G20

What a nice host Vladimir Putin is. Shortly after world leaders gathered in his country for the G20 summit in St Petersburg, a briefing from the President’s official spokesman that Britain is ‘just a small island no-one pays any attention to’ made its way into the media. Nothing like rubbing the nose of one of your guests in the dirt as politicians in this country work out where Britain now stands in the world after rejecting intervention in Syria (more on this in James’s column this week). A Downing Street source has responded in the brittle manner of a slighted guest at a tense dinner party (think an international version of

‘Corruption,’ wrote Edward Gibbon in his peerless Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is ‘the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.’ I was reminded of this phrase when thinking about the Eurozone crisis. Commentators present a dichotomy between the discipline of northern Europe and the frivolity of southern Europe, which is characterised by bureaucratic, judicial and political corruption. Brussels has already imposed technocratic governments on Italy and Greece, and seeks to force Teutonic virtues on those economies. Constitutional liberty is to be limited in the hope of eradicating corruption (both in a literal and figurative sense) in southern Europe. Unsurprisingly, this new imperium is not universally popular: witness the

We’re used to seeing growth forecasts for the next few years, but here’s an altogether rarer beast: forecasts stretching all the way to 2050. They were released by PricewaterhouseCoopers last night, and I thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate seeing them in graph form. Naturally, slap health warnings aplenty across this – economists barely know what will happen this year, let alone decades hence – but some of the trends are still pretty striking. Here’s a round-up: 1. This first graph suggests that – allowing for the relative values of different currencies – China’s GDP will top the US’s around 2020. India’s does likewise just before the 2050 endpoint:   2. The

This snippet from Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge’s latest book merits repeating: ‘As Barack Obama waited in a cavernous building in London, he suddenly noticed Gordon Brown stomping towards him down a corridor, with a flurry of aides in his wake. Unfortunately — probably because he has a glass eye as the result of a rugby injury — the Prime Minister didn’t see the President. To the surprise of Obama and his entourage, the British premier was doing a passable impression of an erupting volcano. He was clearly furious about something his aides had or hadn’t done. It was hardly the behaviour anyone would expect of a G20 summit host,

In his recent cover story for The Spectator, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman talked about how, in the United States, China was beginning to take on the appearance of a new Cold War-style foe. Many Americans accuse China of stealing US jobs, of keeping the its currency undervalued, of exporting deflation by selling its products abroad at unfair prices, and of failing to meet its commitments to the World Trade Organisation. Two months ago, a poll from WSJ/CNBC showed that the majority of Tea Party activists oppose free trade – seeing China as the sole beneficiary of a free trade policy. But it is not only the Tea Party that

As the G20 summit begins in Seoul, the emphasis in much of the papers is on the economic hostility between America and China. The FT’s Gideon Rachman wrote a cover piece on this matter for The Spectator two weeks ago, which we’ve reprinted here for the benefit of CoffeeHousers: In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in

Today is Armed Forces Day, and I don’t recall seeing such collective negativity from newspapers and broadcasters on the Afghan war.  It borders on despair. Most news outlets have dissected David Cameron’s comments yesterday, where he could only offer the hope that troops would be withdrawn by the end of this parliament. Cameron’s non-committal answers, the regular drip of casualties and the sense that the surge has become a slog have led journalists and analysts to conclude, en masse, that the war is unwinnable.   Three interviews are particularly striking. Nick Harvey, the armed forces minister, re-iterated Cameron’s comments in the exact same terms. As I argued yesterday, the vague