Tuesday 8 September 2009

I'm Not Your Toy



La Roux's videos are exceptionally cool; I'm glad she's ditched the pink eye shadow though.

Monday 27 July 2009

Remedy

Thursday 21 May 2009

Heartbreak (Make Me A Dancer)


It is somewhat depressing that the knock-on effect of the demise of Top of the Pops means pushing a single entails a visit to the dystopian fantasy that is 'National Lottery HQ'.

Wednesday 13 May 2009

Overconfidence and the crunch


Malcolm Gladwell presents a fascinating narrative of the role overconfidence amongst experts played in our current financial woes, and in the collapse of Bear Stearns in particular.

Tuesday 12 May 2009

Friday 20 March 2009

"I told you so..."

Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con): "It seems to me that we cannot arrive at the right prescription for the future of our economy unless we gain a clear view of why we are where we are. We cannot expect to be led out of our current crisis by a Prime Minister who puts his head in the sand. Before prescription, however, there must be diagnosis, and it is in that spirit that I offer my remarks this afternoon.

Of course it is true—we can all agree on this—that we are in the throes of an international recession, or something worse. Of course it is true that almost every other country is affected in one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent, but we are almost uniquely vulnerable. We are almost uniquely ill equipped to deal with the calamity that has befallen the world, and we need to consider the reasons for that. They are not too difficult to identify.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), the Leader of the Opposition, was quite right, last Friday, to accept responsibility for the things that we got wrong. We certainly failed to anticipate that the crisis we now face was anything like as serious as it has proved to be, but there are two main reasons for our present plight. Both of them were directly the responsibility of the Prime Minister, and, in respect of both of them, we certainly warned of the consequences. I have looked at the record, and I am in a position to answer the question posed from a sedentary position by the Exchequer Secretary earlier, when she asked, “Where were you?” I shall do my best to answer that question during the course of my observations.

The first of the main reasons for our present plight that I, at least, have identified was the ill-advised decision, taken by the Prime Minister in 1997, to transfer supervision of the banking sector from the Bank of England to the Financial Services Authority. The Bank of England had hundreds of years of experience and expertise in supervising the banking sector of our economy. The Financial Services Authority was new. It had none of that experience and none of that expertise, and, as we know, it has since admitted that it fell down on the job.

It has been suggested that the Conservatives criticised the transfer to the Financial Services Authority only with the benefit of hindsight, but that is simply not the case. When that catastrophic decision was taken, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) was shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Bank of England Bill on 11 November 1997, he said:

“With the removal of banking control to the Financial Services Authority...it is difficult to see how and whether the Bank remains, as it surely must, responsible for ensuring the liquidity of the banking system and preventing systemic collapse.”

He went on to say:
“The coverage of the FSA will be huge; its objectives will be many, and potentially in conflict with one another. The range of its activities will be so diverse that no one person in it will understand them all.”

That, at least, is one of the answers to the question posed by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) a few moments ago. My right hon. Friend also said that he feared
“that the Government may, almost casually, have bitten off more than they can chew. The process of setting up the FSA may cause regulators to take their eye off the ball, while spivs and crooks have a field day.”—[ Official Report, 11 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 731-32.]

That was what my right hon. Friend said in 1997. The warning was there; it was clear; it was on the record; and it has, alas, proved to be absolutely prescient.

The second main reason for our current plight is the level of indebtedness that we as a country, collectively through our Government and as individuals, have incurred. Here, too, there were warnings, and they, too, are on the record; I am afraid that some of them came from me. I drew attention on 9 July 2002 when I was shadow Chancellor to the savings ratio, which was then at an all-time low; it has hit many more all-time lows since. On 30 July 2003, I warned that savings had halved under Labour, that the Government were borrowing more and that families were getting deeper in debt. On 17 March 2004, replying to the Budget, I said that it was
“a credit-card Budget from a credit-card Chancellor”—[ Official Report, 17 March 2004; Vol. 419, c. 337.]

When I proposed at the 2005 election that a Conservative Government would make £12 billion of savings, I said that £8 billion of them would go not to cut taxes but to reduce Government borrowing, which was far too high.

Of course, I was not always thanked—I suppose I did not expect to be—for my pains. Anatole Kaletsky in The Times, for example, complained that throughout my tenure as shadow Chancellor, I had been issuing dire warnings about the economic and financial outlook. I had said, he complained, that Labour economic policies were doomed to failure, that overtaxed consumers were living in a fool’s paradise of unsustainable borrowing and that the British economy and the Government’s popularity were kept afloat artificially by a bubble of house prices and mortgage debt. He said that if the Tories started thinking along those lines, we would be making a big mistake. Well, of course, in terms of the outcome of the 2005 election, he was absolutely right, but was he right in the wider sweep of history? I simply set what I said on the record and leave others to decide who it was that was making the big mistake.

