A Swift Blow to the Head: Alex Goodall's Blog

Prime Minister Cameron: Thank Europe

Published on 2010-05-12 03:43:44

As the new Prime Minister David Cameron begins his long task of attempting to construct what is essentially a European-style Christian Democrat coalition, it’s worth pausing and noting one of the paradoxes at the heart of this deal he’s done. The major party that has over the years been the most instinctively, most viscerally hostile to the European project has been fully infected by the bug. The party that more or less completely split in two over European policy in the 1990s owes its

Would you rather be in the Post Office?

Published on 2010-05-02 08:23:41

I was struck, while reading the London Review of Books, by a remark in an article by Benjamin Kunkel which perhaps deserves some attention: “Everyone talks, with good reason, about the runaway costs of healthcare in the US, but if healthcare inflation since 1980 has exceeded 400 per cent, the price of a university education has risen, on a recent calculation, by an incredible 827 per cent.”In a sense, this should not be surprising. In the developed world we spend less and less of our resourc

Personality politics and moral panics

Published on 2010-04-29 08:28:30

Both sides of the Atlantic are currently watching first rate examples of the power of modern personality politics. In the States, the Democrats are finally realising that it helps to have an enemy they can point to, and have decided that a couple of derivatives traders at Goldman Sachs will nicely fit the bill. Meanwhile, in the UK, a Rochdale granny has been propelled to the front of the election campaign after Brown was overhead saying she was a “bigoted woman” on a microphone that was sti

In which Alex asks himself whether it's possible for him to get any more cynical about British politics

Published on 2010-04-09 18:29:48

Well, well, well. Even that perennial no news channel BBC News 24 gets it right some of the time, and I just saw quite an amusing little "fact check" piece in the run up to the UK election. As we all know, the Tories are in a bit of a bind when it comes to policy. Their only idea is cutting taxes, and that doesn't really add up when you've got the deficit to end all deficits. (Lucky for them that they don't currently appear to need any policies for the wonderful British public to vote them in,

Health care: the last post?

Published on 2010-03-21 08:01:29

At the risk of counting chickens, it appears that today congress will pass the most significant piece of healthcare reform since the 1960s and in so doing validate one of the central parts of the mandate that sent Barack Obama to office. A relentless battle, each side pulling off more comebacks than Muhammad Ali and Bill Clinton in combination, has culminated in an extraordinary week of political manoeuvring in the House, leaving the Democrats within a hair’s breadth of passing this damned bi

The great global nosh-up continues...

Published on 2010-03-20 08:32:17

In another great 'voice of reason' piece in the LRB, John Lanchester acutely summarises the fix we're in. The combination of an arrangement of electoral interests that provides no opportunity for fiscal discipline; an unwillingness to restrain the big banks meeting ignorance about how exactly to do so without damaging 'honest' banking; and a looming debt hangover that will make us realise quite how comparatively mild the cost of the recession has been so far (compared, that is, both to prior rec

What goes around comes around...

Published on 2010-03-20 08:28:12

From a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin, on possibly soon to be outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stevens, one of the last remaining adherents of a Republican politics otherwise long since dead: "John Paul Stevens, who will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on April 20th, generally bides his time. Stevens is the Court’s senior Justice, in every respect. He is thirteen years older than his closest colleague in age (Ginsburg) and has served eleven years longer than the next most experienced (Scali

Individualists of the World, Unite!

Published on 2010-03-09 14:46:20

Review of Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

Complexity and collapse? (Warning: wonkery ahead)

Published on 2010-03-07 07:26:38

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article by Niall Ferguson called ‘Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos.’ Read it yourself, but the substance of the piece is that we should not think about the rise and fall of imperial systems in terms of traditional seasonal or cyclical narratives (which to Ferguson means Vico, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Kennedy and Jared Diamond), since empires, like all other social organizations, are complex adaptive systems subject t

Democracy building in Afghanistan

Published on 2010-02-24 04:01:51

After Hamid Karzai's latest act, appointing all the members of the electoral commission so that in future it won't do troubling things like point out his widespread involvement in voting fraud, any attempt to defend NATO policy in Afghanistan on the grounds of democracy promotion sounds fairly stale. Does anyone remember those justifications circulated at the time of the original invasion - that by overthrowing the Taliban we'd be able to secure rights for women living behind the burkah? How qua