Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 136

The craving for massive live events is ruining our cities | Simon Jenkins

In the digital age, there's big money to be made in large gatherings. But the Olympics will show the flaws of circus economics

The stakes are too low. The Olympic Games were originally held so that young men could prepare for war. Now young men are recalled from war to prepare for the Olympic Games. It is the politics of the nation state gone mad. The commercialism, the heavy-handed security, the ostentatious plutocracy and phoney patriotism of the modern Olympics are out of all proportion to...

Mervyn King has turned our leaders into zombie puppets | Simon Jenkins

Demand has not risen. Neither has production. Yet we have been duped into thinking that QE will kickstart the economy

It must be the biggest confidence trick of all time. It is a cheat, a scam, a fiddle, a bankers' ramp, a revenge of big money against an ungrateful world. It is called quantitative easing, and nobody has a clue what it means. According to the Bank of England, the past four years have seen £325bn pumped into the British economy to kickstart growth, with another £50bn now on the...

For the digital revolution, this is the Robespierre moment | Simon Jenkins

Total disclosure means the onset of a new terror, a retreat to a kind of sofa government beyond freedom of information

I am about to lose my journalist's ticket, my union card, my media cred. I think Tony Blair is right. He was, as he says, "a naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop" to have passed the 2000 freedom of information act in the form he did. In blowing apart the 30-year rule on government secrecy, he threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Blair made almost all public documents...

Parliament, not Leveson, is the best place for this inquiry | Simon Jenkins

We're told Leveson-style tribunals can do no wrong. But lawyers' obsession with cross-examination can hinder the search for truth

A fierce argument broke out in the Commons yesterday over inquiries. As the floodwaters of banking disaster recede, who should pick over the wreckage on the shore? For the prime minister this is a job for parliament. For the opposition leader, a job for judges. Ed Miliband said that if David Cameron does not hold a "judge-led inquiry" into banks, as he did into the...

The Shard has slashed the face of London for ever | Simon Jenkins

Timbuktu's shrines can be rebuilt but this tower, and the glass forest that's set to follow, will ruin the skyline of the capital

We are shocked by the news from Timbuktu. The Islamists are at it again, smashing the medieval shrines and mosques of the desert city, as they did the buddhas of Afghanistan. They claim these jewels of African heritage offend sharia law. Unesco calls the destruction "a tragedy for all humanity", and a prosecutor at the international criminal court calls it a wa...

Banking keeps getting away with it, just as the unions did | Simon Jenkins

Heads will probably roll for the Libor scandal, but this crisis won't end until the profession's link with politicians is severed

Too big to fail … now too big to jail? There seems no end to the immunity – moral, political, fiscal and possibly legal – claimed by the present masters of the universe, the bankers. In a side-splitting, coffee-spluttering radio interview today, Sir Martin Taylor, the former chief executive of Barclays, mused that his old board might consider the best person to "tur...

Despite the Queen's handshake with Martin McGuinness there is little reconciliation | Simon Jenkins

It is good that the Queen's visit has crossed a divide. But power sharing in Northern Ireland remains inherently unstable

'Queen shakes hands with IRA' would once have caused a sensation. Today it is a happy milestone on the rocky path of Irish reconciliation. Within a year, the monarch has made the first ever visit to the Republic of Ireland and is today greeting a republican leader in Belfast. That greeting is across a political divide but also a religious one, the divide that created Irish...

Aerial views of a very different Britain | Simon Jenkins

These black and white photos of the UK from the 1920s on are recognisable but show how much the country has changed

We love to look down from above. It gives us, literally, a superior view of the world, a day in the life of Jupiter. Aerial photography was used as a battlefield aid in the great war, and afterwards two pilots decided to carry the practice over into peacetime, to record Britain from the air. That record is now available online, and makes sobering viewing.

Was Britain really so sma...

These tax scams are all legal – that's morally repugnant | Simon Jenkins

Cameron and Osborne thunder about the likes of Jimmy Carr, but seem terrified of upsetting the rich or closing tax havens

I sympathise with Jimmy Carr. He makes it from Slough to Cambridge, cracks a few jokes and finds that two plus two equals ten after tax. Then along come some posh geezers crying, "Oh I say, that Carr chap may be legal but he's morally repugnant. Let's duck him in the bog."

My accountant once informed me that I too could inherit the earth, or at least deny a fragment of it to...

The eurozone's people are like prisoners in Colditz | Simon Jenkins

Incarcerated in a citadel of currency union with the flexibility of granite, their governments give them no chance to escape

It's not working, is it? No matter how many summits there are, no matter how many times the Greeks vote or Barack Obama pleads or David Cameron lectures from on high, nothing happens. The yield on Spanish bonds, that beckoning finger of apocalypse, goes relentlessly upwards. All we do is howl, simper and plead for Germany to do something, even just kick the can down the...