Standing on the terrace of County Hall with Parliament behind him, providing the snappers with some great images, Cameron spoke about the ‘modern Conservative alternative’ to five more years of Gordon Brown. The implicit message was youth and vigour. This was one of those occasions where the visuals matter more than what was actually said.
Last week’s Financial Times carried an advert seeking a buyer for the bankrupt Crystal Palace. Portsmouth FC, winner of the FA Cup just two years ago, is unable to meet players’ wages or pay for a website. Dozens of clubs are wrestling with their creditors, and the game is effectively divided into two financial leagues: those with, and without, a foreign sugar daddy to write the cheques.and he adds
Worse still, the global success of the English game has done nothing to nurture English, or even British, talent. It has never been harder for an English player to make it in the English Premier League.
If we can get through this, a year, 18 months, even two years, with all the agencies focusing on how you give people skills to fill the vacancies, then you will have a completely different picture at the end of this than you did at the end of the Eighties.’
a Key Stage 2 Science marker, sworn to Masonic-like secrecy about this mysterious testing process. In my innocence I had expected it to be a straightforward procedure, but I hadn’t allowed for the serial incompetence, the human error, the vagaries of postal deliveries, and most important: the political pressure.
if the child wrote the correct answer, but then, on second thoughts, decided it was wrong and crossed it out, the crossing-out still gained the mark.and it gets better
Correct spelling was completely irrelevant — to the point of absurdity. I remember one question required the one-word answer ‘air’. But markers were instructed that even words such as ‘her’ must be accepted as worthy of the mark. ‘Well,’ argued one senior examiner, ‘the child might speak with a Liverpudlian accent.’
tinkering with its ancient and inscrutable constitution might not strike outsiders as a particular priority.the bill is described as
Timid. A proposal that Parliament must vote on whether troops are committed to war is hardly radical: Mr Blair held a vote before the Iraq war and it would be politically difficult to go to war without one in future. Mr Straw held out the prospect of giving MPs greater say over public appointments and the date of general elections, but details are yet to emerge. Other ideas, such as restoring the right to protest outside Parliament and allowing the Union flag to be flown on government buildings at any time, are mostly symbolic.
I thought the most helpful thing would be for me to keep quiet,’ ‘But now, I feel I’ve earned my passage. Let’s face it, there have been plenty of opportunities to rock the boat during the last few months
What Gordon needs to do when he talks about this “new politics” that places power in the hands of people, is to announce a policy that gives that huge symbolic lift.’and his answer
by dramatically cutting the size of Whitehall. I would slash it over and above what is being done by a quarter.’
a man with a lurid history of verbal incontinence is playing the 21st-century election game, with all its gaffe-traps and correctness tripwires - and he is winning.
Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher.
A lot of this is owed to ‘Blairism’ and its corruptions of the body politic; much, too, to the previous Conservative period in office. The main parties, reduced in organisation and membership and with their inherited principles in dissolution, have themselves paid a high price in public recoil for what they have done to the country. Yet, compounding their misjudgments, each seeks the same chimerical ‘centre ground’ where stand the idols of Empowerment, Opportunity, Aspiration, Competition, Modernisation, Choice and so forth. It is the ground not of a Normandy beach but of a quagmire in Notting Hill.
ignores the billion-dollar question: will the private sector provide the capital to finance this replacement-and-then-some of the nation’s nuclear plants?and adds
there is the small matter of whether these massive, capital-intensive stations will be economic, without government subsidies. given that
if we know anything about nuclear power plants, it is that their cost always exceeds estimates.
IT TAKES special ineptitude to cheapen a principle without getting anything much in return. But this week, in a do-nothing budget devoted to plastic bags and cavity-wall insulation (see article), Alistair Darling, Britain's hapless chancellor of the exchequer, showed he is equal to the task
for all the Chancellor’s advertised dullness, he has adopted a strategy of deception which his predecessor would be proud of (and probably authored). It can best be compared to the technique of professional magicians. Before any trick, they perform what is called ‘the pledge’ — whereby the audience is shown something normal: a pack of cards, which someone will inspect to check it’s normal. Of course, it is not. Once a fake backdrop is established, a magic trick is fairly easy to engineer.
Ten Budgets, one Chancellor and three New Statesman editors later, I am still writing about Labour's efforts to divert resources to poor families. The continuity of this underlying theme is remarkable, backed by a main delivery method introduced in 1998. This is to give tax credits to selected low-income groups, at a favourable rate compared to money spent on benefits.
Three different kinds of inequality have survived or arisen under Labour; more than fiscal abstractions, these three inequalities are shaping public perceptions of the government's economic record.
Britain has to reassert its position within Europe, embracing the benefits it could win for British people - from protection of workers to the upholding of universal human rights. Such a purpose could provide the bold and optimistic vision that Labour so desperately needs
