Murdoch papers to charge for online content
The Times and the Sunday Times are to start charging for content online in June.
Users will be charged £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription for access to both papers’ websites, publisher News International has announced.
The News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, implied in a statement that its other titles, the Sun and the News of the World, would follow.
In August 2009, Rupert Murdoch announced that he would to introduce charges for all his newspapers, saying that News Corp wanted to prevent readers moving to free sites by making its content better and differentiated from other publishers.
I wonder whether this is going to be as big a triumph as when Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 million, or when he endorsed the Tories and then paid for daily opinion polls which showed the Tory lead collapse?
Media out of touch with public on cuts
One should never take any opinion poll in isolation, but the latest results from each of the main polling firms suggest a tightening pre-election race. The headlines – such as over the BA strike – have been consistently bad for Labour, so there seems to be an increasing disconnect between what the national media think is going on, and which issues an uncertain public are thinking hardest about as they prepare to make up their minds.
The biggest disconnect between elite debate and public opinion may well be over the central question of “cuts” in public spending.
The evidence is growing that the public are yet to be convinced by arguments for very heavy cuts in public services. On balance, they are more concerned on the impact of cuts on public services than the consequences of not cutting for the budget deficit. And they appear more open to a balanced approach to spending cuts, tax increases, debt and the pace of deficit reduction than many commentators would like.
The response from much of the commentariat, especially on the right, is to charge the public with denial: ‘they just don’t get it. National bankruptcy stares us in the face’.
But it doesn’t. If one wanted to take a (perhaps excessively) sanguine view of the question, one could take the sole Budget speech of the leading ‘progressive Conservative’ of the last century, in which Harold Macmillan held fast to his centrist, pro-public services Keynesian outlook:
It was 1956, and the national debt was 150% of GDP. Current projections suggest it could rise to half of that over the next four years.
Macmillan quoted the historian Macauley over the debt fears of the 18th century.
At every stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand; yet still the debt kept on growing, and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever.
“In fact the debt was gradually reduced from these peaks without any heroic gestures”, as FT columnist Samuel Brittan has written.
It was primarily growth what did it.
It has been argued that the post-war welfare state was unaffordable – though less often how this insight could have been carried through in the face of overwhelming democratic support for it. It has been more credibly argued that, if Britain was to expand domestic public spending, it needed to move more quickly from a global power to a European one.
Of course, Macmillan remains second only to Heath in the Thatcherite hall of villainy. As a consequence, his status among Progressive Conservatives is far from clear, though David Cameron’s press team have characteristically briefed that he has a picture of SuperMac, not Maggie, in his office. Since Cameron seems to entirely reject Macmillan’s economic outlook, one might not seem to make so much difference to the choices he would make in government.
Today, the budget deficit is a problem that needs to be dealt with – though one can not simply short circuit the political and policy debates and choices about how to do that.
But, if only progressive Conservatives knew their own history, they would realise that claims of an existential crisis of national debt are bunk.
Cameron’s gay rights gaffe
David Cameron recently stumbled his way through an interview with the Gay Times.
But interestingly, it wasn’t just the liberal-left media which reported this. Sky News and ITN covered the story, which originally broke into the mainstream via Channel 4. These news channels are hardly known for their pioneering pro-gay rights agenda – but they’re all carrying the story. Perhaps more surprisingly, the right-wing Telegraph is carrying the story on its news pages with a fairly critical angle, whilst The Times news blog declared “Cameron loses plot in gay interview”.
What’s especially significant here is both that the story is being widely covered, and that Cameron is being widely criticised. Not just for his indecision, but also for the fact Tory MEPs are apparently supporting homophobic actions in the European Parliament. This – as well as Cameron’s inability to answer questions about gay rights in a satisfactory manner – is being criticised across the political spectrum. That Cameron felt the need, post-interview, to re-iterate a Tory “commitment” to gay equality indicates that this was a major slip-up.
What does this tell us? Most importantly, that being homophobic is no longer publicly acceptable in our society. continue reading… »
The case for a hung parliament
Guest post by Max Rashbrooke
If an enemy of your enemies is automatically your friend, then a hung parliament is undeniably a friend of Britain and of the left. Ken Clarke has become the latest conservative big beast to come out against a hung parliament, warning the Evening Standard that it would be “catastrophic”.
Many commentators have already refuted that claim, pointing out (as Larry Elliott did in the Guardian) that coalition governments have no problems tackling massive budget deficits, and that sharing power has hardly been a disaster in Scotland, Germany and numerous other countries. But no one has yet had the courage to set out why a hung parliament would actually be good for Britain. continue reading… »
How these housing benefit reforms hurt poor families
For the past few months, the Evening Standard and other right-wing newspapers have been running a campaign publicising the ‘scandal’ that some poor, ethnic minority families are living in large properties in some of the more prosperous parts of London.
