The original story:
“Lord Rogers’ attack on the Prince of Wales is outlandish”
Telegraph View
Daily Telegraph
17 June 2009

Summary of the story:

A crisp Teleraph leader opines that Lord Rogers is wrong to criticise Prince Charles’s intervention which led to the Qatari power elite pulling out of a London architectural scheme they were funding.

livingissues comment:

It is possible that the majority of people don’t like the Rogers scheme which Charles has scuppered. But it got through the democratically-mandated planning system ordained by the the British people speaking through Parliament. If people don’t like the scheme, they need to use the existing system. If they don’t like the system they need to fight to change it.

Of course, Charles can’t argue for those sorts of changes except discreetly. Not that being argumentative is his game. As Lord Rogers says, and it’s a secondary issue: Charles never debates the issues he chunders on about. Maybe his opining from on high is the luxury we have to allow him granted that he has watch his words (at least a bit).

But we really should not permit to Charles to stitch things up behind our backs: that is a serious abuse of his being heir to a constitutional monarchy.

More to the point, it’s amazing to think that the Daily Telegraph doesn’t see any of that and would rather celebrate the outcome of Charles’s intervention because architecturally it suits them. Oh, and theirs is the populist view – which again is hardly the point of a being an intelligent right-winger.

The original story:
“Crisis? What crisis? The market confounds the left”
Philip Stephens
Financial Times
12 June 2009

and others…

Summary of the stories
Philip Stephens – a commentator symapthetic to New Labour – notes that a largely free market view of capitalism and globalisation seems to have survived the latest ruction. He notes that in the recent EU elections, the left – including the social democrats (the UK’s LibDems, for instance) and incumbents of the left – did badly, whilst the right (including some “far-right”) – including incumbents of the right – did well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same newspaper, Peter Clarke notes that the LibDems might surf to success on Labour’s discomfiture and resurface to mimic the success of their Liberal forebears. Richard Reeves made much the same point.

livingissues comment:
It is indeed fascinating that the left at the moment is suffering even though capitalism and ancient institutions have proved rather fallible. The City and Westminster have survived their recent crises much better than is widely supposed and in all sorts of ways, it may be business surprisingly as normal.

I think this is because people do deep down recognise that things have worked pretty well and probably will again.

There is a pretty good chance that MPs and Parliament will emerge stronger than ever. Good. It is likely that Anglo-Saxon capitalism will stay different from more state-controlled capitalism. Good.

It is indeed quite possible that the problem of politics being a battle between dead classes and ideas will be solved. Good. That may happen because centrists parties hoover up the right of the left and left of the right. Good. It may even be that party structures will matter less. Good.

The British on the whole like private life and not public. Their ideal is not to have to bother with the public realm because it is doing well in the hands of professionals paid to run it. They make a partial exception for politics because it is sufficiently like sport to offer amusement at least as a spectacle. Similarly, they follow business news when their wallet is on the line, or the events are exciting.

It is very fashionable just now to say that politics is about to become less “top down” and more “bottom up”. On this account, the elite won’t be able administer everything centrally because we the people will spring up in myriad forms to manage things more locally, and for ourselves. This is supposed in part to be a function of two-way digital media. These may be good developments, but I see no evidence whatever of a widespread urge to take up the tedious and irksome business of running things like schools, hospitals, prisons, and welfare services. If you do… do write in.

The original story:
“Women less happy….”
Richard Woods
The Sunday Times
31 May 2009

Summary of the story:
This is a very readable account of “female misery” but it is wider ranging on happiness.

livingissues comment:
Almost incidentally this piece usefully notes that (contrary to several modern myths) people are not working longer than they used to, or spending less times with their children, or experiencing more misery. The difficulty is that women do not seem to be experiencing the same increases in well-being that men are.

The original story:
“Trudie Styler: Saving the world one jet at a time”
Marina Hyde
The Guardian
15 May 2009

Summary of the story:
Ms Hyde is making something of a profession discussing the absurdity of celebrity conscience and here’s a good installment in the saga. It’s a tale of extravagant flying in jets and helicopters by a woman with lots of homes and a mission to save the planet.

livingissues comment:
Ms Tyler responded to the piece with an interesting assessment of the trade-offs to be made. Every square mile of rainforest that’s saved, saves a good deal of greenhouse gas and so a bit of jet fuel to save a lot of forest is a good deal.

I have no idea how much rainforest Trudie Styler has saved and how much her flying was indispensable to her saving it.

