The Knife and me

It is superficially appealing to dismiss Osborne’s measures as “choking off growth” but the reality is that high levels of debt had already done that.

Julian F, Commenter Spectator Coffee House, 10/05/12

If current boundaries remain in place, and assuming that Labour retains its current eight-point lead over the Conservatives, I calculate that Ed Miliband’s Labour will enjoy an overall majority of approximately 100 seats at the next election. That is a very expensive price for saving the Coalition.

Peter Oborne, Daily Telegraph, 10/05/12

Call Me Dave set up the inquiry in a knee-jerk attempt to divert attention away from his close relations with News International. Now it has come back to bite him….The problem with all these inquiries is that once they’re airborne no one can ever be sure where they’re coming down…Cameron has put the Press on trial and himself in peril for the sake of something in which the public has zero interest. If ever there was a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, Dave, this is it.

Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 08/05/12

…like many Spectator readers, I was disappointed by The Iron Lady chiefly on account of the lack of nudity

Rory Sutherland, The Spectator, 14/04/12

If they had any self-respect and integrity, supporters of the euro – who thought the discipline of a single currency could coexist with social-democracy and ultra-regulated labour markets – should apologise to the people whose lives they have blighted.

Allister Heath, City AM, 01/05/12

I trawled through more than 25 years of public spending records. What they show is a relentless rise in state largesse, through good times and bad, the upshot of which is institutionalised indulgence: luxuries have become necessities and value for money exists only as a concept. Between 2000 and 2010, UK government real expenditure (inflation adjusted) increased by 53 per cent from £451 billion to £688 billion.

Jeff Randall, Daily Telegraph, 26/03/12

The windiest militant trash is blowing across the continent once more

Michael Weiss, Telegraph Blogs, 07/05/12

Mr Hollande says that he will replace austerity with growth. Why didn’t anybody think of that before? Unfortunately, a vacuous slogan is underpinned by ineffectual proposals. Mr Hollande’s programme stresses small, badly-targeted boosts to public spending, while virtually ignoring the structural reforms that are the only route to sustainable growth.

Gideon Rachman, FT, 30/04/12

Lords reform hasn’t really sunk into the public consciousness. They have heard the words but don’t know or understand what they mean and what’s more, they don’t care. It has absolutely zero relevance to the daily life of anyone, other than the Liberal Democrat party..

Nadine Dorries, 06/05/12

As Ronald Reagan once said, there are no easy solutions. But there are simple solutions. Sadly, for the economic prospects of Britain, the government seems unwilling or unable to grasp them.

Mark Littlewood, Daily Mail, 27/04/12

‘no government, not even a Conservative one, can abolish the economic cycle’

Nigel Lawson

A good night for Labour? Are you kidding me? Labour got roughly 39 per cent of the vote on an estimated turnout of 32 per cent. This means around 12 per cent of the eligible electorate voted Labour. To put it another way, 88 per cent of us – the heaving mass of society – did not vote Labour. If that’s a good night for Labour, I’d hate to see a bad one.

Brendan O’Neill, Telegraph Blogs, 04/05/12

There has been a plethora of comment in the past few days about this being the slowest recovery ever and about the fragility of the progress made. But given the scale of the excesses to be corrected it was bound to be slow. In different ways the different parts of the world have made progress in correcting the mistakes. And, for those of us with long memories, this does not feel nearly as fragile as the 1970s.

Hamish McRae, The Independent, 29/04/12

Who could miss the irony of a Labour politician calling an extraordinarily successful businessman “unfit” to run his own business though? What a muppet.

“Uncle Tits”, Commenter, Telegraph Blogs, 02/05/12

If next week’s GDP figures confirm that the UK has gone back into recession, Keynesians and their Labour supporters will claim full vindication. Yet the true story is of a remarkable escape from Gordon Brown’s toxic legacy.

Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph, 19/04/12

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap

Napoleon Bonaparte

The world is losing manufacturing jobs. Yes, even China is losing manufacturing jobs. Given that we don’t trade with Mars, this means that it’s not trade or offshoring causing the losses. It’s purely that rising productivity. We can make more things with less labour now. Excellent – as I said, this frees up labour to go and do something else.

