May 14, 2013
Review of 5 Days in May by Andrew Adonis
Cool anger drives Andrew Adonis’s first-hand account of how Labour tried to stop the Liberal Democrats handing Britain over to a reactionary and incompetent Conservative administration. As a Blairite education and transport minister and a former member of the Social Democratic party, Adonis had spent his adult life believing a “progressive coalition” could unite the centre and left of British politics.
His five days in May 2010 negotiating on Labour’s behalf disabused him of that notion and much else besides.
“Clegg wouldn’t put the Tories in power, throwing over a British Liberal tradition going back a century and a half as a progressive anti-Tory party,” he thought as the electorate returned a hung parliament. When they heard that David Cameron was making Clegg a generous offer, Gordon Brown and much of the cabinet thought the “process would turn to our favour once the Tories and Lib Dems had rehearsed the extent of their differences”.
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Posted in Observer |
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May 13, 2013
When you see rottenness in a system you must ask: does it come from one bad apple or does the whole barrel stink?
The rank smell emanating from the coalition is impossible to miss. At first sniff, it appears to come from the blazered figure of Iain Duncan Smith. It has taken me some time to identify its source, because appearances deceive. From his clipped hair to his polished shoes, Duncan Smith seems to be a man who has retained the values of the officer corps of the Scots Guards he once served.
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Posted in Observer |
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May 10, 2013
When I heard that Niall Ferguson had said that JM Keynes advocated reckless economic policies because he was gay and childless, and hence had no concern for the future, I wrote: ‘If true, this represents Ferguson’s degeneration from historian to shock jock’.
The reports were true, but I was wrong. There has been no degeneration. Ferguson has always been this crass and crassly inaccurate.
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Posted in Uncategorized |
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May 6, 2013
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We flatter ourselves when we boast of mastery of the ironic style. Unlike literal-minded Germans and Americans, we are not ashamed to live behind masks and speak in riddles. On the contrary, we delight in it and damn foreigners for their insistence on saying what they mean. They lack our sophistication. The delightfully quirky British sense of humour leaves them cold.
If we were harder on ourselves, we would notice that on the reverse side of the ironic coin are the smuttiness and evasiveness that always accompany self-censorship. We would wonder how we ended up in a country where fear of causing offence or crossing a powerful or litigious interest had become so ingrained the British could no longer speak plainly or read freely.
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Posted in Observer |
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May 1, 2013
A plane crashes in the Sahara. Only a reporter and an editor survive. At first they hope that rescuers will see the smoke rising from the wreckage. But the fire dies, and no one comes. They are lost and alone under a merciless sun, and start walking.
For days, they march in horrendous heat. Their water runs out. Their skin peels. Their minds reel from sunstroke. Finally, they collapse — blistered and dehydrated — at the bottom of an enormous sand dune.
“Let’s curl up here and die,” gasps the editor.
“No!” cries the reporter. “We cannot give up. Let’s climb to the top of the dune and see if there’s any hope.”
They stagger up — two steps forward, one step back — and reach the top of the dune.
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Posted in Standpoint |
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April 29, 2013
If you want to combat poverty, empower women. There are few uncontested arguments in social policy, but this is one of them. Give women control of their fertility and overpopulation and undereducation will fall. Give women financial independence and they will have the means to free themselves and their children from dangerous men.
Everyone accepts the proposition that, in general, mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money on children. Even the British government accepts it after a fashion. But religious bigotry, rightwing prejudice and bureaucratic convenience have made the coalition determined to forget what it already knows.
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Posted in Observer |
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April 25, 2013
I don’t normally campaign. I’m not a joiner or a natural committee man. But the state of free speech in England pushed me into despair, and three years ago I started to do what little I could for the campaign for libel reform.
Britain was not a country where the natives could debate their grievances and foreigners could come to talk of oppression in their own lands. Our politicians and judges welcomed actions from corporations at home that were clearly designed to use the crushing power of money to intimidate critics into silence, and from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, Hollywood paedophiles, Islamist fanatics and Saudi petro-billionaires. A Russian newspaper contesting Putin’s mafia state or a Scandinavian newspaper investigating the Icelandic bankers’ Ponzi scheme, would be hit with a biased law and huge costs by the London courts. Even after the death of Robert Maxwell in the early 1990s revealed that the old fraud had used the libel law to suppress criticism of his criminal business enterprises, the establishment did nothing.
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Posted in Spectator |
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April 18, 2013
I duly filed a piece for the Observer saying that I and many other who opposed Mrs Thatcher felt uneasy about celebrating her death. Her supporters had a good case when they said that the protests were simultaneously childish and grotesque. But as soon as they censored, they lost the argument.
On cue, an email arrived from Russia Today, Putin’s English language propaganda station. Everyone who goes along with the denial of human rights in the West, the Leveson inquiry in Britain or any double-standard in a democracy should think hard about its implications.
“I am a producer on Russia Today TV network, a 24 hour news channel broadcasting in most parts of the world. We are talking today about BBC radio not playing the witch song (actually then it was changed to 5 seconds of it only) and are looking for guests with opinions and i came across your story and i thought it was wonderful and quite opinionated. So, i was wondering if there is a chance we could ask you to talk to us about your views LIVE today, in the evening. We are talking about freedom of speech, and i think this is what your article is about.”
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Posted in Spectator |
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April 16, 2013
When they hear the screams of rage of the United Kingdom Independence party, leftwingers and liberals are tempted to label them as cries from a “far right”. It is not a hysterical charge, at first glance. Ukip is to the right of the Tory party. Among its members are people who you wouldn’t want exercising power over your life or anyone else’s.
Take Julia Gasper, former chairman (not “chairwoman or “chair” or “chairperson”, because to suggest that Ms Gasper isn’t a man would be political correctness gone mad) of Ukip’s Oxford branch. She licensed every kind of dumb prejudice when she said: “As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the subject.”
But here’s a disconcerting point for those who want to chant anti-Nazi slogans at Nigel Farage..
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Posted in Observer |
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April 14, 2013
As for the BBC, what is there left to say about it? Can it show The Wizard of Oz again? Can it only run the film after the 9pm watershed? Must the announcer warn: “This children’s story contains Munchkin choruses that some viewers may find offensive”? Its decision to ban every part of the song except for a five-second clip in a news report shows clearly something that many people outside the media rarely understand: the BBC folds under pressure.
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Posted in Observer |
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Nick Cohen
