Chippenham & Beyond

After the PBR there was a huge sense of relief among Tories that Brown had chosen such politically poor tax cuts. An income tax cut (or an increase in the personal allowance which would have had the same effect) would have caused the Tories far more problems than the two and a half percent cut in VAT. But it seems that Brown might make a better fist of things second time out. John McFall, Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, has told the Mirror that it is “in the Prime Minister’s mind” to '); //-->

One thing that strikes me about many of Israel’s critics is their unwillingness to even think about why Israel acts as it does. Those who think that Israel is wrong to be doing what it is doing in Gaza should read Daniel Finkelstein’s column in The Times this morning; I won’t quote from it because it is such a splendid piece of writing that it deserves to be read in full. I’m not saying that after reading it you will agree with Israel’s actions but it will give you a sense of empathy '); //-->

As I packed my suitcase to travel to Kiev for the New Year I heard on the radio the ominous words, "The era of cheap gas is over" - they were uttered by Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocrat currently styling himself as "Prime Minister." Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly, had promised to cut off supplies to Ukraine - if Ukraine did not agree, in a year where its GDP had fallen 14 per cent, to a significant price rise, at a time when gas prices are falling.

Last time this happened, Ukraine had to '); //-->

And so he published his pamphlet, "The Jewish State", in which he proclaimed that all attempts at assimilation and all hope for total tolerance were impossible for the Jewish people. They had to create a homeland of their own in their old home, Palestine. I was still in the Gymnasium when this short pamphlet, penetrating as a steel shaft, appeared: but I can still remember the general astonishment and annoyance of the bourgeois Jewish circles of Vienna. What has happened, they said angrily, to this otherwise intelligent, witty and cultivated writer? What foolishness is this that he has thought '); //-->

Employees comfort each other in the Stroud branch of Woolworths after it closed its doors for the final time. The demise of the high street chain, which had been trading for nearly a century, came on a day of bleak news for retailers, with two of the UK's leading firms announcing falling sales over the Christmas period. Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images.

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From Glenn Gould to Peter Pears and Maria Callas: the indefatigable Terry Teachout presents his list of 25 essential classical recordings. In a way, it's also an elegy for the music industry of old:
It may well be that performances of comparable quality and individuality continue to be given today, but if so, they will go unheard by the music lovers of tomorrow, for with rare exceptions they are not being recorded. Btw, I'm glad to see one of his co-bloggers at "About Last Night" has discovered the wonders of Jobim's song "Águas de Março." '); //-->

Alistair Darling goes into full "blame the world" mode in his interview with the FT today - saying that international coordination will be "crucial" to get credit flowing through the financial system and to help our economy recover from the recession.  As Iain Dale noted, similar claims littered Gordon Brown's weekend interviews; so we're seeing something of a new Labour spin line - or at least one that's been reheated since last October.

Now, I would be slightly sympathetic to the claim - after all, the interconnectedness of the world banking '); //-->

Michael Kaiser makes some good arguments in favor of increased arts funding, but unfortunately he mixes them up with bad ones, and he glosses over the best ones. The result is that Tyler Cowen gets to take the moral high ground by saying that "culture for the rich" is "not a priority".

In reality, however, arts funding is a great way of spending any stimulus money, as anybody with a pocket calculator to hand might be able to work out from a couple of the numbers in Kaiser's piece:

The arts in the United '); //-->

As soon as it was reported earlier today that around 40 Gazans (later reduced to 30) had been killed when the Israelis fired on an UNRWA school in Gaza, the usual suspects could scarcely conceal their joy. At last! An Israeli massacre. The BBC straightaway parroted the Hamas/UN line – that hapless Gazan ‘refugees’ had taken shelter from the bombs in the school, only to be struck by Israeli missiles which had scored a direct hit on the school.

But according to the Israelis, something rather different had happened. Palestinians '); //-->

Michael Crick has taken to his blog to reveal the contents of leaked
Minutes from a Tory meeting: “"Care needs to be taken over the candidates that have the potential to embarrass the Party - there will now be a fortnightly meeting to assess the watch-list of candidates, and the reasons they are on the list needs to be taken into consideration."

