Commentariat

Independent Editorial

It is hard to see silver linings in those recessionary clouds, but if you peer closely enough, you might just make some out. Take this week’s Queen’s speech. The Government needs to make room on the legislative agenda for emergency action to alleviate the banking crisis. One casualty is the Communications Data Bill, which provides for the creation of a giant database of information about our telephone calls, emails and internet searches. No one with any grasp of Britain’s history of liberty will mourn that omission.

The scandal of the arrest of the Shadow immigration minister, Damian Green, continues to reverberate. Arresting MPs (not to mention raiding their offices in the House of Commons) is no small matter in a democracy. The affair must be treated with the highest seriousness by the Government. Before anything else we need an official statement detailing exactly what ministers knew before the raid went ahead. Otherwise, poisonous suspicions that the police have been used as a political tool will continue to fester.

The slaughter in Mumbai has finally come to an end. But the political inquest into the atrocity is only beginning. Hundreds of angry Mumbai residents took to the streets yesterday to protest at the failure of the Delhi government to keep them safe. The Indian media, meanwhile, is asking pointed questions about how prepared the authorities were for such an assault.

The last that most people in this country knew of Zimbabwe was that a power-sharing deal had been done between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader. Some of us might have been aware that the implementation of the deal had become a bit sticky, and we might have wondered what had become of Mr Tsvangirai in recent weeks.

There is no law, no system, no set of regulations which can more effectively hold governments to account than the conscience of man. Opposition parties, the public and the press rely on individuals, not systems, to tell us what those who rule over us would like us not to know. We call them “whistleblowers” because, like referees, they seek to keep the players in our political system in check.

The global economic storm continues to rage and national governments seem about as commanding in these conditions as small boats tossed around on a tumultuous sea. The week began with an emergency bailout of Citigroup, the world’s biggest bank, by the United States Treasury. A few days later the Federal Reserve released news of an $800bn credit market intervention. This was followed by a €200bn European Union-wide stimulus package from the European Commission. And expectations are rising that Barack Obama is planning an even bigger spending plan for when he takes office in Washington next year.

They picked a hell of a time to kill off a hero. Recession stalks the global economy. Woolworths has gone into administration. And Kilroy has just escaped from the jungle.

The burden of public sector pension schemes is fast becoming too heavy to bear. Between 2001 and 2007, the Government’s liability effectively doubled. Although 20 per cent of British workers are employed in the public sector, they receive 40 per cent of our pension entitlements. Much of that is unfunded and so paid directly by tax revenues.

The ghastly terror attacks in Mumbai, which have so far left more than 110 people dead and at least 300 wounded, echo previous atrocities by al-Qa’ida. The strikes on India’s financial capital were multiple and synchronised, symbolic targets were chosen and witness accounts suggest the terrorists had a specific aim of killing foreigners.

Now we know things are serious. Forget Lehman Brothers, Woolies has bitten the dust. If the gods of recession wanted a more profound demonstration of their power, they could not have chosen better than the news that the almost century-old retail chain is being put into administration. Of course, it is hard to say, hand on heart, that we didn’t see it coming. Woolworths has been struggling for years – decades, in fact. The store might be everyone’s fond childhood memory, but nostalgia does not fill the tills.

The capture of Bangkok’s main international airport by the yellow-shirted members of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) threatens to turn Thailand’s recent political unrest into a full blown national crisis. The PAD has described the sit-in as a “final battle” in its quest to provoke a coup, remove the discredited Prime Minister, Somchai Wongsawat, and let the army take power. Yesterday, the head of the Thai army, General Anupong Paochina, called for both the PAD and the government to stand down and call an election. Unfortunately, instant recourse to the ballot box will offer no quick fix for this society, which is apparently torn by irreconcilable differences.

The debate in the world’s capitals this week has been dominated by the prospect of fiscal stimulus plans designed to ward off a disastrous global slump. The incoming US president, Barack Obama, has promised to create jobs through such a package early next year. The European Commission yesterday released details of a €200bn Europe-wide plan for 2009, and our Government unveiled its own contribution to that on Monday, with a cut in Value Added Tax.