Tim Worstall, Daily Telegraph, 19/04/12

Dave needs to realise that all the soft, fluffy stuff about huskies, hoodies, handouts to African dictators and countries with nukes and space programmes just won’t hack it any more. He should forget about fripperies like gay marriage and stopping grown adults lusting over packets of Marlboro Lights in supermarkets and focus his attention – and that of his ministers – on the vital task of getting the economy out of second gear.

Nick Wood, Daily Mail, 20/04/12

My soggy experience is so typical of the institutionalised schizophrenia that has gripped Britain in recent weeks; all around us is heavy rain while the authorities shriek about chronic water shortages. Only in a country as badly governed as ours would we have to endure the wettest drought in history.

Leo McKinstry, Daily Express, 30/04/12

‘Lord Mandelson, who was then the most senior member of the Cabinet, charged News International with having done a deal with Cameron. ‘He did this under order from Mr Brown, knowing it to be false. That’s in his own autobiography, that he reluctantly went out to do what he was told, and I think that just reflects on Mr Brown’s state of mind at the time.’
‘I said that very carefully under oath yesterday and I stand by every word of it,’

Rupert Murdoch, 26/04/12

In the North East and Wales, state spending equates to more than 60 per cent of economic output – literally on a par with the old Soviet states. If Scotland were independent, its state spending would be the third highest in the world.

Fraser Nelson, Daily Telegraph, 27/04/12

Simon Heffer, Daily Mail, 21/04/12

“If you think about it, Alex Salmond is a democratic Caledonian Hitler, although some would say Hitler was more democratically elected.”

David Starkey, April, 2012 (probably a little unfair… though only a little)

An unstoppable momentum was certainly created. ..The much better alternative, an immediate minority administration and second election in the autumn once Cameron had laid out a finance bill etc and Labour was in a mess, doesn’t seem to have been given more than a few minutes’ consideration.

Iain Martin, Daily Telegraph, 20/04/12

Breivik is not an implacable foe of multiculturalism; he is a product of it. He is multiculturalism’s monster, where his true aim is to win recognition of his identity alongside all those other identities that are fawned over in modern Europe. In essence, his barbarous act last year was not about dismantling multiculturalism but about expanding it, to make sure it afforded respect to his own petty cultural feelings as well as everyone else’s.

Brendan O’Neill, Telegraph Blogs, 18/04/12

re: inflation and ‘quantitative easing’…not having an economics degree, I’m enough of a simpleton to think that massively increasing the supply of something will, other things being equal, diminish its value.

Daniel Hannan, Telegraph Blogs, 18/04/12

there is also a new form of social exclusion opening up: in a world in which social networking, Googling and online shopping are apparently as natural as getting up in the morning, barely half the population of Glasgow has access to broadband, and a major cause is that a significant number do not even own a computer. Despite the claims over schools, childcare and free Wi-Fi that are being made in the current campaign, it is difficult to see how local councillors, of any party, currently have the power to tackle these wider inequalities.

Ewan Crawford, The Guardian, 16/04/12

Our national security represents the aggregated right of 60 million people to live in safety. But that means almost nothing to the ECHR.

Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, 16/04/12

The reality is, of course, that Gordon is not still inside the Treasury. Instead, the problem is that Treasury ministers still seem to be selecting policy options from a Gordon Brown-era policy menu. And if Treasury officials only ever put to ministers the kind of policy options that they used to present to Gordon, you kind of end up with Continuity Brown.

Douglas Carswell, Blog, 12/04/12

But both Mr Straw and Mr Blair have both made it publicly very plain that they have no knowledge of British complicity in torture. Their denials leave only two possibilities, both deeply shocking. The first is that the Secret Intelligence Service has gone rogue and has been operating a private policy of passing on terrorist suspects to be tortured at the hands of a foreign government, without the knowledge or approval of ministers. The second is that the Blair government was carrying out a secret policy of collaboration with torture, and that Mr Straw was misleading Parliament

Peter Oborne, Daily Telegraph, 12/04/12

I don’t understand your concern. Osborne’s parents have set up and run a successful business for over 40 years, employing hundreds, and they have passed on part of this business to their children. All highly commendable. Ed Milliband lives in the £2m house his father left him via a complex trust arrangement designed solely to avoid inheritance tax. High (if not punitive) levels of IHT are a central tenet of the left. So as to avoid inherited privilege. And yet the Millibands pere et fils seem to (a la Ken Livingstone) believe that their political principles don’t apply to themselves in issues of personal finance.

