Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 127

If Abenomics works, Britain's leaders will look like monkeys | Simon Jenkins

George Osborne should abandon the tribal morality of austerity and, like Japan, print money not for banks but for people

If you thought Germany was a model modern economy, forget it. Look east. After two decades of self-imposed austerity, Japan has had enough. Its new leaders are systematically, deliberately, massively inflating their economy. Named after the new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, "Abenomics" is now two months into a thundering great plan B.

Japan's central bank has been ordered to...

Must we silence nightingales in order to build houses? | Simon Jenkins

This exquisitely precious bird – nature's composer, conductor and performer in one – is at risk from modern British planning

Wednesday 17 April was not just the day of Lady Thatcher's funeral. The diary gave it as the scheduled arrival date of this year's nightingale migration. How wonderful it would have been if, amid the bells, choirs and organs, this bird of joy had settled in St Paul's churchyard and made the world fall silent.

Two nights before, at the Royal Society of Literature, the nigh...

After the bomb, mass hysteria is the Boston terrorist's greatest weapon | Simon Jenkins

A Chinese proverb bids us ask what the enemy most wants us to do. Boston's bomber craves publicity, reaction and retaliation

I know who the real terrorists are. Some of them set off a bomb during the Boston marathon, killing three people and injuring 176. Such things happen regularly round the world. For those in the wrong place at the wrong time it is a personal catastrophe.

Such deeds are senseless murders, but they are not terrorism as such. What makes them terrorist is the outside worl...

The test tube pioneers who gave the world 5 million bundles of joy | Simon Jenkins

Bob Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, who brought happiness to so many, had at first to endure howls of protest

"All he wanted was to help." I cannot think of a finer epitaph than that used yesterday of Robert Edwards by Peter Braude, his fellow embryologist. Edwards, with his partner, Patrick Steptoe, created the first "test-tube" baby in 1978. They must rank high in the league table of donors to happiness. Liberating conception from the womb to the petri dish brought hope to the 10% of couples wh...

How Margaret Thatcher's Falklands gamble paid off

The prime minister's decision to go to war in 1982, with her government on the brink of collapse, changed everything

The Falklands war of April-June 1982 was the turning point in Mrs Thatcher's premiership, indeed in her political career. The previous October, the Tory party conference had been alive with dissent. The so-called "wets" were openly conspiring against her. Bets were being taken against her surviving into the new year. Well behind in the polls and with the new Social Democratic pa...

The Guardian Audio Edition: Is Germany too powerful for Europe? - 9 April 2013

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

Reading on a mobile? Click here to listen.

In this week's edition:

• Baroness Thatcher, the first female PM and the most dominant political figure since Churchill, has died aged 87. Michael White considers the impact of her politics on Britain. Click here to read this article.

• George Osborne is fighting back, aware that tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the frail shock even natural conservatives. But thi...

Margaret Thatcher: pro-European 'wet' transformed by a triumphant war | Simon Jenkins

The hypercautious leader who showered money on the unions was about to get the boot: the Falklands changed all that

Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. By 1990 it was transformed. She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers.

Al...

Where's the real threat here – Kim Jong-un or Trident? | Simon Jenkins

What we should be scared of is not the North Korean's belicosity but how it's being used to subvert domestic politics in the west

The enemy is coming. Declare war, dive for Cobra, hide the silver, lock up your daughters. A grateful nation cheers on its leader and saviour, Kim Jong-Cam, as he races north to prepare his war machines for battle. The running dogs of terrorism should quake in their boots.

The politics of fatuous fright know no bounds. This week the calmest response to the...

Unlike most government reforms, the impact of the planning changes is forever | Simon Jenkins

The planning changes are causing pandemonium – damaging democracy and scarring the countryside with thousands of new homes

As of today England comes under a new planning regime. Its purpose is brutally simple: to release for potential building the 60% of England's land area that is unprotected countryside. Nothing like it has been seen since the 1940s. It is clear that only designated national parks will enjoy full safeguarding.

Like most of this government's reforms – from the health service t...

Press regulation: a victory for the rich, the celebrated and the powerful | Simon Jenkins

This new press regulator is all about revenge, not justice. It's hard to imagine a more chilling deterrent to serious investigation

We can agree that the press had it coming. The victims needed revenge. Celebrities wanted redress. A few tabloid moguls got a bloody nose, and Ed Miliband got to meet Hugh Grant. But what happened on Monday in Westminster was a ludicrous way to engineer a more disciplined press. We do not have an independent regulator, but the agency of a political stitch-up. Any...