminder of the way in which technology has come to control our lives. We now know what a proper IT collapse feels like: a piece of computer code goes wrong and, within days, bank machines shut down and chaos ensues. This week the stories range from unpaid bills
The folly of jetting off to an international summit in a pleasant tropical resort during a time of emergency at home was amply demonstrated by Jim Callaghan in 1979 when he arrived, suntanned, back from the Caribbean apparently unaware of the seriousness of growing industrial unrest at home. But at least he never actually uttered
The American political scientist Wallace Sayre said that the bitterness of a political debate was inversely proportional to its importance. This has been true for US politics, where at each election time the issue of gay marriage divides the country — even when the president has no authority to either legalise or ban it. It’s
As Britain prepares for a week of peaceful celebration, Syria will be bracing itself for more bloodshed. The Assad regime, perhaps emboldened by the knowledge that the west has no appetite to intervene in Syria, is becoming ever more brutal in its repression. The massacre in villages around Houla, where 108 were slain, most of
The Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, promised this week to ‘reduce the volatility of energy bills’. Unfortunately, his proposal to eliminate the peaks and troughs in the electricity market involves elevating bills to a much higher level and leaving them there. Besides the pain this will inflict on already stretched households, the result of the
There is one crumb of comfort that Fleet Street can extract from the phone-hacking scandal: its own foibles still create a vastly bigger splash than do those of newer media. This week Facebook investors harangued the company’s chief executive for wearing a hoodie in meetings and Yahoo’s chief executive resigned after a shareholder questioned his
This government has run out of good ideas; that was what the Queen’s speech told us this week. When the coalition was formed, it united behind a genuinely bold agenda: school reform, welfare reform, health reform and deficit elimination. Where has the boldness gone? The coalition’s courage has vanished, as has its sense of purpose
At the end of the month, a group of protestors plan to descend upon a field in Hertfordshire and ‘decontaminate’ (i.e. destroy) a field of genetically modified wheat. The activists, from an organisation called Take the Flour Back, claim to be saving Britain from a deadly menace. In reality, they are threatening not only to
The Joint Committee on the Draft House of Lords Reform Bill could have saved itself a lot of bother if, instead of producing a lengthy report, it had simply quoted the words of Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, in the House of Lords in 1641: ‘When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary
There was a time when the British could look upon the French, and their monstrously big government, with a sense of superiority: not any more. There is now a horrible similarity to our political predicaments. We both have political leaders who have failed to kick-start an economic recovery, in spite of repeated promises. We
There is a danger in this week’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Abu Hamza and four other Islamic extremists can be extradited to face terror charges in America. The danger is that it makes the court look reasonable and in doing so weakens the case for removing Britain from its jurisdiction.