Throughout all this time, of course, the Prime Minister was proclaiming that he had put an end to boom and bust—and you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I do not think he was trying to deceive us; I think he genuinely believed it. Perhaps the worst thing he did was deceive himself. It was because he was genuinely convinced that he had ended the economic cycle that he did not fix the roof while the sun was shining. After all, if we think that the sun is never going to stop shining, why on earth would we bother to fix the roof? As we know, the Prime Minister is still in a state of denial. That is not the least of the reasons why he is incapable of leading the country out of the mess we are undoubtedly in. It is, I am afraid, a very big mess indeed.

A good deal of the comment on the current crisis seems to revolve around the question: how long will it last? It seems to me that another question is at least as important: what will come after it? The suggestion that is often implicit in the first of those two questions is that next year or the year after, we shall return to the world that we knew two or three years ago. That notion seems to me to be completely misplaced. We will be in a new world, a different world, with challenges every bit as formidable as those we face at the moment. We will be able to overcome those challenges only if we have leadership that is prepared, in the words of the excellent speech made the week before last by my hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor,
“to confront some uncomfortable truths and tell people what they may not want to hear.”

The mess that my right hon. Friends will have to clear up after the next election will present them with a very difficult task, but I am sure that they will not be daunted. They will, after all, simply be discharging the age-old and historical responsibility of the Conservative party to clear up the mess that Labour has left behind. That is something that we have done before, time after time. It is, in essence, what the Conservative party is for. It is what we exist to do: to clear up the mess that Labour always leaves behind.

The sooner we have that election, and the sooner my right hon. Friends can get on with discharging that historical responsibility, the better it will be for everyone in our country."

It's depressing to look back at just how much of this disaster could have been averted. (h/t ConservativeHome).

Thursday 12 March 2009

Foreign Policy Fail


For all of Brown's sins - and his rather jarring insistence on referring to President Obama as 'Barack' - he came out of his little transatlantic sojourn rather better than his counterpart. Let's hope the Obama administration's future foreign policy efforts are an improvement on this fiasco.

Tuesday 10 March 2009

Moon

I thought I'd start putting more trailers and clips from upcoming films that I'm excited about on the blog; I'm going to try to keep this up once a week, so if I've got nothing new to put up I might dig out something old that's worth a look.

Below is a clip from Moon, Duncan Jones' directorial debut, which stars the ever-reliable Sam Rockwell and fits into one of my favourite niches in the genre, that of a near-deserted space-station or ship concealing some dark secret.

Wednesday 4 March 2009

Tuff-Writer Pens


I enjoy objects that are really built to last, especially when something is essentially overbuilt from the outset; so these pens from Tuff-Writer appeal to me. Constructed from aerospace-grade Aluminium and using the same cartridges that give the enfuriatingly fiddly Fisher Space Pens their pull, these pens are about as practical as they get. Fisher have built military versions of their Space Pens in the past, but they can't match the rugged appeal of the Tuff-Writer efforts; indeed, the size of these pieces alone gives them a macho allure. (h/t Mil-Spec Monkey).

Friday 27 February 2009

Orwell/Wells

"It's not quite War of the Worlds but some say there's something Orwellian about..."

Who says the BBC is dumbing down?

Tuesday 24 February 2009

Mr. Benn

Iain Dale links to an interview of Hilary Benn by Joshua Chambers, a student reporter at the University of York's radio station; they are discussing the release, and alleged torture, of Binyam Mohamed, it is definitely worth a listen. Hilary Benn - the son of one of the finest Parliamentarians, most deluded ideologues and incompetent ministers of the Twentieth Century, Tony Benn - is repeatedly made to look an uncaring prat by a student radio reporter; Benn clings to a useless script, a brief he appears not to have taken the trouble to research beyond the sophistic soundbite he clings to throughout.

The fact that Mohamed is not a British subject, but is instead a man who resided here from 1994 until he decided to travel to Afghanistan in June 2001 to attend an Al-Qaeda training camp, and that his much-discussed "torture" falls into the same blurred debate as the treatment of all the Guantanamo detainees is never mentioned by Benn. Chambers is able to run rings around him precisely because Benn's script is so short and so limited; it is painfully obvious that he has been instructed not to mention George W Bush's tenure in office, and consequently any interviewer worth his salt is able to jab a well-placed knife into Benn's nethers and twist, while the less that is said of Benn's confused defence of a "long-established principle" regarding intelligence gathered from torture the better.

In truth, this embarrassing display is just another symptom of a government in terminal decline; Benn went forward to be interviewed without really knowing what he was talking about and not caring enough to find out. However, crucially, as a politician nurtured by New Labour's culture of spin and control-freakery, he lacked the imagination or the self-reliance to give even an excuse of an answer without falling back on endless repetition of the same pathetic dictum. These rats don't have the guts to swim; they're going to cling to the sinking ship.