Mugabe stole the Zimbabwean election with violence and intimidation. But Morgan Tsvangirai unwittingly helped him. How did this hitherto brave leader lose his bearings so badly, and what will the consequences be—both for Zimbabwe, whose warring factions are now in fragile talks, and for the MDC, which is also riven with deep faultlines? Stephen Chan, who reported from inside Zimbabwe between the first presidential poll and the run-offs, looks ahead.
Archive for the 'In the news' Category
His identical twin brother may have been ousted as prime minister last year, but President Lech Kaczynski of Poland is doing a good job of maintaining the family tradition of intransigence in foreign policy. Just as the dust was beginning to settle following the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon treaty, the Polish president—never known for his Europhilia—has said that he will refuse to sign the treaty. Now other wavering countries, including the Czech Republic, may find it tempting to postpone ratification.
This all adds up to a big headache for France, which takes over the presidency of the European Union today. Before the Irish vote, Nicolas Sarkozy had looked forward to the opportunity of hosting a grand ceremony in Paris at which the Lisbon treaty would come into force and the EU would move on from its current tiresome phase of navel-gazing. Yet in an interview to mark the beginning of the French presidency, Sarkozy suggested that he understands that there is a difficulty with the EU’s attitude towards the democratic rights of its citizens, and that many people are beginning to wonder if the union is better equipped to “protect” them than member states. Sarkozy plans to travel to Dublin next week to meet Irish voters and listen to their concerns over Lisbon and the direction of the union.
Whether or not the Irish referendum was lost on grounds that had little to do with the Lisbon treaty, as many argue, the union cannot continue to reform and develop without the support of its citizens. Any ratification procedure that seems directly to go against the will of voters will lead to the continuing distancing of the European Union from ordinary people, and this is not sustainable in the long run, particularly if the union is going to expand to take in the Balkan countries and particularly Turkey. So while it is perhaps understandable that European politicians would express frustration that a few hundred thousand voters in Ireland can hold up what is seen as a necessary streamlining process, perhaps they should be looking a bit further ahead and thanking the Irish for drawing everyone’s attention to something that is long overdue. Sarkozy, to his credit, seems to have realised this—amd perhaps he has found a mission for the French presidency—making us fall in love with the EU again—that will turn out to be even more glorious than the one he had envisaged.
The surprise winner of the Prospect/Foreign Policy global intellectuals poll is Fethullah Gülen, a US-based Turkish Sufi cleric with an international network of 5m followers, many hundreds of thousands of whom propelled him to a landslide victory (see the full results here).
Those who had a pop at Prospect for pandering to the forces of pseudo-democratic populism by running such a poll will feel vindicated by the result. After all, the fact that the Fethullahçi—the collective noun for Gülen’s followers—successfully mounted an orchestrated campaign for their man does away with any claim of objectivity made for the poll (not a claim we ever made, of course).
Yet on the other hand, as I describe in my piece that accompanies the results, perhaps we can see in Gülen’s victory the emergence of a new kind of public intellectual: one whose influence is expressed through a personal network, with the help of the internet, rather than more traditional institutions like journals or universities.
And Gülen himself has strong links to Turkey’s ruling AK party, which finds itself on the receiving end of an attempt to ban it by the country’s secular establishment. As David Goodhart describes in his editorial, this is probably the biggest political battle in Europe—and anything that draws our attention to it must be a good thing. (Ehsan Masood explores Gülen’s life and work here.)
If you have any questions about the poll, or the various voting campaigns that it spawned, post them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
For many, the most exciting thing about Barack Obama’s victory in the Democratic race is the prospect of a US president who will take concrete steps to improve America’s tarnished reputation in the rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world. Andrew Sullivan indulged the thought last year in his hymn of praise to Obama in the Atlantic: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”
Not so fast, said Prospect author and professional contrarian Edward Luttwak. Writing in the New York Times, Luttwak suggested that Obama’s chances of healing relations with the world’s Muslims would be crippled by his own personal history. Obama’s father was, famously, a Muslim, but renounced his faith, and Obama is a practising Christian, as we know from the Jeremiah Wright controversy. According to Muslim law, wrote Luttwak, Obama’s birth to a Muslim father, even one who had left the faith, made him an apostate. And apostasy in the eyes of Islamic clerics is the worst of crimes. The usual sentence is execution, and Islamic law states that any Muslim who kills an apostate shall be spared punishment. At the very least, said Luttwak, this would make security for the president on trips to Muslim countries even more of a headache.
Luttwak likes to ruffle feathers, and usually gets a response—his article “The middle of nowhere,” published a year ago in Prospect, which argued that the world would do best to ignore the increasingly irrelevant middle east, remains, I think, the most-read piece on our website. (The book of the same name is being published later this year.)
