Comment Headlines
Stories dominating today’s comment pages…
- POLITICS: In The Times, Camilla Cavendish says Gordon Brown’s audacity in presenting spending cuts as increases this week was breathtaking. Everyone knows that the money has run out. If only Brown had been as economical with public finances as he was with the truth about public expenditure. In The Telegraph, Robert Chote, director of the IFS says that whichever party wins the next election, it looks certain that we will see significant cuts in departmental spending. Peter Riddell reports that a Populus poll suggests Alan Johnson as Labour leader might attract back some voters who have deserted the party since the last election. Almost half of the 2005 Labour voters who are now floaters would switch back. Gordon Brown does however receive strong support to remain PM amid current and past Labour voters. But a majority are highly critical of the Cabinet reshuffle and many do not think he is going a good job. In The Independent, Steve Richards says that tonally, David Cameron is pitch perfect. But in terms of policy he and his party have been less clear and, where there has been clarity, the policies are too often moving in the opposite direction to the tone. Austin Mitchell, in The Times, says that the Tories have a brilliant system for changing their leader: a knife in the back and a body in the river and it’s all over. By comparison Labour’s election process is a Doomsday machine, so why bother? Brown will lead Labour into the election next May. For MPs the putsch is over.
- THE ECONOMY: Gary Duncan in The Times, says there was swelling optimism in the markets that Britain could be the first of the West’s big economies to break out of recession. But he points to continuing caution from the Bank of England which warns that an economic upturn will be hard won, slow and could be tough to sustain. Alex Brummer in The Mail, says that until the banks start lending again, there is no chance of a genuine bounce back. The Guardian’s Dan Roberts, writes that as the recession nears a possible end, we have missed a golden opportunity to remake capitalism on firmer, fairer footing. There is no sign of banks being forced to separate their lucrative but risky investments from the “duller bits of banking” and any hope of humbled banks reining in their pay awards have proved naive.
The Daily Digest tells me what the thinkers are thinking – Peter Bale, Executive Producer, Microsoft UK
Leader Lines
We select the most interesting leaders of the day…
- INSULT TO OUR INTELLIGENCE: The Daily Mail says that yesterday the Labour and Tory spokesmen responsible for public spending each argued their case on Radio 4’s Today programme: neither did the public the courtesy of even flirting with the truth. This condescension to the electorate insults the intelligence. Why on earth are we not having a debate about where each party believes the inevitable cuts should fall? Is anybody, on either side of the House, debating any of the real issues? Never has there been so little honesty in British politics.
- IRANIAN ELECTIONS: The Guardian says ahead of Iran’s elections there have been unprecedented scenes, including the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defaming not just his chief rival Mir Hossein Mousavi, but also one of Iran’s most powerful men. Ahmadinejad accused Iran’s former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani of stealing billions of dollars of state money and being Mousavi’s puppet master. Could the Islamic Republic be undergoing its own velvet revolution? That said, Ahmadinejad may be down in the polls, but he is far from out.
- PATAGONIA AND THE WELSH: When a traveller from Patagonia told British immigration officials she was on her way to Denbighshire to brush up her Welsh, she was back on the plane to Argentina in hours, says The Daily Telegraph. What a blow to Patagonian-Welsh relations. The benighted officials of the sadly named UK Border Agency should know of the enduring links between Wales and Patagonia. Experts say the Patagonian city of Trelew retains an agreeable cast of a tongue that is one of Britain’s glories. Cultural traffic between Patagonia and the principality should increase and be two-way.
Comment Cornucopia
Some of the wide-ranging topics covered today…
- NO WORD FOR IT: Tom Utley in The Daily Mail says it is depressing that ‘Web 2.0’ breasted the finishing-tape at the crucial moment, snatching the title of the millionth word in the English language from some other close contenders, far worthier of celebration; words such as slumdog, sexting, or greenwashing. Unlike Web 2.0, all these splendid coinages pass the first test of fitness to be welcomed into English: they fill gaps in our language.
- INSIGNIFICANT CORRODED CLUB: Jan Moir in The Daily Mail argues that increasingly any form of perceived exclusion –from politics to panel shows- seems to rob women of any common sense. ‘Let us in’, they shriek, without really contemplating whether they really want to be inside this corroded comedy world in the first place. Sometimes it is not what is sexist but what is significant that is really important.
- SPACE JUNK THREAT: Johann Hari of The Independent says that in just 50 years of exploring space, humans have left 600,000 pieces of rubbish in space, all circling us at super-speed. There is a great danger the rubbish will crash into other pieces of rubbish, and on, and on, until the earth is circled by a haze of impassable metal debris
Thought for the day
from Terence Blacker in The Independent
The British public may be hungry for change, as the Rowntree study argues, but sometimes the way of changing the me-me-me society lies closer to home than we like to think.
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