Nick (a commenter), Spectator Coffee House, 07/04/12

By 1997 employment was rising, growth stable, and the deficit was well under control, meaning that Gordon Brown as chancellor inherited the most benign economic scenario for any British government of the last century. The situation was so fundamentally strong that it took three successive Labour administrations to wreck it.

Peter Oborne, Daily Telegraph, 05/06/12

There has been the continual murmur, though, from the people who rule us, that we do not drink alcohol properly, like the French. We do not, on the whole, sit in agreeable bistros and enjoy a nicely chilled bottle of white with our sea bass, while debating how best to surrender.

Rod Liddle, The Spectator, 31/03/12

I detest Gordon Brown with every ounce of my being, but at least he had a vision; he wanted us to be North Korea. Even that dreadful old fraud George Galloway has a vision; he wants us to be like Tehran.
Where is Cameron’s vision? What does he believe in?

Kelvin MacKenzie, Daily Mail, 31/03/12

This week it’s been revealed that donors of £250,000 get dinner with David Cameron at his private flat in Downing Street. It’s £5k to have dinner with Nick Clegg, but on the plus side he’ll give you it in cash

Frankie Boyle, The Sun, 30/03/12

Terence Blacker, The Independent, 10/04/12

Personally, I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough surrealism in politics. If David Cameron turned up at PMQs in a dark trenchcoat, carrying a live haddock and muttering “Where’s my unicorn?”, I think our democracy would be all the stronger for it.

Dan Hodges, Telegraph Blogs, 11/04/12

John Kay, FT, 27/03/12

As a nation, we are still today what we have been for years — public spending junkies with a ludicrously exaggerated sense of entitlement, shooting up cash that the country cannot afford if it ever expects again to become a competitive nation.

Max Hastings, Daily Mail, 22/03/12

To the question “why do people take an instant hatred to Ed Balls?”, the answer is that it saves time.

Matthew Norman, The Independent, 21/03/12

NHS Direct, the phoneline for hypochondriacs, and  walk-in centres, the NHS equivalent of a 24-hour shop for people who simply can’t wait till the following day to find out why they have a runny nose

Brendan O’Neill, Telegraph Blogs, 23/03/12

From this Budget we calculate that pensioners will lose on average about one quarter of one per cent of their income in 2014.

IFS budget summary, 22/03/12

The public sector has become a kind of national addictive drug. It dulls the pain of economic decline — but in doing so it stifles enterprise, dynamism and wealth creation. And it has also created an ever-expanding population dependent on the state and vulnerable to government control — a captive class of permanent left-wing voters.

Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, 18/03/12

Frankie Boyle, The Sun, 23/03/12

We tend to think of Gordon Brown in terms of failure. I mainly associate him with one of the most lunatic ideas in recent human history: the supposed end of boom and bust. The notion that we have arrived at the summit of economic achievement, meaning growth that lasts for ever with perpetual low inflation and low interest rates, is obviously mind-bogglingly daft. It would be amusing that many people were taken in by it for so long if the end results had not been so damaging.

Iain Martin, Telegraph Blogs, 13/03/12

Daniel Knowles (re the ‘granny tax’), Telegraph Blogs, 22/03/12

..drinking by the average adult has fallen by about 20 per cent in these five years…The solution of minimum alcohol pricing, reviving the preposterous medieval notion of the just price, is a state-sponsored punishment for the offence of being young and poor.

