BRITAIN A political party that does what it says on the tin
The 2010 general election will see a new arrival on the British political landscape—and there can be little doubt in voters’ minds as to what they stand for. The Abolish Half Parliamentary Seats Now Party, Prospect learns, is planning to field between five and ten candidates in an effort to draw attention to what its leader, Arthur Bullard, told us was “a symbolic issue, representing a breakdown of trust and confidence in our political classes.” Britain, he points out, has more MPs than any other country in the world apart from China, and “that probably isn’t a very good sign for our democracy. People are absolutely staggered when I tell them. It’s a shorthand for the need to grasp the nettle of political reform.” Cameron has already suggested a 10 per cent reduction, but Bullard believes this “simply isn’t radical enough. Our MPs have lost the trust of the nation, and they don’t seem to have noticed.” Time, then, for a sharp reminder.
MEDIA Giving the newspaper game away in London
Here’s a quandary to keep the pen-pushers at the Office of Fair Trading occupied. On 12th October, the Evening Standard—on sale in London for 182 years—went free. It was a surprising move, given that Rupert Murdoch’s thelondonpaper had folded a month earlier arguing that “free” didn’t work. Still more surprisingly, the other evening freebie London Lite—set up by the Standard’s old owners Associated Newspapers as a Murdoch spoiler—kept their presses rolling.
Despite technically having different owners, London Lite and the Standard are a bit like Siamese twins: parting entirely would be very painful. Back in January, Associated sold 75.1 per cent of the Standard to a Russian oligarch, but they retained a critical stake. Furthermore, London Lite still shares offices with the Standard, buys editorial copy from it and shares some of its backroom functions. This means that Associated has a finger in both pies of the only two free evening papers left, while also owning the free morning paper Metro.
The OFT last looked at the Standard in 2005, when Express owner Richard Desmond successfully challenged Associated’s exclusive deal to sell in Tube stations. But who will step forward this time? An OFT spokesman says that they may review the situation during their next “market survey,” while an investigation could be triggered if a complaint is lodged by a rival. Trouble is, there aren’t any of those left.
FINANCE Global finance keeps on drifting eastwards
As Prospect went to press, it looked likely that the world’s largest aluminium company—the privately-held Russian outfit RUSAL—would make an initial public offering of shares in China. Its CEO and owner, billionaire Oleg Deripaska (of Mandelson yachting fame), was hit hard by the financial crisis (his fortune is said to have fallen from $28bn in 2008 to a mere $3.5bn today) so it’s no surprise that he’s keen to raise some cash. What has raised eyebrows in the business world, however, is RUSAL’s decision to ignore London or New York. A further sign that the world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting eastwards? It’s certainly one of the clearest indications to date that owners of big resource companies—and not just in Russia—are increasingly looking east for investment, where there’s cash on offer unmatched in the old world (not to mention a lack of nagging questions about corporate, and oligarch, behaviour).
NORTH AMERICA Why Nobel refusal doesn’t always offend
Obama said yes to the Nobel peace prize. But what if he’d said no? He’d have been joining a much more elite club. Out of the 821 winners since 1901, only six people have ever refused a Nobel—and four of those did so unwillingly, due to the pressure exerted either by the Nazis or the USSR. That leaves two voluntary refusals. In 1964, Jean Paul Sartre declined his prize for literature, arguing he did not wish to be “transformed” by it as an author. Then came the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, who was jointly awarded the peace prize with Henry Kissinger in 1973 only to decline it—much to Kissinger’s embarrassment—on the grounds that peace had not yet been accomplished. As a young president just a year into office, Obama could justifiably have pleaded both Tho’s and Sartre’s reasons: a lack of tangible accomplishments and the desire not to be pinned down by a label. And at least one Democrat might have been pleased by such humility: one William Jefferson Clinton, who is now the only Democratic president from the last 40 years not to have won the peace prize.
Iggy isn’t quite so pop among Canada’s women Michael Ignatieff has suffered a number of reversals on the road to being Canada’s liberal leader. His glamorous media-don lifestyle in Britain and America led to accusations of carpetbagging, while his writing in support of the war on terror saw him accused of neocon sympathies. But a man whose appearances on Britain’s The Late Show in the 1990s sent hearts fluttering, whose Harvard lectures were packed with amorous admirers and who once appeared as a cover star in GQ magazine now faces a more surprising problem: losing the support of female voters.