In chapter five of the Budget, called ‘achieving fairness and promoting opportunity’, the government decided to respond to this concern by lowering the Local Housing Allowance payments, by excluding the top 8% of properties in London when calculating how much to pay out (pages 67-8). In theory, this is intended to save £145 million. This will mean that people in London and in some other parts of the country will get lower levels of Local Housing Allowance.
Fair enough, some might say. In these difficult financial times, it is right for the government to try to save money and address perceived unfairnesses and public concern. But it’s worth recognising the consequences when the government lets right wing newspapers decide its housing policy.
Firstly, it goes against Labour’s priorities on tackling discrimination, reducing child poverty and creating mixed communities. continue reading… »
Why aren’t our banks backing green projects?
Guest post by Adam Ramsay
There is much to write about yesterday’s budget, but I thought I would highlight just one paradox – one I genuinely don’t understand.
Alistair Darling announced a £1bn fund for low carbon projects. This green investment bank is designed to provide the stimulous which will encourage other lenders to also back renewable energy projects and the like. The Treasury reckon this will lead to a total of £2bn extra for low carbon infrastructure. In itself this is to be welcomed, but is nothing like the level of investment we need in climate protecting technologies if I am to have a comfortable retirement come 2050.
So far so normal.
Alistair Darling also announced that the bailed-out banks would be given new requirements to lend to small businesses. They did a similar thing back in November with their ‘asset protection scheme – again, no massive surprise.
OK, so, here’s the paradox. continue reading… »
Pope implicated in child abuse cover-up at school
From the New York Times…
Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal…
…The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
Maybe we should put an 18 rating on his visit, just to be on the safe side.
Earth Hour on Saturday
Our friends at the WWF asked us to remind our readers about Earth Hour:
Earth Hour 2010 is coming up again on Saturday 27th March when people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour at 8.30pm local time, in order to send a clear message to the world’s governments that climate change needs to be addressed urgently.
Hopefully we can top last year’s awesome achievements, which saw hundreds of millions of people across 3,000 cities and towns in 83 countries participate.
If you’re interested in helping, it would be really fantastic if you could blog about the Earth Hour event – and ask your readers to get involved telling their colleagues, friends and family too.
The more signups we get, the more we can show the world’s governments how seriously their people now consider global warming to be, and how loud their voice is on this urgent issue.
If you’re keen to do more, WWF have come up with a number of resources, including:
Embeddable videos
A nifty widget for your blog
A number of sharable ways to show your support
The Cider Tax Rules
Just about the most immediately contentious announcement in yesterday’s budget was the decision to increase the rates of alcohol duty levied on cider by a whopping 10% over and above the inflation rate of 3% used as the basis for other rises in excise duties.
Within what seemed to be a matter of minutes of the announcement, the provisional wing of the Wurzel’s Appreciation Society had a Facebook group up and running while I understand that in Hereford, today, the SAS have been placed on stand-by in case it becomes necessary to protect the Bulmer’s factory from a rampaging mob of anonymous protesters, all wearing Justin Lee Collins masks. Rumours also suggest that a bomb threat may have been issued to the Burnham-on-Sea branch of Oddbins by a group calling itself the People’s Front of Somerset*, prompting the Home Office to raise the terrorist threat level in Minehead to ‘who gives a fuck, Butlins doesn’t open for another fortnight’.
(Or was that the Somerset People’s Front? Hell, I dunno, might have been the People’s Popular Front of Somerset for all I give a toss!)
Truly, the End of Days is upon us all, but do cider drinkers really have any cause for complaint?
Or is this just another lame excuse for me knocking up a graph… continue reading… »
The challenge for the centre left
This was a good budget. Perhaps unsusually, I thought the best bits were the bits that will probably get the least attention.
While the stamp duty holiday will benefit me personally and (given the age and salary profile of most journalists and editors), get a lot of headlines, it is essentially a measure designed to ensure housing values stay steady. Fair, enough – but not where the real action is.
Instead, I’m more excited by what Alistair Darling talked about, in his understated way, as the Growth Agenda.
Let me put it this way: the prime political challenge of the centre left for the next decade has to be the creation of around two million jobs. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to pay down debt. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to fund public services. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to fund the research, development and technology that is needed for long term growth.
Doing that won’t be easy. People talk about export led growth, and that’s important. But everyone will want to export their way to growth. People talk about public works spending, but such projects can only do so much. continue reading… »
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» Do older people really need more NHS healthcare?
» There are alternatives to the reckless ‘Plan A’
» On Beecroft: it is already quite easy to sack people
» Why Cameron’s claim of 600,000 jobs created is plainly wrong
» By using age to allocate NHS funding, Lansley rewards Tory voters
» The rise in domestic violence deaths is not an “isolated” problem
» Adrian Beecroft highlights mindset of Tory right
» The US is now a model for the Eurozone to save itself
» The IMF plan to revive the economy doesn’t go far enough
» The Boris brand is weaker than his friends think
» Nine things you can do to halt Lansley’s destruction of our NHS
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