Above: A workman mows the roof of a building near Torshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands. Grass roofs have been a feature of the islands since the Viking age
BRITAIN
Britain lectures America on climate change 101
The Copenhagen climate conference kicks off on 7th December, and the Brits are already limbering up. In August climate change minister and possible future Labour leader “Red Ed” Miliband launched edspledge.com, a website to “campaign for a deal.” What are your priorities, asks Ed in an online quiz, where one option—“the PM attending Copenhagen to help deliver a deal”—sets a worryingly low bar for success. But Ed’s efforts seem a model of sanity next to his department’s latest exercise in soft power: the “100 Voices, 100 Days” campaign. Run from the British embassy in Washington, this plans to win over sceptical Americans in the run-up to Copenhagen by posting an online video every day from a different climate change evangelist.
The wheeze, unveiled to sceptical American journalists in September, led some to worry that such British meddling will backfire as badly as the Guardian’s legendary “operation Clarke county,” which pushed lefty Brits to advise rural Americans during the 2004 presidential election, with predictably poor results. Introducing the latest drive, Miliband said he hoped “that Americans from every corner of the country” would contribute, but there is little sign of this: most videos are filled with dutiful speeches by professional lobbyists.
The next Adair Turner
Adair Turner certainly shook things up with his comments in September’s Prospect, but this is unlikely to prevent his job being taken (in the event of a Tory victory) by James Sassoon—team Cameron’s main man on the City, and the brain behind George Osborne’s plan to redesign City regulation. The 53-year-old Sassoon was previously Gordon Brown’s envoy to the square mile, having left a senior banking post to take the main financial regulation job at the treasury in 2002. Like another Labour-to-Tory turncoat—David Freud—he had a glittering career at Warburg’s as a young man, where he was so thin and ascetic he was known as “swipe” (as in card). Colleagues remember him as “intensely political”—and he certainly seems to know when to jump ship.
Will Nesta burn on the bonfire of the quangos?
With Cameroons desperately seeking possible cuts, the juicy £300m lottery-funded endowment enjoyed by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) is ripe for a credit crunch culling—especially given the vagaries of its remit. Can Nesta escape the chop? CEO Jonathan Kestenbaum has certainly been behaving like a hunted man, cozying up to team Cameron—a bit awkward given his previous role as a prominent backer of David Miliband’s abortive 2008 Labour leadership bid. Rounds of lunches with senior Tories were followed in August by his hiring of “red Tory” (and noted medieval theologian) Phillip Blond, to advise on innovation policy. Now Nesta are laying on five events at October’s Tory conference (against just two for Labour and one for the Lib Dems). The coming quango cull will certainly be bloody, judging by a recent Institute of Directors report demanding savings of £818m by scrapping a dozen public bodies, including the Welsh Channel 4. Yet Nesta was oddly absent from the list. Might Kestenbaum’s frantic schmoozing save his skin after all?
INTERNATIONAL
A hard cell for Georgia’s hard done by opposition
Since Georgia won its post-Soviet independence, all of its presidents have been removed, at least in part, by street protests. This is a fate current leader Mikheil Saakashvili is determined to avoid—earlier this year he sent in riot police to make arrests and beat back the crowds during long, occasionally violent street protests.
The opposition responded by erecting fake prison cells in protest, denoting their imprisonment by Saakashvili’s despotism. Only one remains, sitting in a small television studio. Since January it has been occupied by a man who to many has become a patriotic icon: rapper and poet Giorgi “Gia”Gachechiladze, who has vowed to sit it out (with a few breaks) till Saakashvili goes.
As Gachechiladze, whose brother stood in the 2008 presidential elections, recently told Prospect, massive fraud had thwarted his brother‘s campaign, while Saakashvili’s “fascist” state runs on torture and corruption. Listless and chain smoking after months in self-enforced captivity, he has nevertheless gained a huge following, largely thanks to his rambling nightly talk-cum-reality show, where he invites guests to drop by the studio and curse the government. It’s a strangely appropriate brand of opposition for this dismembered, intensely theatrical nation.
A season of mourning for European thought
The last 18 months have been a bad time for Europe’s elder statesmen of the mind, with the deaths of Polish historian and politician Bronislaw Geremek, critic and historian of ideas Leszek Kolakowski (also Polish), and the German-British social theorist Ralf Dahrendorf. Now Canadian political philosopher GA Cohen has been added to the sad toll, passing away on 5th August, aged 68. Cohen was an influential Marxist theorist with a talent for eye catching arguments, most obvious in his 2000 book If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich? Yet beyond the expected obituaries his passing has been little noted—similarly (in Britain at least) with Geremek, Kolakowski and Dahrendorf. The intellectual world in which they moved has, it seems, slipped from public view. Their ideas will not fade so easily.
SPORT
All set for a Rio Olympics?
Aside from an unsavoury track record on human rights, what do Prince Nawaf of Saudi Arabia, Fifa President Sepp Blatter, former King Constantine of Greece and Henry Kissinger have in common? All four, writes David Goldblatt, will vote at the International Olympic Committee’s congress in Copenhagen on 2nd October, where the 2016 hosts will be decided. Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid remain in the running. Madrid’s pitch is competent but cheesy (their slogan: “hola everybody”). After London in 2012, however, another European city is unlikely. Tokyo promises a low-carbon event—but its residents are so unenthusiastic that their bid is probably a non-starter. Chicago has made a still stronger green case, but the US government won’t underwrite the games, and the city’s finances look shaky. Rio, then, is the late favourite. South America has never hosted the games, while public and government support seem strong. But the Brazilian claim that their Olympics will be a “catalyst for social integration” looks far fetched coming from a society where inequality is among the highest in the world. And even if such egalitarian claims were true, the IOC’s electorate of minor royals, retired sportsmen, alleged war criminals and cosseted international bureaucrats seems poorly placed to judge.
Richard Haass and the geopolitics of golf
2008’s brief war between Russia and Georgia finally disproved Thomas Friedman’s “golden arches” theory of international conflict—that no two countries with a McDonalds have ever gone to war. Thankfully, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has now moved to fill the gap in geopolitics-cum-leisure theorising with a successor hypothesis: the “fairway theory of history.” Countries with many golf courses, Haass noted in Newsweek, tend to be friendlier towards America than those without. Just look at Vietnam, whose animosity towards the US has melted in recent years in parallel with the development of the luxurious Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail courses and resorts. Venezuela, by contrast, has closed several courses, with Hugo Chávez even condemning golf as “bourgeois.” Naturally, relations with America have suffered. Perhaps Obama should look into creating a special envoy for the game?
