Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Great Poppy War of 2011

From our UK edition

Galling as it may be to admit this, it is possible that in the Great Poppy Stramash of 2011 FIFA is right and the Football Association is wrong. Perhaps that puts it too strongly. Let me put it this way: were I in charge of FIFA, I'd make an exception to their general prohibition on "political statements and symbols" to allow England to adorn their shirts with poppies for their friendly match against Spain this weekend. But were I running the FA I'd respond to FIFA's silly reluctance to make any such exception by saying "Well, we think this unfortunate but there it is. Let's get on with the game." And if the Football Association really wants to make a point about all this then perhaps it could write a hefty cheque - at least £100,000 - to the Poppy Appeal?

Alex Massie

A Petition That Deserves Your Support

From our UK edition

Making it easier for people to petition parliament is, on the whole, a modest but useful step forward. The White House offers a similar online "service" though the point of it escapes me since the President's powers are so limited when it comes to legislation.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

George Osborne Slays the Tobin Tax

From our UK edition

George Osborne was filmed laying into the idea of a Tobin Tax on financial transactions at today's Ecofin meeting in Brussels. As he says: if you want to tax bankers, tax them but don't create a tax that will only be paid for by their customers. Here's Osborne: All this is well said (transcript here) and is, incidentally, a revealing glimpse into parts of euroworld that are rarely broadcast. Also, calling this a "Robin Hood Tax" is perverse: in fact it's a Sheriff of Nottingham ploy that appears to target the rich while actually being paid by the poor.

Alex Massie

Campaign Adventures: Congo Edition

From our UK edition

I've not been paying much attention to the elections in the Congo. Nor, I suspect, have you. But politicians everywhere can learn from Etienne Tshisekedi, the man hoping to knock President Laurent Kabila off his perch. His method seems admirably simple: declare victory three weeks before the polls open for business: Those who say that Kabila prevented my plane from landing do not understand the situation. Kabila no longer represents anyone but his wife. People like Boshab [president of the national assembly] and Mende [minister of information], who started elsewhere and talk with both sides of the mouth, say one thing during the day and another at night, have now abandoned him. He is alone with his wife, as you can see. So I say we need not wait for the elections.

Alex Massie

Huntsmania: Fun, But Not Serious

From our UK edition

The game is the game, you know? And one of the rules of the Presidential Primary Game (Press Edition) is that there's more space to be filled than there are sensible things with which to fill it. (This, plainly, is a problem exacerbated by the intertubes.) This being so, 'tis the season for the traditional game of "Taking a Second Look at People Who Won't Win The Republican Presidential Nomination". Exhibit A, courtesy of Ryan Lizza, this Eric Erickson piece at RedState reconsidering Huntsman. Exhibit B, this is picked up by the smart lads at Business Insider. One more flurry of Huntsmania and we'll have a bona fide media trend. And, like most such trends, it will be bogus but fun. We've been here before and there's nothing wrong with that.

Alex Massie

Two Cheers for Theresa May and her Passport Fiasco

From our UK edition

The obvious thing to be said about the pilot programme run amok that "loosened" border controls at a number of busy UK airports this summer is that said programme was both rational and reasonable. Obviously one is not supposed to say this and instead concentrate on the thousands of terrorists and other nasties who will have been "let in" to Britain as a result of the failure to "read" every "chip" embedded in every passport. Shockingly, officials were told that school parties and kids travelling with their parents probably wouldn't need the same level of scrutiny as other, more probably malevolent, types.

Alex Massie

Militarising the Police: Still a Bad Idea

From our UK edition

Good grief, the Metropolitan Police have asked for - and worse, been granted - permission to deploy officers armed with rubber bullets as thousands of revolting students march through London tomorrow. I suppose the Met has always had this power but, this, as Sam Bowman says, is still a terrible idea: Deploying them now is a worrying step towards a dangerous “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to riot control, and should be reversed. Despite widespread public perception of them as relatively harmless method of crowd control, rubber bullets are extremely dangerous. In a study of 90 patients suffering from injuries from their use in Northern Ireland, one person died and 17 were permanently disabled or disfigured. Quite.

Alex Massie

Joe Frazier, Lion of Manila

From our UK edition

The defensive playground boast Stick and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me was always unconvincing protesting, as it did, far, far too much. In case you doubted this, consider the sorry example of Joe Frazier, lion of Manila and the Garden, forever embittered and broken by Muhammad Ali's taunting. All before my time, of course, and boxing will never capture the imagination in Britain (or the United States) as it did back then. The 1970s were a golden era and not just in the heavyweight division either. The confluence of colour television and a phalanx of genuine stars prepared to fight one another anytime, any place helped captivate much of the planet. Ali and Frazier were pre-eminent, of course, but there were plenty of other champions.

Alex Massie

Back to the Mainland

From our UK edition

Back on the mainland after a magical week on Jura* and, frankly, reacquainting oneself with whatever's been happening in the rest of the world is a pretty grim business. Must be done however, so expect a measure of catch-up blogging here soon. What happened last week that mattered? *Should you be tempted to visit the island I can't recommend the Ardlussa estate too highly. A special place.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Programming Note

From our UK edition

I'm away to the Isle of Jura for the next week and so this is likely to have some impact on posting frequency here. The Paps, meanwhile, are calling...

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Health & Safety: What Would Jesus Do? Weep, Obviously.