In principle, she could be right. Similarly, the airmiles of a person like Sir Nicholas Stern might well be worth it, if what he achieves needs face-to-face contact.

In her response, she mentioned her part in the campaign against Chevron and its supposed involvement in destroying Ecuador’s wildernesses. It happens the Economist had a little piece on the background to this saga and it’s well worth a look. One way of looking at things is to say that the Ecuadorian government squandered its own assets and it’s far from sure that any US company has much to blame itself for.

The original story:
“Making Allowances”
Leader Comment
The Times
9 May 2009

Summary of the story:
The Times’s leader writer ran the gamut of argument on the problem of finding the right people to go into politics, especially how to reward them properly.

livingissues comment:
The nation has been indulging in an orgy of dislike of Members of Parliament and their allowances. Interestingly, The Telegraph is not universally admired for its expose. It was seen in some quarters as a witch hunt which risked taking our eye of the real issues. As The Times remarks, the upshot is probably that the MPs’ “take” is quite small and not very corrupting.

MPs will have to rethink how they pay themselves.

Actually, though, the public has more rethinking to do than the politicians. We have been so busy wanting everybody in authority to be responsive to the point of submissiveness that we haven’t noticed that we want to be informed and led by an elite.

We won’t be led by serious and worthwhile people until we signal that we admire public service. (Nick Stacey told A N Wilson (FT, 9/10 May 2009) how badly we were lacking this sense.) Of course, public servants have to be well-rewarded. But they’ll need respect too.

The failing is partly in the leadership cadres. For all the humbug and arrogance that has always littered the elite – the professional classes – there was also a more widespread understanding of the idea of vocation. Helena Kennedy made something like that point on BBC2’s Newsnight (11 May 2009).

We need to build a new sense of professionalism and the vocational pleasures it can bring.

So it’s a reciprocal matter. The led need to understand their obligation to their leaders and the leaders need to have quite a strong sense of their duty.

This sort of ethos was once quite openly discussed and taught. It wasn’t the preserve of the public school, though public schools certainly took it very seriousy and still do (as the headmistress of Roedean reminded the FT (9 May 2009). Actually, it ran right through society as a value and was taught at every point. It was, for instance, accepted that adults had a leadership role, and it didn’t really matter how poor or uneducated they were.

The original story:

Why did so few stand up to the spin machine?
Guido Fawkes
The Times
17 April 2009

Summary of the story:

Guido Fawkes gives his side of his exposure of Damian McBride (a senior aide to the Prime Minister Gordon Brown) and the “dirty tricks” media campaign he seems to have proposed for the Reg Rag website which was allegedly to be launched by Derek Draper, an erstwhile New Labour media man.

In particular Fawkes takes the mainstream media to task for knowing that there was a poisonous media operation at the heart of government but keeping it under their hats.

Here is a key quote from the piece:

The explosive proof of a smear and spin operation in the heart of Downing Street was met with a universal lack of surprise inside the Westminster village. Everyone who was interested knew it existed. Labour Party rivals to Gordon Brown had long been on the receiving end of poisonous briefings retold by pliant lobby correspondents.

livingissues comment:

It is hard to dispute that the political media is part of a noxious world at the heart of British life. Perhaps inevitably, there is an important cadre of journalists whose entire career depends on their being “in” with ministers and the spin doctors who control the flow of information out of Number 10, Westminster and the ministries. They are in an invidious position.

Tellingly, when a corner of the carpet is lifted (as by Guido Fawkes) journalists then pop up to say they knew this sort of all along. In this case, one such was James Blitz in the Financial Times who told us that he had known for years that Mr McBride was out of order much of the time.

There are two ways to go on this.

One could argue, as Mr Blitz implies, that this new smear campaign by Mr McBride was of a different order to his earlier poor behaviour. That carries the implication that it might have been wrong to expose Mr McBride’s earlier behaviour and that it is right to expose him now. Besides, spin masters and journalists have to be able to communicate in an off-the-record way, so it is very likely that these channels may sometimes be very colourful without – say – a bit of bad language in a conversation being much of a scandal,

But, alternatively, one is very tempted to see the journalists’ behaviour in a more severe light. This is Guido Fawkes’s line and in his case it is not without self-interest and self-promotion.

It is very possible to argue that the New Labour administration has been bad for government because it has been so good at manipulating the media. In the end, of course, the machinery has been exposed. It happened first with Mr Blair, whose work with Alistair Campbell, his press officer, was detected and analysed. Mr Brown’s media operation was in a way both more brutal and more subtle. His spokesmen seem to have been if anything rather rougher than Mr Campbell. But they also more successfully “spun” Mr Brown as intellectual, moral, and solid. In short, they span Mr Brown as not needing spin. It has taken a while for it to become clear that the “real” Mr Brown may be a very complicated mixture of rootedness and storminess, and profoundly interested in the frothy world of perception.