Charles Moore, The Spectator, 17/03/12

The truth is this has nothing to do with rights for gay people, nor with – shudder – “equality”. No. This is about Dave earning street cred in Primrose Hill. Which is amazing, really. The Tory base is disillusioned and drifting to UKIP and what does the Leader of the party do? Suck up to a tiny cabal of metropolitan liberals (who will never, ever vote Tory anyway) by making a priority something no one asked for and no one particularly wants

Milo Yiannopoulos, Blott R, 08/03/12

The Taliban have, of course, had a lot of outside help in devising new ways of blowing up British soldiers. When I was in Helmand a couple of years ago I was shown electronic components that had been used to make a homemade roadside bomb that had been sent to the Taliban by their supporters living in the Midlands – one of the components even had “made in Birmingham” emblazoned on it.

Con Coughlin, Daily Telegraph, 08/03/12

A government is a thing that makes a budget. If it doesn’t make a budget it is not a government. That is why, these days, there is rioting in Athens every few weeks. Greeks are certainly not complaining about having their debts written off. .. It is the surrender of sovereignty that is the problem. To the extent that “fiscal union” or “fiscal supervision” means surrendering budgetary authority to Brussels, it means disbanding countries. The protesters think: no budget, no Greece. They are right.

Christopher Caldwell, FT, 16/03/12

Iain Martin, Daily Telegraph, 06/03/12

A tourist is asked by the officer in passport control at Athens airport:
‘What is your nationality?’  He replies: ‘German.’
The officer then asks: ‘Occupation?’ The tourist replies: ‘No, only visiting.’

Kelvin Mackenzie, Daily Mail, 03/03/12

Mention Lent, and people immediately think of giving something up. The point about this is you must give up something you really like. It wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice for me, for instance, to give up rock music for forty days and forty nights. Quite the reverse, I could give up some things forever. Hell, they say, goes on forever. My idea of hell would be an everlasting Glastonbury Festival, complete with mud and occasional guest appearances by John Lennon.

Peter Mullen, Sermon Sexagesima Sunday, 2010

But just as the tyranny of majority opinions over minority rights – majoritarianism – is usually wrong, surely so is its converse, the assertion of minority rights beyond equality before the law (civil partnership provides that) to a wider cultural equality than the law or human rights can actually enforce, any more than it can to the right to employment….it will be wise to retain a legal distinction between marriage and civil partnership. Noisy bishops aren’t always wrong.

Michael White, The Guardian (incredibly), 05/03/12

Brendan O’Neill, Telegraph blogs, 01/03/12

There is much talk of how formidable Mr Salmond is. The truth is, he bought the Scottish election with unaffordable promises and was elected on a tide of tactical votes against Labour, who ran a disastrous campaign attacking Lady Thatcher.

Michael Forsyth, Daily Telegraph, 28/02/12

Deputy PM Cleggy, that brittle, one-man tangle of pomposity, evasion and self-loathing

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 28/02/12

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology, MIT

“I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman.”

Lawyer Henri Leclerc “defending” Dominique Strauss-Kahn

This is the core of your problem. Because you believe in power over principle, you can’t tell the difference between vision and triangulation. You think you can keep the left just enough on side through pointless attacks on individual bankers’ bonuses or honours and that you can win the centre ground by attacking the unions and embracing austerity. This ridiculous lack of vision means that I have to wait to see what your latest quote is to know whether – this week – the party’s left wing or right.

Alex Hilton (to Mili-E). Labour List, 17/02/12

Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator, 03/02/12

George Osborne’s plan is to bring the government finances back into balance in the medium term and reduce government spending to just below 40% of national income. This is very worrying. By the Chancellor’s own admission, the UK government has never been able to tax its citizens more than 40% of national income. The limit of the ambitions of a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be to tax the British population at the maximum taxable capacity.

Philip Booth, Institute of Economic Affairs, 15/02/12

One of the basic truths of politics is that the Left is far more oblivious to human suffering than the Right. The Left always speaks the language of compassion, but rarely means it. It favours ends over means. The crushing of Greece, and the bankruptcy of her citizens, is of little consequence if it serves the greater good of monetary union.
Nevertheless, for more than a generation, politicians such as Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Nick Clegg and David Miliband have used their sympathy for the aims and aspirations of the European Union as a badge of decency. Now it ties them to a bankruptcy machine that is wiping out jobs, wealth and – potentially – democracy itself.