It’s certainly an imaginative public private partnership. The Women’s Minister, Harriet Harman, yesterday asked for the help of the Women’s Institute to help root out sleazy adverts in local newspapers.

First the famine; now the disease. Zimbabweans are being subject to afflictions of a truly biblical ferocity. An outbreak of cholera, as we report today, is likely to have already killed thousands. New cases are appearing daily.

The unprecedented £20bn worth of tax cuts and public spending announced this week by the Chancellor is a measure of the plight of the British economy, not to mention the size of the gamble being taken by the Government with the national finances. But it pales, both in absolute size and as a share of gross domestic product, beside the stimulus package that Barack Obama wants to sign into law when he assumes office as the 44th President.

The decision by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to commission a study into the impact of an amnesty for illegal immigrants has not gone down well in Westminster. Mr Johnson’s party leader, David Cameron, has refused to endorse the idea, and the Immigration minister, Phil Woolas, has described Mr Johnson as both “naive in the extreme” and a “nincompoop”.

Some names are hopelessly misleading. “Pre-Budget report” sounds like it belongs in some dull accountancy textbook. But make no mistake, the fiscal package unveiled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons yesterday under that insipid name was a colossal and highly risky piece of economic engineering. The implications are anything but dull, for upon it hang the economic future of this country – and, quite probably, the shape of the next government.

The Catholic Church, it used to be said, thinks not in decades but in centuries. No more. A mere 42 years after the Vatican castigated John Lennon for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Christ, that bellwether of papal thinking L’ Osservatore Romano has overturned this condemnation, declaring Lennon’s words to be the inconsequential boast of a "young working-class lad", while praising the Beatles’ musical legacy.

It is easy to call on the world’s freedom movements to seek the path of negotiation over the way of violence. But what happens if it gets you nowhere? That was the bleak question asked by Tibetan exiles at a meeting in Dharmsala in India that ended at the weekend.

It is hard to recall a time when Treasury sources have so copiously leaked the contents of a Budget as they have in recent days. At the same time, it is not hard to figure out why this has gone on, presumably with Gordon’s Brown’s blessing. Clearly, the Prime Minister’s strategy has been to advertise the idea that he and Alistair Darling are undertaking big, bold measures to restore the nation’s finances – even before the measures themselves have been unveiled.

We report today that the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, is to cut Value Added Tax tomorrow in an attempt to stimulate the economy and to reduce the severity of the coming recession. If cutting tax is the right policy – a question to which we return in a moment – then VAT is the right tax to cut.

It is no surprise that the BBC Trust has acted quite so feebly in its report on the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross prank. A general castigation but no specific punishment is what you might expect from an oversight board that has been set up to combine the contradictory tasks of defending the BBC to the outside world and acting as its policeman internally. But it is a response that fails on both counts. It will do nothing for the corporation’s standing outside and nothing to shake up its management within.

Whatever else this week may or may not have achieved in the fury of political exchange, what it has done is to produce clear divisions between the various parties on how to deal with the recession hurtling towards us. And so it should. Lord Mandelson may malevolently accuse the shadow Chancellor of treason in discussing the state of sterling. The Prime Minister may try to paint the Opposition into a corner of seeming to deny help to the victims of the downturn. But the reality is that there are profound disagreements among economists, businessmen and financiers as to how to deal with this crisis, and those arguments should be reflected in Parliament.

Talk about underwhelming. Now that the dust has settled, the sensible conclusion to draw from the leaking of the British National Party’s membership list this week is that the political threat from Britain’s far right is actually pretty minor.

So far, Barack Obama has been admirably decisive in his appointments in the run-up to taking over as President on 20 January. Compared to Bill Clinton’s desultory attempts to appoint a team in the same period in 1991, the President-elect this time around has acted with speed and purpose. Within a week of his election victory, Obama had chosen his chief of staff and main adviser. Since then, he has started to make his main cabinet appointments, filling – according to well-sourced reports – key roles in Homeland Security, Commerce and Health and Human Services with a mixture of old Clintonites and close colleagues from his Chicago days.