The Independent (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
Last week, a glove-puppet turned into a grave-digger. For the past year, Alistair Darling had been Chancellor in name and salary only. Modern prime ministers also hold the title "First Lord of the Treasury". In Gordon Brown's case, it has not been a mere honorific. He has continued to run the Treasury as if he were still Chancellor.
The Independent (Free subscription) | 07/14/2008
This is not politics. It is is vivisection. Unable to resist blundering into unforced errors, Gordon Brown cannot decide whether he is Marie Antoinette or Heathcliff. "Dithering heights'' might become the defining phase of his premiership. Cloth-eared, incapable of using words to appeal to human beings, Mr Brown has lost contact with social reality and with common sense. Events may have turned malign,...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 07/07/2008
There are no easy answers to the question of the other within. Even without his wig and robes, even in a Muslim centre on Whitechapel Road, Nicholas Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, might seem to have little in common with Ray Lewis, who has been obliged to resign as Deputy Mayor of London. Yet both men are wrestling with related difficulties. Both are addressing the vital issue of alienated communities....
The Independent (Free subscription) | 06/30/2008
There was a New York bagel maker called Finkelstein. He was the most unfortunate of men. The day after the insurance policy ran out, his store burnt down, which did not persuade the health authorities to drop the charges over the mice in his basement: placed there, he was certain, by a rival. On Yom Kippur, his daughter and only child announced that she was going to marry a goy. Truly, his suffering...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 06/23/2008
The Ministry of Culture is not one of the great offices of state. It was invented by Harold Wilson, who wanted to create a post for Jennie Lee, Nye Bevan's widow. In those days, she was the Minister of the Arts. She invented the Open University, which is probably a good thing and definitely a more significant achievement than any of her successors have managed. The years passed and the bureaucratic...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 06/16/2008
A week ago, British politics was almost on the verge of becoming dull. Labour was bound to lose; the only question still to answer was the size of David Cameron's majority. That was the consensus – in the Labour Party. The cloud of defeatism had settled on Labour MPs, who were even more mired in the slough of despond than their Tory counterparts in 1996/7.
The Independent (Free subscription) | 06/09/2008
Isaiah Berlin came out with the phrase which tells us most about the era we live in: "The great goods cannot always live together." Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of law and order. The two words trip easily off the tongue – especially a Tory one – as if they were synonymous. Far from it: to assess their competing claims requires unending intellectual debate.
The Independent (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
... Further Higher Obituaries Corrections Opinion Leading Articles Commentators Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Bruce Anderson Joan Bakewell Terence Blacker Simon Carr Rupert Cornwell Mary Dejevsky Hermione Eyre Robert Fisk Andrew Grice Adrian Hamilton Johann Hari Philip Hensher Howard Jacobson Dominic Lawson John Lichfield Donald Macintyre Hamish McRae Matthew Norman Deborah Orr Christina Patterson...
ConservativeHome (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
... political weather. The Tories now have to prove that they are serious men for serious times." - Bruce Anderson in The Independent "Mr Brown was a DIY Chancellor who rejected expert advice, knocked down load-bearing financial walls and hollowed out traditional support mechanisms. So we ended up with Northern Rock, a pensions collapse and the disastrous merger of tax and customs, to...
Daimnation! (Free subscription) | 07/18/2008
... case the usefulness of it as a ballot question for the Conservatives will weaken over time," said Bruce Anderson, president of polling firm Harris-Decima. Or, people might look at the declining crime rate and conclude that the Tories' justice policies are working. Admittedly, this would probably give the Conservatives more credit than they deserve, since crime rates were going down...
ConservativeHome (Free subscription) | 07/14/2008
... decades, everyone forgot that there is nothing so terrifying as the sound of crashing paper." - Bruce Anderson in the Independent "The debt crisis, the banking crisis, the property crisis, the oil crisis, the shift to Asia, the bear market in stocks, are huge global adjustments that have all come together at the same time. If my birthday does not prove to be another Black Monday on...
MicroShaft Blog (Free subscription) | 06/30/2008
The title of this article in the Independent is a more sober, "Gordon Brown thought he could rely on the Scottish vote – now it could bring him down" but I'm sure that Bruce Anderson would have preferred to title it with my version. His comment below is probably the stand out When Labour dominated the Scottish executive, there was no equivalent of the prawn cocktail offensive that the...
atHome Top Story (Free subscription) | 07/01/2008
... than a five out of 10.A majority in other provinces and territories rated national pride a 10.Bruce Anderson, president of Harris-Decima, said the poll suggests that while Canadians may not be as overtly patriotic as their American neighbours, there's still a strong sense of pride across far-flung corners of the country."There is something abidingly pride-building about the notion...
The Telegraph (Free subscription) | 06/15/2008
As it is widely believed that politicians have too few principles and are too reluctant to resign, many voters will applaud Mr Davis. They are wrong, says Bruce Anderson.
Stryker Brigade News (Free subscription) | 06/14/2008
Found the following story via Blog-Ah!. by Bruce Anderson, Anderson Valley Advertiser A thousand people in Boonville is fifty thousand in San Francisco, and there were more than a thousand people in Boonville by five o'clock last Thursday waiting for...
