Commentariat

You are browsing the archives of 2008 August.

I’ll be doing some fairly major maintenance on the site this morning, so I apologis in advance for any inconvenience.

I’ll try to keep you informed, but it may be unpredictable.

Matt

Alistair Darling, the chancellor, publicly fretted at the weekend about the state of the UK economy and the performance of the Labour government. On the economy, his…

The war in Georgia, short and bloody as it was, has called into question the whole relationship between Russia and its neighbours in the European Union, as well as…

Alistair Darling’s interview on the economic slowdown is a major political crisis … but only because the government has decided that it should be

The list of professions that have disappeared in the past century makes solemn, if poetic, reading, says David McKie

Editorial: Traditional economics now faces a serious challenge - because behavioural economics is much more than a buzzword

Editorial: What came across in the chancellor’s interview was a politician of unusual integrity, dry humour, and sober intelligence

Luke Harding: In South Ossetia, I witnessed the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in the Balkans

Jackie Ashley: Unless Brown and his ministers can articulate an optimistic vision of what comes next, there is no chance of recovery

Gary Younge: The real problem with the Bush years is not so much what he did but that America’s political class enabled him to do it

Siobhain Butterworth: Leaky ships and journalistic privilege

Editorial: The backdrop of Hurricane Gustav could not be more damaging to the Republican convention

Max Hastings: All hirings and firings are arbitrary, but until more minorities are in senior jobs, the perception of discrimination will linger

Peter Preston: Premier League teams exist in a bubble outwith economic reality. They are due a rude awakening

Tony Greenbank: Lake District

Letters: Will anyone stand up for those of us who are not hard-working?

Today’s corrections

Letters: For all its celebration of free markets and self-reliance, the US has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility

Letters: Alistair Darling seems to have forgotten that he’s paid to be the chancellor of the exchequer

Letters: Child benefit paid to mothers was just one of the achievements of allowing women into the political sphere

Letters: It is much easier to swat a fly with an object that lets the air through

Why did he pick on 1948? When the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in a curiously likeable interview, bluntly said that the economic downturn was “arguably the worst in 60 years”, why did he choose 60? He could have opted for 30, a far more common trope these days, and whipped us back to the 1970s Winter of Discontent. If he really wanted to frighten the bejasus out of us he could have said “worst in 70 years”, and plunged us into the hungry Thirties after Wall Street had crashed and Neville Chamberlain had reduced wages and the dole by 10 per cent, put tax up and heralded ten years of general misery. Or he could have declared it the worst downturn in 90 years, and fixed his beetling black gaze on 1918 when economic output fell by 25 per cent over three years and didn't recover till the Second World War.

The invasion of Iraq brought to a head a new wave of anti-American feeling around the world. In cartoon terms, the European charge is that Americans are fat, trigger-happy, Christian fundamentalists, opposed to abortion, wedded to the death penalty and determined to drive the largest cars on the planet with some of the cheapest petrol.

This summer I decided to do something stupid: read the 38 books on the list
that the Tory leader, David Cameron, issued his MPs for the recess. I must
have been suffering from a chemical imbalance. I read fast. Still, 38 books
was a stretch. But a lot was at stake: a glimpse into the brain of Cameron’s
Conservative Party, or at least how he would like them to think.