Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 81

With Barack Obama’s exit the US is losing a saint. But a sinner may make a better president | Simon Jenkins

If a good man like Barack Obama fails to deliver on his promises, is it inevitable that a bad man like Donald Trump will do worse?

Does a good man make a good president – and a bad man a bad one? Barack Obama’s leaving speech in Chicago on Tuesday night was as uplifting as his arrival speech in November 2008. It exuded optimism, moderation and generosity. He was neither triumphalist nor sectarian. Ever adept at masking cliche with rhetoric, he turned “Yes we can” to “Yes we did”.

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Economists have completely failed us. They’re no better than Mystic Meg | Simon Jenkins

On Brexit and the 2008 crash their predictions – distorted by politics – were utterly wrong. The profession owes the public an inquest and an apology

It is official. Figures for the past six months show that the forecasts of instant Brexit catastrophe from the Treasury and the Bank of England were garbage. The Bank’s economist, Andrew Haldane, admitted yesterday that it was a repeat of the failure to predict the 2008 crash. It was another “Michael Fish moment”, when meteorologists failed to fo...

After Ivan Rogers, Britain will still need friends in Europe – and diplomats | Simon Jenkins

The EU ambassador’s resignation shows that the Brexit war machine set up by Theresa May is not fit for purpose

Brexit is the black hole of British politics, a place of dark matter, strange attractors and bent time. It has now sent Sir Ivan Rogers spinning, screaming into its void. People stop in the street and ask, “What can it all mean?”

Related: Ambassador to EU quits and warns staff over 'muddled thinking'

Britain is for ever part of Europe. It will always have enemies there, and need frien...

The hacking is 21st-century, but US-Russia relations are stuck in the past | Simon Jenkins

While Moscow’s cyberwar capacity is cutting-edge, the flurry of expulsions and misguided sanctions simply rehash the mistakes of the cold war

So Barack Obama expels 35 Russian diplomats because Moscow apparently hacked the American election campaign. Big deal. The gesture is, as Moscow replies, “the death throes of political corpses”. In another bout of this archaic ritual, Russia threatened to close Moscow’s Anglo-American school and expel a batch of Americans from Moscow – though Vladimir Pu...

Don’t let the news get you down – things will get better, they always do | Simon Jenkins

We live longer, with better access to water, power and health services and less violence. Hope lies in these statistics, not in the horror of headlines

Hope is a slave to news; we should never forget it. And news has always been bad. Its currency is unspeakable horror, with hatred and doom darkening every horizon. News defies us to peer through the gloom and ever see light ahead.

The answer lies not in downgrading hope, it lies in downgrading news. For it is not what it purports to be – the rea...

Trump’s latest tweet about nuclear weapons is both daft and dangerous | Simon Jenkins

The president-elect’s promise to enlarge the US nuclear arsenal shows a woeful grasp of how the world, and wars, work today

After comes post-sense. The curt utterances of Donald Trump recall those of the oracle at Delphi, except that its enigmas were clever. The president-elect’s latest 140-hieroglyph message on nuclear weapons is either daft or dangerous – and therefore both.

So far in foreign policy, Trumpism has included welcome signs of realpolitik. The new man has hinted at scep...

Libraries are dying – but it’s not about the books | Simon Jenkins

The internet stole the monopoly on knowledge but it can’t recreate a sense of place. Revival is possible

Public libraries have had another bad year. They are like churches and local railways. People like having them around, and are angry if they close. But as for using them, well, there is so little time these days.

The latest Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy figures on library closures are dire. In the past five years 343 have gone. Librarian numbers are down by a quarter,...

Never mind Russia – it’s the internet’s culture of lies we should be tackling | Simon Jenkins

With the digital air thick with mendacity, and cyber-conflict on the rise, it’s clear that the Google/Facebook duopoly badly needs some kind of external control

Everyone can lie. That is the agony and the ecstasy of the internet. It is guilt-free, open-season, licensed mendacity. You can forget the glory days when it was the empire of the weak, the kingdom of the free. It is like capitalism in the 19th century. It is raw, unfettered, unreliable power. We are right to fear it.

Related: A challe...

Pale, stale males are the last group it’s OK to vilify | Simon Jenkins

My cohort already faced routine contempt. Now we find ourselves blamed for Brexit and Donald Trump

I am hideously white, and not a man but “male”. Being over 50, I suffer the added failing of being disgustingly old. Such are the routine humiliations of my group. The BBC was called hideously white by its former boss Greg Dyke, and the West End stage hideously white by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This week the Football Association was dismissed by critics as a bunch of “old white men”. Note that it is...

Cameron can’t be a victim of populism – the term no longer means anything | Simon Jenkins

Politicians and philosophers, proceed with extreme caution. The political words we all learned in childhood – left, right, liberal, conservative – are turning to dust

Poor David Cameron was defeated, he says, by “populism”. It was not by people who disagreed with him or by his political enemies or those he had offended. It was an evil called populism. What on earth did he mean?

The answer is near meaningless. Populism has become a euphemism for exploiting the people’s will, supposedly by facile...