Lehman Brothers report: condensed in plain English
Posted on Friday 12 March, 2010
Filed Under Economics |
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ACCOUNTING gimmick is one way of putting it, criminal misrepresentation is another. True, those business school dweebs who were running Lehman Brothers until two years ago do seem likely to end up in the dock. But it shouldn’t just be civil charges that they face.
Few people in this country – or even in the US, come to that – are actually going to read the 2,200-page Valukas report into the collapse of the investment bank in question, even though it is said to be well-written by the tedious standards of the genre.
But as has become traditional with these kinds of inquiry, on both sides of the Atlantic, the edited highlights indicate that the court-appointed examiner effectively exonerates the top brass of any wrongdoing. They might have screwed up big time, he contends, but they weren’t bent.
At worst, former chief exec Dick Fuld and chief financial officers Chris O’Meara, Erin Callan and Ian Lowitt could face claims for negligence or breach of fiduciary duty.
BNP teachers: it’s right not to ban them
Posted on Friday 12 March, 2010
Filed Under Civil Liberties, Far right |
6 Comments
POLICE officers and prison workers are banned from becoming members of the British National Party. But teachers, the government has confirmed today, are not. Whatever happened to logical consistency here, I haven’t a clue. But on balance, I reckon Maurice Smith has made the right call.
Unsurprisingly, the decision has upset some on the left, who argue that the profession should be added to the list of jobs covered by what amounts to a slowly-expanding backdoor Berufsverbot. I would counter that support for a softly-softly version of the German system, which excludes members of outfits deemed extremist by the state from public sector employment, is essentially misconceived.
Let’s look at some of the considerations here. Is such legislation somehow OK if it applies to sensitive positions only, keeping the fash out of the classrooms and the cop shops while still allowing them to Sieg Heil to their heart’s content while emptying our wheelie bins?
Or perhaps all this is no skin off our nose if such restrictions apply to the far right alone, while exempting Trot social workers and local government officers?
Labour: lurching towards where it always has been
Posted on Thursday 11 March, 2010
Filed Under New Labour |
4 Comments
LURCH, according to my dictionary, is an archaic or dialect intransitive verb, which means ‘to prowl or steal about suspiciously’. Seemingly its sole use in twenty-first century English is to provide Tories with an all-purpose pejorative designation for any identifiable outbreak of milquetoast social democracy inside the Labour Party.
Labour, you see, never moves to the left in a cautious and considered manner after a period of due ideological reflection and deliberation. Nor does it ever hop, skip and jump in a general westerly direction, or veer to port in the wake of demonstrable justification for setting just such a course. Oh no. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, Labour is perpetually ‘lurching towards the left’, even when it is idling in neutral.
You can find a classic example of the genre on conservativehome.com, which warns its readership that Labour is lurching leftwards after … get this … selecting trade union officials for winnable seats. The piece is based on an article in The Times, headlined ‘Safe seats for union backers prompt fears that Labour will turn Left after election’. Seduce my aged footwear.
Back to the 1970s with William Hague
Posted on Wednesday 10 March, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party |
27 Comments
HAS somebody gone and invented time travel, and the story broke on a day when I was just too hungover to listen to the Today Programme? Or could it be that Peter Mandelson is secretly a Time Lord? They are supposed to look like human beings, after all.
I only ask because William Hague is set to give a speech today, arguing that a Labour victory at the general election will take Britain back to the 1970s.
This riff seems to play the same role in contemporary Tory discourse as the opening chords to Honky Tonk Women do at a Rolling Stones gig. Keef only has to launch into that famous look-no-hands duuuh … dum dum duuuh … dum dum bit on his open-tuned telecaster, and the joint goes wild. That’s because the audience knows what’s coming next.
So it is when Daily Telegraph editorial writers and the Federation of Small Businesses trot out their lame cover versions of one of Conservatism’s greatest hits. The dead unburied on Merseyside! Uncollected garbage in Leicester Square! Picket lines everywhere!
On the ‘intellectual superiority’ of conservatism: reply to James Delingpole
Posted on Tuesday 9 March, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party |
28 Comments
I’M ALL for the coinage of snazzy neologisms, and I have never been big on political correctness. But premising an argument for the intellectual superiority of conservatism on the contention that anybody not blinded by the right is perforce a ‘libtard’ seems to sink the underlying contention straight away.
Yet such is the thesis of a blog post hosted by the Telegraph website yesterday, hot off the keyboard of one James Delingpole. For those that haven’t had the pleasure, this guy is a two-bob shock jock wannabe, who routinely adopts a writing tone reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh going cold turkey on the hydrocodone. That’s just to prove how really, really outrageous he can be, you understand.