And the document shows that a Conservative Central Office official has even been appointed to keep a close eye on what these potential trouble-makers get '); //-->

Christopher Hitchens, an admirer of Benny Morris, is still mulling over the deeply pessimistic op-ed that the revisionist historian published during the holidays:
To read Benny Morris is to be quite able—and quite free—to doubt that there should ever have been an Israeli state to begin with. But to see Hamas at work is to resolve that whatever replaces or follows Zionism, it must not be the wasteland of Islamic theocracy. And an impassioned post from South Jerusalem's Haim Watzman: 
I would really like to punch Ismail Hanieh, the Hamas prime minister '); //-->

Israeli troops on duty in Gaza. Photo: Matan Hakimi/Israeli Defence Force via Getty Images.

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I love the gym on a January morning. The frantic flush on the faces of the bankers as they Stairmaster to redundancy, the quivers of the anorexics staggering into their fifth mile. Actually, there aren’t any anorexics. The anorexics of Bloomsbury are clearly lacking in New Year’s resolve. Hardly surprising, as despite the tsunami of publicity annually devoted to the perils of eating disorders, only 19 out of 1,000,000 women are suffering from anorexia, according to Clinical Knowledge Summaries, as opposed to the 240,000 afflicted with obesity. Hardly an epidemic, yet anorexia is '); //-->

Team Cameron will be delighted with the news that Caroline Spelman is to be cleared of any wrongdoing over the 'Nannygate' affair – the Tories can well do without any "sleaze" accusataions being fired in their direction –  and the expectation now is that she'll be kept in the shadow cabinet, although not necessarily as party chairman.  To my mind, Cameron would be best-advised to move her to an alternative brief.  Although it may have been partially down to the allegations hanging over her, Spelman has been a near-invisible figure over the past year-and-a-half.  And one imagines that any '); //-->

One of the charges most frequently levelled at the Tory shadow cabinet is that their commitment to the cause isn't quite great enough; that they lack the same out-of-power-obsessiveness that drove New Labour between 1994 and 1997.  Revelations about second jobs and the like have often made this argument quite persuasive.  But Tory supporters can take heart today from the fact that most of the shadow cabinet is spread across the country, making the case for their party's economic approach.

As Tim Montgomerie points out, this caps what has been - bar '); //-->

Rachel Sylvester’s column today, highlighted by Pete this morning, raises the question of who should take the blame for the decline in Britain’s utility as a combat ally. This is principally a result of this country fighting wars on a peacetime budget. It was one of Tony Blair’s great failings that he did not tell Gordon Brown that the need for a serious and sustained increase in defence spending was non-negotiable. (When Brown became Prime Minister, the military had to fight two wars for a year without even a full '); //-->

Lordy, more annoucements on yet another layer of bureaucracy to weigh down companies during the recession:

The government's equalities office is drawing up an amendment to the equality bill that would force companies to publish figures in annual accounts showing the number of men and women in particular pay bands. The bill is due to be published early this year.

More than just more bureaucracy: it's actually meaningless. Without knowing what jobs the various different people are doing we can't tell whether this means equal pay or not. For we do indeed have a '); //-->

Last night’s BBC TV News at Ten featured a highly partisan report about Gaza by Jeremy Bowen. Making no mention of the direct hit yesterday by a Hamas rocket on a kindergarten in Ashdod (which was empty for fear of precisely such an occurrence) Bowen concentrated heavily on the growing civilian casualty toll among Palestinians, making no acknowledgement of any Hamas operatives among these figures. The piece de resistance of this item was a report from Gaza’s Shifa hospital by a Gazan BBC producer, Rushdi abu '); //-->

There's a piece at CiF which I think rather fails in its major premise.
At the dawn of the digital era, during this first decade of the 21st century, the most important new commodity is internet access. A growing canon of research has documented the enormous benefits that accrue to those with broadband access (and the increasing detriments faced by those without it). Within many civil societies, in much the same way the agrarian revolution helped eliminate famine, the industrial revolution brought manufactured goods into everyone's lives and the computer era integrated machines (from laptops to PDAs '); //-->

Well, that was a strange experience. Part One of Steven Soderbergh's beautifully shot film about Che Guevara is painfully slow at times: after a while I almost felt I was trudging across the Sierra Maestra at the tail-end of a column of rebels. Jumping back and forth between the final years of Batista and a 1964 visit to Manhattan, the movie seems intent on rendering every last detail of Guevara's career, yet ends up telling us very little.  Even Fidel Castro seems a cipher. So, in the end, I settled for admiring the editing, the acting, the locations - everything, '); //-->