Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 113

Nigel Farage a natural Tory on course to drive the Tories from power | Simon Jenkins

The Ukip leader is a gadfly who will one day go to ground. But before then it is Cameron, not Miliband, who has most to fear from his sting

There is nothing new about Nigel Farage. He is just another politician adept at exploiting the gap that so easily opens between public opinion and a ruling class grown detached and introverted. Polls show his Ukip appealing not just to disgruntled Tories but a range of the politically dispossessed, particularly those who did badly from recession and expect...

There was only one loser in this Royal Mail privatisation: the taxpayer

The Treasury was badly advised on the sale, relying on firms accused of unethical practices and corporate greed

Thatcher would have screamed, "What! Flogging off her majesty's mail, cheap and to a bunch of spivs?" She always refused to sell Royal Mail. Her latterday apostle on Earth, Margaret Hodge, said as much on Tuesday. As the public accounts committee chairman, she savaged the business secretary, Vince Cable, for last winter's sale of Royal Mail. He had promised: "There is...

There was only one loser in this Royal Mail privatisation: the taxpayer | Simon Jenkins

The Treasury was badly advised on the sale, relying on firms accused of unethical practices and corporate greed

Thatcher would have screamed, "What! Flogging off her majesty's mail, cheap and to a bunch of spivs?" She always refused to sell Royal Mail. Her latterday apostle on Earth, Margaret Hodge, said as much on Tuesday. As the public accounts committee chairman, she savaged the business secretary, Vince Cable, for last winter's sale of Royal Mail. He had promised: "There is...

The IPCC report takes us from alarmism to adaptation

The landmark climate change study should silence the doubters, and steers us towards calm if urgent debate on how we act

At last there are signs of a change of climate over climate change. Seven years of alarmism have yielded endless conferences and gargantuan sums of public expenditure, with no serious impact on carbon emissions. In a bitter irony, the state that has been most hostile to the concept, America, has been the leader in emissions reduction, largely through a free market shift from...

The IPCC report takes us from alarmism to adaptation | Simon Jenkins

The landmark climate change study should silence the doubters, and steers us towards calm if urgent debate on how we act

At last there are signs of a change of climate over climate change. Seven years of alarmism have yielded endless conferences and gargantuan sums of public expenditure, with no serious impact on carbon emissions. In a bitter irony, the state that has been most hostile to the concept, America, has been the leader in emissions reduction, largely through a free market shift from...

Yes, they can be mavericks, but we need whistleblowers like Edward Snowden

Call them weird, snitches, or friends of any enemy. Yet without these saints the world would be a worse place

A lawyer working for HMRC found that his boss, David Hartnett, was having "sweetheart" sessions with Goldman Sachs allowing the bank to avoid £10m in interest on tax. He thought this out of order and did what the rulebook said. Under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (Pida) he wrote privately to the national audit office and to a committee of parliament. When HMRC...

Yes, they can be mavericks, but we need whistleblowers like Edward Snowden | Simon Jenkins

Call them weird, snitches, or friends of any enemy. Yet without these saints the world would be a worse place

A lawyer working for HMRC found that his boss, David Hartnett, was having "sweetheart" sessions with Goldman Sachs allowing the bank to avoid £10m in interest on tax. He thought this out of order and did what the rulebook said. Under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (Pida) he wrote privately to the national audit office and to a committee of parliament. When HMRC...

Ukraine has revealed the new world of western impotence

Behind the self-righteous bluster on Russia, all our leaders can do to punish Putin is cancel summits, school places and shopping trips

I am starting to lose this one. How dare anyone excuse a great power hurling brute force against a small one, justifying it with some nonsense about extremists and a "responsibility to protect". There should be no place for such cynical bullying in a 21st-century world order. And for what? So a leader with a virility complex can play to his domestic...

Helen Suzman deserves her tribute alongside Nelson Mandela

The forgotten saint of the anti-apartheid movement, her legacy to liberalism was to abandon the armchair

We can all be brave in a crowd. The truly brave are brave alone. Next month we celebrate the 20th anniversary in 1994 of the first free election in South Africa, one of the few times in history that a minority has voluntarily handed power to a majority in conditions of relative peace.

The two "saints" of the occasion, Nelson Mandela and the outgoing president, FW de Klerk, will hav...

Labour's jobs promise: the wrong sort of command economy

The policy is too general jobs need to be created away from the overheated south in the still-depressed Midlands and north

The old songs are the best, but it's how you sing them. Labour's proposal to "give jobs" to all unemployed young people recalls the command economies of the 1940s and 1960s. So too is the old Labour idea of paying for it by hitting the rich until the pips squeak.

This time there is a sting in the tail: if young people refuse the offer of work they will sacrifice b...