Let’s leave aside what the casual deployment of a portmanteau word conflating ‘liberal’ and ‘retard’ reveals about his attitudes towards people with learning disabilities. Sick jokes can make a point, if they are funny. But it is not just humourless lefties that won’t feel particularly inclined to ROTFLMAO at this one.
Jos massacres: the case for secularism
Posted on Monday 8 March, 2010
Filed Under International, Religion |
63 Comments
IF YOU are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.
The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.
There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.
Jewish student groups: the 1985 banning campaign
Posted on Sunday 7 March, 2010
Filed Under Israel |
78 Comments
A MOMENT from my past has just caught up with me. Last week I received an email from Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, the Jewish-led charity that monitors anti-semitism in Britain.
Rich informed me that the CST is currently researching the campaign conducted 25 years ago - with the involvement of at least some Socialist Worker Student Society branches – to get campus Jewish societies disbanded, on the grounds that they were ‘racist’. Such a stance is in obvious contrast to SWSS’s overtly friendly attitude towards comparable Islamist-dominated Muslim student groupings over the last period.
He added, quite correctly, that I had spoken in support of a resolution to scrap the JSoc at a meeting of City of London Polytechnic students’ union in 1985. Yep, that long-haired skinny Trot kid on the platform was me. What’s more, Rich requested a meeting to talk about this episode.
Now, I am aware that the CST is held in some suspicion by many on the Jewish left, who dismiss it on grounds of its self-appointed nature. I am also bewildered that anybody has kept records of such minutiae, decades after the event.
But throughout my journalistic career, I have often written articles contrasting the actions of present-day politicians with what they said and did as college radicals. Therefore logical consistency dictates that the I should apply the standards I apply to others to myself.
So I will be getting together with Rich at some point in the week ahead. I have his assurance that the object of the exercise is not to paint me as some kind of swivel-eyed anti-semite.
Michael Foot 1913-2010
Posted on Friday 5 March, 2010
Filed Under Obituaries |
36 Comments
I’M PROUD to possess two books given to me as presents by Michael Foot. One of them – a witty polemical assault on a couple of wartime Tories – was penned by himself. The other is an early edition of Leon Trotsky’s ‘Where is Britain going?’
As many of the obituaries since his death at the age of 96 this week have noted, Foot was the last Labour leader who was both a writer of substance and sufficiently literate to have read the Marxist classics.
Tributes from all quarters have been manifold, and not a few of them have been motivated largely by conventional piety. Let’s just say that the Michael Foot I knew would not have wanted the praise of Margaret Thatcher or David Cameron, or to be lauded by the very newspapers that ludicrously calumniated him as a KGB agent.
Jon Venables: a second chance, and even a third
Posted on Thursday 4 March, 2010
Filed Under Society |
21 Comments
THE moral difference between an adult that murders a child and a child that murders another child should be obvious at a moment’s reflection.
Yet somehow the crime that Jon Venables and his young friend Robert Thompson perpetrated against James Bulger 17 years ago – horrific though it was – has always attracted a degree of vituperation way beyond what is logically appropriate.
You can understand the lynch mobs banging their fists against the police van carrying Baby P brute Steven Barker to trial. But what purpose did it serve to hand out that kind of treatment to two already deeply frightened ten-year-old boys?
Venables was a test case for the proposition that kids who kill can be rehabilitated. Rather than spend 15 years or more behind bars, as Tory home secretary Michael Howard wanted at the time, he was released after eight years of education, psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment. Effectively, he was given a chance to make something of his adult life.
BBC 6 Music and Asian Network: why a hideously white middle-aged man cares
Posted on Wednesday 3 March, 2010
Filed Under Society |
10 Comments
TWO radio stations I have never listened to in my life are about to get the chop. Being the sort of bloke former BBC boss Greg Dyke famously described as ‘hideously white’, and pushing 50 to boot, the suits at Broadcasting House probably assume that I couldn’t less.
Yet somehow the death sentences pronounced on BBC 6 Music and Asian Network strike me as something of a dealbreaker. The whole idea of the BBC is that it offers the nation a comprehensive package. We pay a one-off bargain price for the lot, irrespective of which parts we choose to take up.
In its way, Britain’s state broadcaster is a standing rebuke to free market fundamentalism. No wonder Murdoch and the Tories hate it.
Its very existence represents implicit recognition that private sector provision necessarily gravitates towards mass market pap, rather than intelligent programming. That’s why Mastermind doesn’t run on Men & Motors.
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