From our UK edition

I hold no particular brief for the people "occupying" the London Stock Exchange but whatever one may think of their aims it's evident that in closing the cathedral this week the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral and his colleagues have behaved like total ninnies. Then again, this is the Church of England so a certain measure of hand-wringing may be part of the job description at St Paul's. Who knows? What we do know, thanks in large part to this splendid, exhaustive, post by David Allen Green is that the so-called "health and safety" concerns are so feeble they could almost be a parody of CoE hopelessness. Among the "possible" threats to "life and limb": Smoking/drinking within the tented areas. Slips, trips and falls exacerbated at night with cover of darkness.

Alex Massie

Lord Ashcroft’s Common Sense

From our UK edition

Good stuff from Lord Ashcroft this morning. Good because, obviously, he agrees with me that the Tory obsession with Europe and, just as importantly, the style in which that obsession is paraded before the public damages the party. As the noble lord puts it: [W]e know that for many people, the main barrier to voting Conservative is that they do not think we share the concerns of people like them.  But which issue has the last week shown still seems to exercise our party above all others? Some will be inclined to blame the media for the back-to-the-nineties coverage of Tory turmoil over Europe.  But the fact that we know journalists find the story irresistible makes it all the more ludicrous to hand it to them on a plate. [...

Alex Massie

No, Barack Obama is not the Second Coming of George McGovern

From our UK edition

On the other hand, Rich Lowry - editor of National Review and therefore a man who should know better - offers this pithy analysis of American under Obama: [N]one of this should be surprising since the Democrats, despite the Clinton interlude, never stopped being a McGovernite party, and Obama is a McGovernite figure For the love of god, this is poppycock on stilts. I have no idea how, as Daniel Larison says, honouring an agreement signed by a Republican president that promised to withdraw American troops from Iraq can be construed as any kind of "McGovernite" policy. Indeed, for this to make any kind of sense I think you have to conclude that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger must have once been "McGovernites" too since they wanted to end an overlong war too.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

How Good is Barack Obama at Politics?

From our UK edition

Not as good as you might think, argues Ramesh Ponnuru: Last year, President Barack Obama issued a warning to Republicans. They had been “politicking” instead of “governing,” he said. “Well, we can politick for three months,” he said. “They forgot I’m pretty good at politicking.” That was in August 2010. At the end of those three months, Republicans controlled the most seats in the U.S. House since the 1940s. Republicans did well for a lot of reasons. One of them was that the president is wrong: He isn’t all that good at politics. [...] But take a closer look at Obama’s rise and a hole in his resume quickly becomes apparent: Obama never had to fight for and win the votes of people who don’t agree with him.

Alex Massie

First Lord or First Among Equals?

From our UK edition

Well, James, hang on a minute. The three "schools of thought" you identify in relation to last night's Tory rebellion on Europe are not three distinct schools at all. That is, one may consider the Tory party "unmanageable" on europe and believe that the leadership got caught up in the madness yesterday. But it is your final school that really have it wrong: The third lot are the ones who have grasped the significance of last night's events. Despite being loyalists, they are in no doubt about the need for Cameron to change his style of party management. They want him to stop acting like a medieval monarch and start behaving in the manner of someone who is first among equals when it comes to his parliamentary colleagues. Up to a point.

Alex Massie

What (Some) Wall Street People Really Think

From our UK edition

Apparently this email spent much of the summer pinging from one Wall Street firm to another. I suspect the author's views are pretty widely shared. Sure, there are plenty of smart people in the financial world but it's also true that many of them ain't smart enough to know when to lie low. As a man said recently, the public rather thinks that the banks and all the rest of them have missed an excellent opportunity to shut up. We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years.

Alex Massie

The Legend of the Patriotic Drinker

From our UK edition

This is one hell of a statistic: In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98). That's from a new book by James Simpson Creating Wine, the Emergence of a World Industry 1840-1914. This seems hard to believe until one recalls how little governments spent on anything back in the late-Victorian era. Nevertheless, there you have it: boozers kept Britain afloat then just as drinkers and smokers do more than their bit to fund the government these days. Even so: 36%! There's something almost heroic about that.

Monday

Alex Massie

The Rebels and Government Agree: There Will Be An EU Referendum.

From our UK edition

In principle, I agree with Fraser's admirable post previewing Monday's debate (summarised excellently by ConservativeHome here) on an EU-referendum but I suspect that wily old Blairite John Rentoul is right to argue that there was no way the government could wash its hands of the affair since, whatever it chose to do, The headlines would be about a divided Tory party, come what may. Which is reasonable enough since the Tory party is divided. Granted, the primary division is between the Get Out Now team and the Renegotiate Everything team but the point remains: this has been a blunder. The government has mishandled this affair and been embarrassed by its own backbenchers. Nearly half the non-payroll Tory vote declined to back the Prime Minister yesterday.

Alex Massie

The Rich Deny Themselves

From our UK edition

There's plenty of good sense in Neil O'Brien's article on the "squeezed middle" in today's Telegraph but this snippet helps explain a good deal of what's baffling about British politics: In fact, a recent YouGov poll for Policy Exchange found that eight out of 10 people believe they are in the middle 40 per cent of earners. Only 2 per cent of people believe they are in the top 30 per cent. There are many ways of looking at it but among them is this: most people who pay anything up to £30,000 a year for their children to be educated do not think they're amongst the wealthiest 30% of British earners.

Saturday