Author Archive for Tom Chatfield

Prospect’s new issue: Miliband’s message

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 24, 2008
in British politics and Inside Prospect
. 7 Comments

Britain’s foreign secretary is touted by many as a future prime minister and the saviour of his party—questions that the current torments of the Labour party have made especially urgent. In the unlikely event of a coup against Gordon Brown, David Miliband probably won’t be among either the ringleaders or the chief beneficiaries. But it is increasingly clear that this ambitious, intellectual and articulate politician has a central role to play in the future of British politics.

In our cover story this month, Miliband spoke to a panel of interviewers—Robert Cooper, Kishwer Falkner, David Goodhart, Dominic Lawson and Richard Reeves—in the fullest and frankest public exposition to date of his thinking as both a foreign secretary and Labour politician. It’s a confident, informed performance, and one which moves between the inevitable blandness of pre-prepared lines and some engagingly impassioned discourses on policy, the history of Labour thought, and the larger problems besetting modern politics.

Among other topics, Miliband discusses the nature and future of liberal intervention, great power rivalries in a globalised world, climate change, British politics, the future of Labour and the left—and why and how social inequalities need to be attacked. The scene is certainly set for a convincing post-election leadership challenge, if Labour lose and Miliband decides to stake his claim. How might the mantle of prime minister-in-waiting sit on him then, with a Cameron-led Conservative party in power?

As ever, please let us know your thoughts and share your comments below.

Why finance is turning Japanese

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 24, 2008
in Business and Inside Prospect
. 1 Comment

As credit crunches ever harder on the global economy, Jonathan Ford explains in our lead opinion this month why the Wall Street crash of 1929 is a less significant analogy to the situation today than the Japanese crisis of 1989—the year which marked the start of a 13-year decline in the Nikkei index of leading Japanese shares.

As in late-1980s Japan, Ford argues, banks have now lent too much money to bad borrowers. Having made big losses, they are concerned about more bad debts coming down the line, eroding their capital. This has made them extremely reluctant to lend—even to one another—and may set in motion a pattern of “deleveraging malaise” that traditional mechanisms, such as the lowering of interest rates, cannot break.

Is the world set to become debt-averse in a way that threatens growth across the entire global economy? It’s a possibility, he believes, that we discount at our peril.

Overstretched and over there

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 24, 2008
in Inside Prospect
. 3 Comments

Britain’s armed forces remain among the world’s finest—but, at a time which has seen their deployment in a number of unpopular, costly and distant wars, undermanning and public indifference have become issues of critical importance.

In his essay for Prospect this month, James Fergusson looks at the troubled present and future of Britain’s military covenant—what it means today, what status military service now has as a career, and how the armed forces conceive their own roles in the nation and the world.

In memoriam, DFW

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 24, 2008
in Arts and culture and Inside Prospect
. 18 Comments

The loss of David Foster Wallace on 12th September came shortly before Prospect was due to go to press, but we were fortunate enough to be able to call upon author Julian Gough to do some justice to one of the most dazzling, troubled talents of recent American letters.

In his Opinion piece, Gough looks back on Foster Wallace’s career and its painful self-cancellations: the universities that enabled him to write, but that stifled the writing he was able to do; the gifts of high comedy and high seriousness that set him apart from his peers, but that only rarely found the great subjects his talent deserved; his painful, painfully thorough self-awareness, which pre-empted both his own tragedy and his audience’s re-readings of his life. Let us know your thoughts below.

Three theories of humour

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 24, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

To celebrate the October launch of Jim Holt’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This (Profile)—a history of jokes, their origins and causes—Jim has written a pithy 800 words for us in his old “Speculations” slot about three theories of humour, the end of the world, and what chimps laugh at. You can read it here: and we hope you’ll contribute as wittily as you see fit on the blog below.

Happy birthday, Google!

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 5, 2008
in Science and technology
. 3 Comments

As the BBC and, doubtless, almost everybody else in the online information game is pointing out, google turns ten years old this weekend, a milestone marked among other things by the release of its new internet browser, Chrome (well, that was yesterday, but it’s close enough).

For a company to move within a decade from zero to a quarterly turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn), with net quarterly profit of $1.25bn, is a thoroughly modern experience—a phenomenon enabled by the almost unlimited proliferation of products and services that people are willing to buy, sell and, crucially, advertise online. Even the previous generation of tech miracles didn’t happen like this. In 1985, ten years after it was founded, Microsoft was on the cusp of releasing its Windows operating system and had enjoyed huge success in the (still relatively small) world of computing with its DOS operating system. But it was still a year away from going public, and its turnover was less than $163m. Its founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were barely millionaires. According to Forbes’s latest list of the world’s billionaires, google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth $18.7bn and $18.6bn respectively. Admittedly, adding them together still leaves you quite a few billion shy of Bill Gates’s current $58bn. But he’s had 23 more years and one internet revolution to consolidate.