Peter Oborne, Daily Telegraph, 16/02/12

So if we deport Abu Qatada later today to face trial in Jordan I am sure we should, as a nation, prepare ourselves for a quite strongly worded letter. But I think Britain could cope with that.

Douglas Murray, The Spectator, 07/02/12

Labour’s initial hostility to NHS reform was a terrible pity, and we are all paying the price. It meant that when Tony Blair opened the taps on spending after the 2001 general election the new money was captured by the vested interests. According to some estimates, barely a quarter went on patient care, with much of the remainder squandered on massive pay increases and the creation of an even more monolithic bureaucracy.

Peter Oborne, Daily Telegraph, 11/02/12

Once, Europe consisted of hundreds of polities: Italy, as a country, is no older than the London Underground. The idea of nationalism is a relatively modern concept.

Laurance Reed, The Spectator, 28/01/12

Re an 11 year old from Hull seen drinking from a bottle of vodka…. it makes a change to see a woman passing alcohol to her son in the fresh air, rather than the traditional British method of through the placenta

Frankie Boyle, The Sun, 10/02/12

What should we make, in general, of such long-term budget plans? ‘Bullshit,’ he says, with a smile. ‘Look at past five-year plans, how many have worked? It’s like someone getting married eight times, each time thinking “this time it’s for love.”’ So how long should governments draw their budgets? ‘One year at a time,’ he says. ‘The error margin for five years is monstrous.’

Fraser Nelson interviewing Nassim Taleb, Spectator, 11/02/12

Macaulay got it about right: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.”

The great historian was mocking Victorian society’s treatment of those who had strayed sexually, but he could have been describing the kind of lynch-mob fury that has now enveloped the nation’s bankers

Martin Dickson, FT, 03/02/12

Tony Blair was, in my book, the worst prime minister of modern times.

During a long period of economic growth, he failed to achieve more than a fraction of the domestic reforms he had promised, and he developed a fondness for fighting wars, of which the intervention in Iraq was the least excusable and the most damaging.

Stephen Glover, Daily Mail, 09/02/12

(re Bonio) Over the next few weeks, as the Left works itself up into a frenzy of righteous indignation over bankers’ bonuses, it’s worth remembering that one of the biggest tax avoiders in the world is a liberal rock ’n roll star who browbeats Western governments for not giving more money to Third World countries and campaigns to Make Poverty History.

Toby Young, Telegraph Blogs, 02/02/12

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn’t be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised

Terry Eagleton, The Guardian, 12/01/12

For whatever eurozone leaders may say today, fiscal pacts are much harder to enforce between countries than within them. Here, London and the South-east subsidise northern England, and England subsidises Scotland. But we’ve been part of a common nation for 300 years and there are still Scots who don’t want to be told what to do by an English Prime Minister, and English taxpayers who begrudge stumping up for them.

Mary Ann Sieghart, The Independent, 30/01/12

The total amount of gold that has ever been mined in the world is estimated at around 142,000 tonnes. At $2,000 an ounce, all the gold that Egyptian, Soviet and South African slaves, American forty-niners, Inca and Aztec Indians or our contemporary miners have ever extracted out of the ground would today be worth about $9 trillion. This is approximately the value of the inflated paper money currently circulating in the USA alone, never mind the rest of the world.

Alexander Boot, Daily Mail, 26/01/12

THE belief we have any financial obligation to foreign arrivals is a form of self-loathing dressed as compassion.

Leo McKinstry, Daily Express 23/01/12

…this may well be the moment when Mr Salmond’s bluff finally began to be called…Such is the mystique of this preposterous populist that until now other politicians have dared do no more than tiptoe around him. For he is regularly portrayed as Machiavelli, Cicero and Robert the Bruce rolled into one orotund orator.

Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, 16/01/12

Nick Clegg’s problem is different. He is keen to save his party, and will have noticed that support for the Lib Dems, in polling, has now fallen below the number of people who say that they believe that the lightsabres from Star Wars are real.

Fraser Nelson, Daily Telegraph, 19/01/12

Clegg wanted to enter a coalition with the Tories, not just because he shares Conservative instincts, but because he is a snivelling, venal, ruthless social climber, desperate to make the final step from middle to upper-class.

Paul Richards, Daily Mirror