Michael White's Blog, page 11
March 15, 2016
May on smooth form as MPs try to hack the Ripa
The home secretary handled the snooper’s charter debate well, but even supporters seek more details about surveillance
If Theresa May can hang on in her job for just a few more weeks, she will overtake the long-service record of the Victorian home secretary whose lads at the Met failed to catch Jack the Ripper. There was a lot of Ripper talk on Tuesday when MPs debated May’s latest version of the snooper’s charter. The case casts a shadow over her career too.
Whoops! No. Correction. The menacing “Ripper” they kept mentioning was Labour’s half-baked Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (“often incomprehensible”, recalled Tory Euro-martyr Dominic Grieve), known in Whitehall as “Ripa.” And “snooper’s charter”? Labour’s Andy Burnham doesn’t care for that label either. Lazy thinking, he said, and mean to hardworking spooks.
March 14, 2016
Germany's AfD needs to learn history’s lessons all over again
Party leader says border police should be able to shoot at refugees trying to enter country illegally
Have you heard much about Frauke Petry? No, neither have I. But this might be about to change as Reading University acquires a famous chemistry graduate and David Cameron an awkward new star in the dodgy Eurosceptic group he helped set up at the European parliament.
So who is Petry? The 40-year-old businesswoman has degrees from Britain and Germany. Her family moved from the old East Germany to the west after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Young Petry grabbed the opportunities there and became a highflier. She’s the one who said Germany’s border police should be allowed to shoot at refugees trying to enter the country illegally.
Continue reading...March 11, 2016
Is Barack Obama right to criticise Nato's free riders? Of course he is
The US’s European allies have become comfortably well-off and lazy and neglected the basics of self-defence
From the shrieks in much of the British media after Barack Obama’s Nato “free riders” remarks you could be forgiven for thinking the president had gone out of his way in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly to criticise Britain, France and other allies for mishandling the bloody shambles which is now Libya.
A pompous French politician popped up on the airwaves to suggest Obama should look in the mirror. “Obama lays blame for Libya mess on Cameron” thundered the front page of the Times. Surprise, surprise, the long and thoughtful interview, optimistically billed as The Obama Doctrine, wasn’t ALL ABOUT US. It is 20,000 words long and if the offending passages occupy more than 800 of them I’d be amazed. Obama is critical of many people, including the US foreign policy elite and the oil-rich Gulf autocracies.
Related: Obama's criticism of Cameron reveals president's own weaknesses
“Free riders?,” I interjected.
“Free riders,” he said, and continued. “So what I said at that point was, we should act as part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and without a long-term military commitment in Libya.”
Related: David Cameron was distracted during Libya crisis, says Barack Obama
“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said. He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming “distracted by a range of other things”. Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the US to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off – except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight”. Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics ...”
Continue reading...Tony Blair: the man who continues to divide the Labour party – Politics Weekly podcast
Political biographer Tom Bower joins Tom Clarke and Michael White to debate Tony Blair’s legacy and divisions in the Labour party
Today’s Labour party is in the middle of something akin to a nervous breakdown.
Activists have rallied to their leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, but ranks of MPs despair at their new chief, and feel rising paranoia about the members coming after their seat.
March 10, 2016
Sunday trading: SNP helps protect English credit cards from their owners
David Cameron lost his bid to extend Sunday trading after SNP and Tory rebels teamed up against him. I, for one, was delighted
I quite like shopping. But even I can see that it has become a dysfunctional feature of modern life, ubiquitous and, for some, compulsive. Frantic scenes during the January sales can look like legalised looting. So when the government dreamed up spurious reasons for a further relaxation of the Sunday trading laws in England and Wales, I assumed George Osborne must want to stimulate spending for tax-grabbing reasons.
Daft or what? In good times as well as bad, there is only so much money to go round, only so much credit we can each rack up, only much “stuff” we can cram into our ever smaller homes without having to throw out some of the stuff we bought last year.
Related: SNP U-turn on foxhunting vote: a conflict of principle and practice
Continue reading...March 9, 2016
Why John Whittingdale is politically tone deaf and 30 years out of date
Culture secretary is breathtakingly complacent over Brexit and the threat of Scotland leaving the UK
I had an unexpected collision yesterday over sovereignty while listening to the culture secretary, John Whittingdale, talking mostly about the future of the BBC (“I love the BBC”) and Brexit. Except that my collision with Whitto came over Scotland, not Europe.
It happened at the monthly lunch held in the press gallery at Westminster. There’s a guest, he or she makes a short speech, not always as weighty as the audience might wish, then takes a few questions from assembled hacks, but not from their guests, usually MPs or officials.
Continue reading...March 7, 2016
Cynicism meets sentimentality as Rupert Murdoch weds Jerry Hall
It was difficult to work out whether to mercilessly mock this Fleet Street power wedding or smile indulgently
I spent the weekend grappling with my conscience over the sight of Rupert Murdoch getting married again at almost 85. Should I do what the old rogue’s attack dogs would do to someone on the enemies list and mercilessly take the piss? Or should I smile indulgently and murmur: “It shows what a romantic old rogue he really is. He actually likes being married.”
Related: Marrying Rupert Murdoch is ‘absolutely wonderful’, says Jerry Hall
Related: Rupert Murdoch marries Jerry Hall - in pictures
Continue reading...March 4, 2016
Rich and ruthless: Trump taps into a darker all-American tradition
The Republican frontrunner may be the contest’s can-do outsider but he has also lit up some disturbing corners of US politics
Good to see Donald Trump’s Republican rivals finally laying into the rascal. But in all the fuss over Trump’s endorsement by a man called David Duke, and the Republican frontrunner’s slippery attempts to sort-of-repudiate his embrace, nowhere near enough attention has been given to the very ugly racist fantasies that Duke stands for.
Still, cheer up. The stony path that is the moron’s career lights up disturbing corners, but it also leads us to some of the funniest political one-liners I know, as well as to what remains my favourite car bumper sticker: “Vote for the Crook, Not the Nazi.”
Continue reading...March 3, 2016
Tom Bower on Tony Blair: 50 shades of mostly black – no grey
Biographer piles on well-worn charges with a JCB, the kind of mud sticks and people believe it fodder that sustains Mail artillery
Tom Bower is the Carlos the Jackal of contemporary biography, the genre’s Daily Mail if you prefer. If he announces that he is planning a book on Nelson Mandela or the Virgin Mary, the rest of us must assume that the pair of them have a dirty secret or three worth Bower’s attention. Tom does not write fanmail between hard covers.
He’s done very well at it too, targeting mostly the rich or the powerful – some of them dangerous. It takes guts as well as hard work to tackle the likes of Richard Branson, Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black, Richard Desmond (all of whom sued and lost) or Formula 1’s Bernie Ecclestone, who took a shine to the writer and once joked: “What can I do that’s evil for you.” I think it was a joke.
Related: Carole Caplin interview: "I'm a survivor"
Continue reading...March 2, 2016
Pensions fairness to next generation demands that we adapt to new realities
People living longer raises alarming cost implications for pensions. We can’t keep ducking a serious conversation about it
The fastest way to stop people reading an article is to type the word “pensions”. But I’m going to persist today in the hope that it may help prevent you making the familiar mistake that many others made, including me, in taking little or no interest until long after we should have done.
I know, I know, it may all seem unaffordable and a long way off, even longer as successive governments push back the retirement age for drawing the state pension to reflect rising longevity and therefore rising costs. The former CBI chief John Cridland (born 1961) was appointed on Tuesday to stage another review focused on fairness in future reforms.
Continue reading...Michael White's Blog
- Michael White's profile
- 1 follower