The issue is whether the media has been any good at conveying how poisonous things had become. One way into this is to insist that the personal and the party political be kept separate from the formal and the institutional. Sue Cameron, in the FT, draws this distinction and makes it stick by saying that the tax-payer should only pay for employees – for officials – whose function is highly respectable and in (to use an old-fashioned formulation) the service of the Crown.

The merit of this approach is to recognise that politicians may be vicious, scurrilous, neurotic, gossipy, profane and malicious, but when they put people to work on their behalf in this vein, they or their political party should pay for it. The State, the Nation and the Crown should be kept well away from this sort of thing.

Actually, “special advisers” like Mr McBride always were supposed to steer away from party-political spinning. The Civil Service has just re-iterated the distinction. From now on, the test of whether journalists are doing their own job will be whether they police those old decencies the way they were supposed to all along.

The original story:
“Wall Street slow to see zeitgeist”
Chrystia Freeland
Financial Times
3 April 2009

Summary of the story:
Chrystia Freeland’s piece discusses the public anger about failures in Wall Street and The City. Here is a key passage:

The technorati and the punditocracy have tended to characterise public anger provoked by the crisis with the lazy shorthand of “populist rage”.

This week’s robust mass manifestation of that discontent in London will have strengthened that perception. But the truth is that the people’s disgruntlement is far more focused than that dismissive tag would suggest. Even those London crowds – and remember, these were people animated by the passions of a public demonstration, not participants in an Oxford Union debate – targeted the windows of Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the big public welfare recipients, rather than the hedge funds of nearby Mayfair.

livingissues comment:

Chrystia Freeland seems irritated that Wall Street people dismiss as “populism” the anger about the hiatus in capitalism. Fair do’s: one imagines that there are elite, educated, thoughtful people who are angry with the generation of capitalists who have so failed their customers, employees and firms. Certainly, it’s not just mob folly to dislike what’s been going on.

But Ms Freeland’s analysis seems to emphasise the wrong things. Here are a few:

(1) The street protest against the G-20 was mostly old-style anti-capitalism of the sort we’ve heard for a decade or more. This anger is always directed at whatever capitalist target looks the most unpopular at the time.

(2) This wasn’t “popular protest” by “The People”. Not many taxpayers (all of them) with money in RBS would think it clever to add to the bank’s problems by breaking the firm’s windows.

(3) The really interesting thing about the mass media response to the financial chaos we are living through is how little of it is anti-capitalist. There seems to be a quite a lot of tacit understanding that capitalism hasn’t failed us, we have failed capitalism.

(4) It is very interesting how much interesting discussion there is now about what sort of controls are needed on capitalism as we rebuild the system. The good thing is that there is a lot of sensible discussion about how too much new regulation would be as dangerous as too little.

(5) The important thing is that Chrystia Freeland seems quite wrong to say that the G20 leaders have much to learn from the protestors. They are already being quite thoughtful and have plenty of more interesting voices to take account of.

The original story:
Seeds of its own destruction
by Martin Wolf
8 March 2009

Summary of the story:
Martin Wolf opens an FT analysis of the state of capitalism in The Crunch with a piece which supposes that free market capitalism ruled the roost for a while and that government was once despised and now isn’t.  The tone of Wolf’s piece then changes somewhat to suggest that whilst things may get very much worse, and government interference will certainly be needed, capitalism may not be quite as dead as the opening paragraphs imply.

livingissues comment:
It is worth pointing out that capitalism is and always has been an unruly beast. We should admire it for its energy much more than for qualities it couldn’t really have, like niceness or stability. What’s more, capitalism is premised on the idea that energetic and greedy people are important and can be harnassed for good. (Nice unambitious people can also be harnessed, but that’s not controversial.)

This is not a process in which governments are neutral. Indeed, they regulate so much that what they don’t outlaw they seem to condone. If government slackens the reins, that’s a government decision about the form of economy they want.

It is entirely possible for free-market fans to argue that it was over-regulation which caused the present crisis, as Eamon Butler points out in the Times.

But it is also and rather differently possible to argue that regulation matters and that the present crisis arises not because capitalism is a monster and an enemy of the state, but because it always presents a challenge to regulators.