A report in the Globe and Mail newspaper has revealed that Canada’s female voters are deserting the one-time sex symbol in droves. Focus groups cite women describing Ignatieff as “stuffy, drab, arrogant, inauthentic, paternalistic, unmemorable, unsexy and, most of all, untrustworthy.” Still worse, Canadian author Patricia Pearson was also quoted as saying: “Did you see that political commercial of him standing in a meadow… It just made me laugh so hard. He looks like he has heartburn.”
BOOKS A history of mutual congratulation
In August, the TLS ran an eloquently devastating review of Andrew Roberts’s new history of the second world war by the pre-eminent British expert in the field, Richard Evans, which concluded: “This is not a new history of the second world war in any meaningful sense; it is not even an adequate history of the second world war.” Cue a massed counter-offensive from Roberts’s chums at Standpoint magazine, who managed to publish not one but two rebuttals in October: one from editor Daniel Johnson (focusing exclusively on German military ranks, a field in which he judges Roberts and Evans to be equally ill-informed) and one from 18th-century British historian Jeremy Black. Black’s glowing defence fails to mention any of Evans’s criticisms, preferring to salute Roberts’s “commitment” while lamenting the “moral emptiness of so much of the work produced by great scholars.” Might this be the same Jeremy Black who, in the December 2008 issue of Standpoint, was hailed by one Andrew Roberts for “the sheer quality of his output” which “ought to have marked him out as one of our great historians”? Surely not.
ENVIRONMENT PWC does its bit in the global warming battle
With the Copenhagen conference looming, one question looks more urgent than ever: how can people in wealthy countries be made to understand the consequences of their lifestyles? Happily for eco-warriors, a solution has arrived from the most unlikely of sources: PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm’s latest report on “the future of work” contains a hard-hitting piece of futurology. It’s 2020 when the real trouble starts: the year when “global warming changes the climate of Europe; as the snow on the Alps melts, skiers head to the US.” If that vision of escalating winter sports airfares doesn’t get the PWC partners swapping their Porsches for bicycles, nothing will.
The 2010 general election will see a new arrival on the British political landscape—and there can be little doubt in voters’ minds as to what they stand for. The Abolish Half Parliamentary Seats Now Party, Prospect learns, is planning to field between five and ten candidates in an effort to draw attention to what its leader, Arthur Bullard, told us was “a symbolic issue, representing a breakdown of trust and confidence in our political classes.” Britain, he points out, has more MPs than any other country in the world apart from China, and “that probably isn’t a very good sign for our democracy. People are absolutely staggered when I tell them. It’s a shorthand for the need to grasp the nettle of political reform.” Cameron has already suggested a 10 per cent reduction, but Bullard believes this “simply isn’t radical enough. Our MPs have lost the trust of the nation, and they don’t seem to have noticed.” Time, then, for a sharp reminder.
MEDIA Giving the newspaper game away in London
Here’s a quandary to keep the pen-pushers at the Office of Fair Trading occupied. On 12th October, the Evening Standard—on sale in London for 182 years—went free. It was a surprising move, given that Rupert Murdoch’s thelondonpaper had folded a month earlier arguing that “free” didn’t work. Still more surprisingly, the other evening freebie London Lite—set up by the Standard’s old owners Associated Newspapers as a Murdoch spoiler—kept their presses rolling.
Despite technically having different owners, London Lite and the Standard are a bit like Siamese twins: parting entirely would be very painful. Back in January, Associated sold 75.1 per cent of the Standard to a Russian oligarch, but they retained a critical stake. Furthermore, London Lite still shares offices with the Standard, buys editorial copy from it and shares some of its backroom functions. This means that Associated has a finger in both pies of the only two free evening papers left, while also owning the free morning paper Metro.
The OFT last looked at the Standard in 2005, when Express owner Richard Desmond successfully challenged Associated’s exclusive deal to sell in Tube stations. But who will step forward this time? An OFT spokesman says that they may review the situation during their next “market survey,” while an investigation could be triggered if a complaint is lodged by a rival. Trouble is, there aren’t any of those left.
