Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 125

To rein in top pay, keep MPs poor and furious | Simon Jenkins

As long as politicians harbour a pay grievance against public sector colleagues, they are more likely to guard the public purse

You know how it is. You are sitting with some friends round a table on which is stashed £60m. It comes from a poll tax on television sets, free of Treasury control, and you can do with it what you like. You can use it for better television programmes, give it to low-paid staff or even return it to the taxpayer. No one will know, exce...

What is David Cameron doing in Kazakhstan? | Simon Jenkins

Of course Britain must do business with Kazakhstan, but it doesn't have to give the regime its political blessing

Why has David Cameron vanished to Kazakhstan? It takes most prime ministers a second term to flee British politics and seek a career on "the world stage". Cameron is hardly out of a plane these days, usually with a tour party of business cronies and a promise of some vague trade package.

The Kazak dictator for life, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has promised Cameron "£85m in trade deals", i...

Politicians who demand inquiries should be taken out and shot | Simon Jenkins

From Stephen Lawrence to Bloody Sunday, an inquiry serves as the establishment's get out of jail free card

There should be a public inquiry. Indeed there should be a judicial inquiry, a veritable "judge-led" inquiry. Into what? That does not matter. An inquiry has become the cure-all for any political argument. Whether the subject is a dud police force, a dud hospital, a dud quango or a dud war, only a judicial inquiry will atone for wrongdoing and do penance for public sins.

An inquiry defers...

Who'd try to smear Stephen Lawrence's family? A Met that's out of control | Simon Jenkins

All police forces have two cultures. One is of genuine service. The other is a murkier world of secret operations and militias

The Met is out of control. The revelation that it sought to smear the Lawrence family in the hunt for Stephen Lawrence's killers – perhaps to stifle racist aspersions on its detectives – beggars belief. Less surprising is that the operation was unknown to the then police chief, Sir Paul Condon, to the home secretary and to the Macpherson inquiry. It is merely further e...

Brazil is saying what we could not: we don't want these costly extravaganzas | Simon Jenkins

From the World Cup to the G8, many countries are paying an extortionate price for hosting these pointless displays

On Tuesday evening a loud noise engulfed Parliament Square: a demonstration of flag-waving Brazilians. I asked one of them what he was protesting. It was, he said, the waste of money on the Olympics. I told him he was in the right city but the wrong year.

Here we go again. Brazil has been bamboozled into blowing $13bn on next year's football World Cup, and then on a similar su...

Britain's response to the NSA story? Back off and shut up | Simon Jenkins

Snowden's revelations are causing outrage in the US. In the UK, Hague deploys a police-state defence and the media is silenced

On Monday the Guardian carried a story that British intelligence had spied on delegates at two G20 summits, those chaired by Gordon Brown in 2009. Laptops and mobile phones had been hacked, and internet cafes installed and bugged. With many of the same heads of government gathering for the G8 summit in Northern Ireland, the story was, to put it mildly,...

The Guardian Audio Edition: 18 June 2013

Audio versions of a selection of a selection of articles from the Guardian newspaper and website

Reading this on a mobile? Click here to listen

In this week's edition:

• Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies at the G20 summit in London in 2009. By Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball. Click here to read article

• Forget Field Marshal Twitter. What scares rulers like Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are th...

G8 summit: Cameron has misjudged by putting Syria on the agenda | Simon Jenkins

Discussing Syria is likely to result in discord between Russia and the west which could sour the atmosphere of the summit

For once a G8 summit has a good idea on the table. David Cameron's call for today's Ulster meeting to agree action against tax havens is original, sensible and needs international concord to push it through. Success would be a real triumph for him. A treaty will take time, but it is good to start now.

So why spoil it with Syria? Syria is a racing certainty to result in disco...

On the subject of political meddling, RBS and the like can shut up | Simon Jenkins

Stephen Hester wanted to turn RBS back into a normal bank but, after £45bn, the government can do what it likes

The silly response to Stephen Hester's exit as boss of RBS is to say that politicians should not meddle with banks. The truth is the opposite. Banks should not meddle with politicians.

Remember who started this. The banks in the early 2000s behaved with a recklessness I believe should still be regarded as criminal. A number went bust and ran pleading to the state, hollering that they...

From Trafalgar to Taksim, the politics of the square puts the wind up power | Simon Jenkins

Forget Field Marshal Twitter. What scares rulers like Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are the street's wild squadrons

Why does power hate a city square? A square fields no army, commands no votes, has nowhere to go. It is just a space. Yet it is space that invites occupation, an occupation hostile to power. Hence Turkey's president felt obliged yesterday to "recapture" Taksim Square in Istanbul. It had become an alternative seat of legitimacy, a place of defiance, an ugly gesture at his majesty....