Delve back still further into the mists of time, and you’ll see exactly why such growth is unprecedented. Henry Ford founded his automobile company in 1903, and by 1913 its production of the Model T—the world’s first mass-produced car—was running at over 200,000 units a year. It was an unprecedented industrial success, and allowed Ford to sell cars that year at the astonishingly low price of $550. Assuming every car he made that year was sold at full price, Ford’s 1913 revenue can thus be approximated to $11m, which adjusting for inflation would have been worth around $245m today. Ford was working at the peak of technology, on a scale that had never been seen before. Yet today, that peak is a mere footnote to a foothill—and Google is grossing more than $319m a week (according to last year’s accounts).

So companies are bigger now, and can grow faster, than ever? Well, yes. Yet a glance at one of the world’s first incorporated companies is somewhat sobering. Born in 1600, the Honorable East India Company of Great Britain began as a trading venture for British merchants wishing to exploit the riches of Southeast Asia. Pause a century or so, and it had become an entity which—as Nick Robins concisely puts it over at OpenDemocracy—”ruled over a fifth of the world’s people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.” If google’s disconcertingly cheery blog and “don’t be evil” ethos are a front for this kind of empire-building, they’re doing an awfully good job of keeping it quiet…

In Fact—in a bookstore near you now

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 4, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Today is an especially exciting Thursday for Prospect, as it sees the publication of the book of our ever-popular “in fact” column, which can now be purchased in—we hope—all good bookstores near you. Lovingly edited by our senior editor and fact-compiler-in-chief Tom Nuttall, it’s a compendium of information that aims to be every bit as inclusive, challenging and intermittently astonishing as our own magazine. Did you know, for instance, that one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator; that more than half of the London underground network is overground; or that Brent, in north London, is the only place in Britain where women earn as much as men on average? All this and more waits within its pages.

Fact-fans will be doubly thrilled to learn that you can not only purchase the book at our dedicated in fact website, but that you can also contribute there to its evolving, electronic incarnation—an online hub for all matters factual. And while you’re checking that out, why not enter our book launch competition, in which we’re giving away five copies of In Fact for the five best reader submissions to the “in fact” column—all of which we’ll publish in October. To enter, simply email your fact, its source and date to our fact hotline, plus your name and address, by 16th September.

We happy Danes, we band of brothers

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on August 27, 2008
in Europe, Inside Prospect and Uncategorized
. 6 Comments

Hamlet, the most famous Dane of them all, was both fictional and glum. Yet, Sally Laird argues in her Opinion piece for the latest issue of Prospect, real Danes in modern Denmark are the happiest people in the world (according to the best recent investigations into such matters).

They’re not the most economically successful, or the cleanest-living, or the most demanding. But a national emphasis on shared experiences and a “gift for being properly ceremonious without being solemn” have created a society happier simply to be itself than anywhere else on earth.

It’s also a place that might, just, remind the rest of us that man can hand on more than misery to man—given half a chance and a properly assembled plate of herring sandwiches.

A noble death?

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on August 27, 2008
in Inside Prospect
. 114 Comments

One piece in our latest issue that’s sure to provoke debate is Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s account of contemporary bullfighting in Spain. It’s a topic close to the author’s heart, and he eloquently defends the modern spectacle of the bull-ring as an art form while acknowledging the moral compromises inherent in a festival that has slaughter at its heart.

As Fiske-Harrison has explored in his previous postings on this blog, what it means to behave “well” towards animals is a very different business to what it means to behave well towards other people. Given, however, that our behaviour towards animals does not simply exist in an ethical vacuum, most modern societies find themselves in a peculiar position: horrified by bull-fights or fox hunts, yet economically predicated on the industrial rearing and slaughter of many millions of animals.

Can such contradictions be reconciled? Can we justify our pleasure in either the spectacle of a bullfight or the savour of a steak dinner? As ever, let us know your thoughts below.

Migration fiction moves on

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on July 30, 2008
in Books and Inside Prospect
. 1 Comment

The migrations of the 20th century have long provided rich pickings for literature—including around half of the winners of the Booker prize since its inception. Yet, argues Kamran Nazeer in our lead review this month, social and technological change are ushering in a new era that art has only tentatively begun to explore: a world of shared, instant information, greater mobility and awareness on the part of most immigrants, and with few of the seemingly irreversible dislocations of 50 years ago.

Comparing Eva Hoffman’s 1989 memoir of her 1959 departure from Poland for Canada, Lost in Translation, with her recent novel of a 21st century migrant in Europe, Illuminations, Nazeer explores this transition and its consequences for writers—the new challenge they face; the loss of the binary oppositions so central to older works; and the newer, subtler traumas to be explored today.

As ever, share your own thoughts and experiences below.