FINANCE Global finance keeps on drifting eastwards
As Prospect went to press, it looked likely that the world’s largest aluminium company—the privately-held Russian outfit RUSAL—would make an initial public offering of shares in China. Its CEO and owner, billionaire Oleg Deripaska (of Mandelson yachting fame), was hit hard by the financial crisis (his fortune is said to have fallen from $28bn in 2008 to a mere $3.5bn today) so it’s no surprise that he’s keen to raise some cash. What has raised eyebrows in the business world, however, is RUSAL’s decision to ignore London or New York. A further sign that the world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting eastwards? It’s certainly one of the clearest indications to date that owners of big resource companies—and not just in Russia—are increasingly looking east for investment, where there’s cash on offer unmatched in the old world (not to mention a lack of nagging questions about corporate, and oligarch, behaviour).
NORTH AMERICA Why Nobel refusal doesn’t always offend
Obama said yes to the Nobel peace prize. But what if he’d said no? He’d have been joining a much more elite club. Out of the 821 winners since 1901, only six people have ever refused a Nobel—and four of those did so unwillingly, due to the pressure exerted either by the Nazis or the USSR. That leaves two voluntary refusals. In 1964, Jean Paul Sartre declined his prize for literature, arguing he did not wish to be “transformed” by it as an author. Then came the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, who was jointly awarded the peace prize with Henry Kissinger in 1973 only to decline it—much to Kissinger’s embarrassment—on the grounds that peace had not yet been accomplished. As a young president just a year into office, Obama could justifiably have pleaded both Tho’s and Sartre’s reasons: a lack of tangible accomplishments and the desire not to be pinned down by a label. And at least one Democrat might have been pleased by such humility: one William Jefferson Clinton, who is now the only Democratic president from the last 40 years not to have won the peace prize.
Iggy isn’t quite so pop among Canada’s women Michael Ignatieff has suffered a number of reversals on the road to being Canada’s liberal leader. His glamorous media-don lifestyle in Britain and America led to accusations of carpetbagging, while his writing in support of the war on terror saw him accused of neocon sympathies. But a man whose appearances on Britain’s The Late Show in the 1990s sent hearts fluttering, whose Harvard lectures were packed with amorous admirers and who once appeared as a cover star in GQ magazine now faces a more surprising problem: losing the support of female voters.
A report in the Globe and Mail newspaper has revealed that Canada’s female voters are deserting the one-time sex symbol in droves. Focus groups cite women describing Ignatieff as “stuffy, drab, arrogant, inauthentic, paternalistic, unmemorable, unsexy and, most of all, untrustworthy.” Still worse, Canadian author Patricia Pearson was also quoted as saying: “Did you see that political commercial of him standing in a meadow… It just made me laugh so hard. He looks like he has heartburn.”
BOOKS A history of mutual congratulation
In August, the TLS ran an eloquently devastating review of Andrew Roberts’s new history of the second world war by the pre-eminent British expert in the field, Richard Evans, which concluded: “This is not a new history of the second world war in any meaningful sense; it is not even an adequate history of the second world war.” Cue a massed counter-offensive from Roberts’s chums at Standpoint magazine, who managed to publish not one but two rebuttals in October: one from editor Daniel Johnson (focusing exclusively on German military ranks, a field in which he judges Roberts and Evans to be equally ill-informed) and one from 18th-century British historian Jeremy Black. Black’s glowing defence fails to mention any of Evans’s criticisms, preferring to salute Roberts’s “commitment” while lamenting the “moral emptiness of so much of the work produced by great scholars.” Might this be the same Jeremy Black who, in the December 2008 issue of Standpoint, was hailed by one Andrew Roberts for “the sheer quality of his output” which “ought to have marked him out as one of our great historians”? Surely not.
ENVIRONMENT PWC does its bit in the global warming battle
With the Copenhagen conference looming, one question looks more urgent than ever: how can people in wealthy countries be made to understand the consequences of their lifestyles? Happily for eco-warriors, a solution has arrived from the most unlikely of sources: PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm’s latest report on “the future of work” contains a hard-hitting piece of futurology. It’s 2020 when the real trouble starts: the year when “global warming changes the climate of Europe; as the snow on the Alps melts, skiers head to the US.” If that vision of escalating winter sports airfares doesn’t get the PWC partners swapping their Porsches for bicycles, nothing will.