There always was an understanding that markets are prone to “animal spirits”, as another FT piece notes. They overdo things.

The point is that managing capitalism is something which is always difficult and interesting.

We can’t seriously blame financiers for being greedy and enthusiastic. They are Alpha Males and being over the top is what they are for. On this line, the current problems were caused by governments wholly misreading the world they were dealing with.

In short, governments failed to do government much more than capitalists failed to do capitalism.

Of course it is also true that a generation of capitalists have failed: they destroyed the institutions they were employed to run. To that extent, they misread their own greedy self-interest.

But the free market did not fail and capitalism certainly didn’t. The free market and capitalism don’t exist independently of government and society. Indeed, they take the form allowed to them by government.

The lesson may indeed be that governments should not resile from their role in governmening capitalism, but that still places the present problem as a government failure as much as a failure of capitalism.

The original story:
UN backtracks on claim that deadly IDF strike hit Gaza school
Amos Harel
Haaretz
3 February, 2009

Summary of the story:

Haaretz’s reporter began his story:

The United Nations has reversed its stance on one of the most contentious and bloody incidents of the recent Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza, saying that an IDF mortar strike that killed 43 people on January 6 did not hit one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools after all.

livingissues comment:
[This is slightly amended from earlier versions of this blog - apologies, RDN 14.45hrs, 4 February 2009.]

Haaretz’s story mostly checks out at a site referred to by the UN as an official source, ReliefWeb. See their story here. The story is buried by the UN low down in a document, without headline or signposting. So it looks like multiple apologies are in order.

The British media pushed out powerful elements of the original untruths with a great deal of emphasis, and presumably they believed that such allegations if true would do real hard to Israel’s reputation. Using that logic the British media ought to put the record straight – and with a great deal of emphasis.

Of course, the 43 dead remain dead and their families’ grief won’t be diminished by this “news”. Nor, perhaps, their sense of grievance.

It is worth noting that early reports of the incident on 6 January 2009 were often headlined in terms of an attack on a school (for instance, the Independent’s). But the stories themselves (including the Independent’s) often then noted that the shells fell outside the school. It was then often left ambiguous as to whether the fatalities and casualties from those shells were inside or outside the school.

Some accounts did report at least one UN official saying that the shells were outside the school and that there were no fatalities (but some casualties) inside it as a result. Indeed, the UNRWA seems to have got itself into a muddle and reversed its account quite early on. So the latest UN account confirms what some said, and corrects others. Namely, that the shells definitely landed outside the school, killing no-one.

One is now looking forward to evidence on the two other main allegations against the Israeli military and its New Year operations in Gaza: that they used phosphorus and “herded” a group of civilians into a building and then shelled it and them.

The original story:
“This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here”
George Monbiot
The Guardian
14 January 2009

Summary of the stories:
George Monbiot’s column criticises middle class consumption habits and asserts that the climate damage they will cause will mostly afflict poorer people. He cites the Aga (an expensive cooker and room-heater). But he also takes on the “no frills” flying revolution. He quotes authoritative data that whilst all classes are flying more than they used to, there hasn’t been much change in the share of flying done by the well-off.

GM also looks at the class warfare aspect of the argument over climate change and notes that the Marxists at spikedonline seem to be caught in a paradox as they defend the rights of middle class people to damage poor people.

livingissues comment:
George Monbiot is surely right that the better-off do much more climate damage than poor people (and he might have stressed the degree to which most damage by well-off people is discretionary whilst much of the damage done by poor people is unavoidable).

However, whilst it is popularly believed that the main effect of low-cost flying was to unleash a working-class flight to the sun, in fact almost everyone in all classes is doing more flying. It really ought not to be a surprise that the proportion of poor and rich people flying has not much changed.

The data GM seems to be using says that about 60 percent of leisure flying is done by people earning over £46,000. About 40 percent is done by those earning less. This may not be hugely just, but it is not very surprising.

Interestingly, the data also suggests that much of the increase in flying is amongst people travelling on business, and it seems that the big increase here is amongst the less well-off passengers.

GM is right that spiked online are vigorous – and seemingly paradoxical – in defending the freedoms of consumers (rich or poor) against the anxious nay-saying of the environmentalists. But he perhaps overlooks the value of spiked online as squib-merchants. Besides, spiked and others are surely on the money when they argue that environmentalism is in large degree an argument between affluent greens and affluent consumers, and that these are often really the same type of person and even the self-same person.

But then much protest has a middle class accent. Does now, allways has. See here for a wonderful video about a charming protest at Heathrow.