By Nigel Morris
The Commons authorities have lost another attempt to keep the details of leading MPs’ expenses secret. But they could still mount yet another appeal against today’s High Court ruling.
They have already been ordered to pay £33,500 in legal costs – money that will come out of public funds – and the final bill from the protracted legal action looks certain to exceed £100,000.
Surely the time has come for the authorities – under the stewardship of the Speaker Michael Martin – to face up to the 21st century.
Continue reading "Publish or be damned!" »
By Adrian Hamilton
It is what political leaders leave out of their speeches that is often more interesting than what they put in. So with President Bush's speech this week to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. The peace process which he is supposed to be pushing as his final legacy of office barely got a look in.
Which tells you all you need to know about how the talks for peace set in motion earlier this year at Annapolis are going. The straight answer is nowhere. Although Washington would still hope to get some kind of statement of agreed principles by the time Bush leaves office in January, words are the very most they can hope for. On anything substantive or practical there just isn't the ability to deliver from either side. The Palestinians are divided between Gaza and the West Bank. Israel's government is too weak and its prime minister may fall any moment, charged with corruption.
Continue reading "Bush's speech signals start of Republican battle" »
By John Rentoul
Terrific article in The Atlantic on the extraordinary fund-raising success of the Barack Obama campaign. Funny stuff, money, especially in America, Brobdingnag of revolutionary capitalism, where the giants of each wave eat their parents: IBM, Microsoft, Google.
The numbers are so large as to have no meaning. Obama has raised a quarter of a billion dollars so far. What is more "he is doing it almost effortlessly". Quite unlike the traditional top-down model of political fund-raising where the candidate has to work dinners and small rooms hard to raise large cheques, this is a vast, self-generated and self-sustaining internet phenomenon in which thousands of people all over America have spontaneously decided to raise small donations from Facebook friends and social networks.
The social-networking model provided Obama with something that insurgents before him, from Gary Hart to McCain, always lacked: a means of capturing excitement and translating it into money. In the 2004 primary, Howard Dean raised $27 million online. Obama is fast approaching $200 million.
Continue reading "Obama's clean money" »
By Michael Savage
Before I say anything on this, let me first say that the scenes coming back from China in the wake of the earthquake are truly awful. But the very fact that we can see scenes of the tragedy - and especially those of collapsed schools - means that our attention has turned all too quickly away from the catastrophe still unfolding in Burma.
Be it the media's preference for a powerful image or our greater interest in China in the current climate, the Chinese earthquake is the big story. That may not be a surprise given that as many as 50,000 people may have been killed. But while the death toll in Burma could top 100,000, the repressive actions of the junta could see millions die from disease. That is where our attention should be - even if the images are harder to come by.
Continue reading "The cameras should still be on Burma" »
By John Rentoul
One of the subterranean shifts in politics over the past two months has been that in expectations of the outcome of the next election. For a long time, the default assumption has been that it would be a hung parliament; now a Conservative overall majority seems most likely. That assumption is reflected in the betting markets.
So it may seem an odd time to recommend No Overall Control?, a lively booklet recently produced by the Hansard Society, which assesses the impact of a hung parliament on British politics. But I think the default assumption will swing again. As The Independent on Sunday argued last weekend in a splendidly counter-herd leading article, "has Westminster forgotten the key maxims in politics – Macmillan's events and Wilson's week?"
I do not think Gordon Brown can recover, but I do think that a change of leader in the next two years is now more likely than not and could pull the party back into hung parliament territory. So this book is a valuable guide to the scenario that has been touted before every election since we last had a hung parliament (1977-79) but which this time really could come to pass.
Continue reading "Book of the Week" »
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