And Luttwak certainly got a response this time. Such a fierce one, in fact, that the NY Times conducted its own inquiry into Luttwak’s thesis, interviewing five Islamic scholars, and found, more or less, that Luttwak was talking complete bunkum. In a fine contribution to what is steadily becoming a grand tradition of self-flagellation at the Grey Lady, the newspaper’s public editor wrote: “Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture… With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view.
If in doubt, the Old Left would nationalise or regulate. If in doubt the New Right would privatise or deregulate. And if in doubt, the soupy left-right blend that now unites us has its own default option: quantify and publish.
Today The Guardian reports that the government is preparing to publish the death rates of patients undergoing major surgery at NHS hospitals in England. Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty with a promise to publish New York-style ‘crime maps’, detailing the areas of London that suffer from the worst crime.
The practice of tabulating and comparing ‘outputs’ has been growing in policy for a number of years now. The production of rankings is always the highlight of the World Economic Forum’s World Competitiveness Report, in which nations around the world are placed on a chart from the most competitive to the least. And New Labour has been infamous for its league tables, especially in education. The hope in such cases has been to create incentives to alter managerial strategy or try harder. Revealing a country to be the 35th most competitive in the world is meant to be a wake-up call for them to do better (unless it’s France), as well as to give businesses an indication of where not to invest.
This policy trick is now being performed for the benefit of individual citizens, thanks to two developments. Continue reading ‘On the probability of not dying’
If you weren’t put off by the slightly silly questions on More4 News’s feature about the Prospect/Foreign Policy top 100 global public intellectuals poll last night (which consisted largely of a reporter asking Prospect editor David Goodhart why we’d left off “influential” people like Jeremy Clarkson and Osama bin Laden; you can see the report by following a link on this page), then please take the opportunity to vote for your top five here if you haven’t done so already.
Voting has been brisk in the first week—around 7,000 ballots cast—and while voting patterns so far bear a fair resemblance to the results from the 2005 poll, there are a few surprises (as well as a few obvious national vote-rigging campaigns).
More4 News was mildly sniffy about Prospect’s intellectuals wheeze, comparing it to FHM’s top 100 sexiest women reader’s poll. And insofar as both publications have asked their readers to express a preference on a matter that their choice of reading material suggests they may have strong feelings about, the programme was right. The obvious next step, not suggested by the report, is for the two magazines to combine forces to find out who the world’s top 100 sexiest intellectuals are. This time, I imagine Chomsky might find the competition a bit tougher. Do feel free to leave your suggestions below.
Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, likes to think of himself as the scourge of Westminster; his blog is replete with examples of villainous or shameful behaviour by members of what Staines sees as the inherently corrupt members of Britain’s political classes. Today, however, Staines himself has become the story; the Independent’s Pandora diary reports that last week Staines found himself up in a magistrates’ court on drink-driving charges. It appears that Staines had over-indulged at a reception hosted by the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, where, he says, “The booze is usually pretty good.”
Staines is no stranger to the sauce, as any visitor to his blog will soon learn. But Guido Fawkes, whose tireless cynicism and fierce plague-on-all-your-houses libertarian independence used to make his site one of the most entertaining and essential reads in the British political blogosphere, has in recent months become little more than an attack dog for the Tories, and has become far less interesting as a result. Might all that Margaux have dulled Guido’s instincts? Meanwhile, one of Guido’s main rivals for the most-read British political blog, politicalbetting.com, goes from strength to strength.
Funnily enough, as I write not a single commenter at Guido’s site has brought up the Independent story; this is not a group usually renowned for its reticence. It may simply tell us something about the lack of crossover between the Independent’s readership and the increasingly partisan Guido Fawkes’s constituency.
A couple of news stories today help illustrate some of the more unexpected consequences of the vast price rises some commodities have experienced over the past few years—caused largely by increasing demand in the rapidly growing countries of the developing world. The New York Times reports that enterprising thieves in Leicestershire have been stripping rural churches of lead strips in their roofs. The motivation for these bizarre acts of theft is the sky-high price for lead on global markets; the metal is now worth seven times what it was just six years ago. (I’m reminded of a similar story a few years ago about a sudden epidemic in manhole cover theft in Britain and Ireland at a time of soaring prices for cast iron. In fact, a quick Google search reveals that the activity now seems to have spread to the US and Canada—and even to China.)
But more cheery news emerges from Helmand province in Afghanistan (now there’s a sentence you don’t read every day). Con Coughlin, the Telegraph’s man in Helmand writes on his blog that high prices for wheat have succeeded where Nato troops and the Afghan government have failed: in getting Afghan farmers to stop growing poppies, which are of course used as the basis for heroin. As Chris Haskins wrote in Prospect a few months ago, wheat prices have risen rapidly in recent years, caused partly by poor harvests and partly by a growing turn in developing countries towards the western diet. Now Afghan farmers want their share of the pie. And so while the spectacular rise in global wheat prices may raise the spectre of a “Malthusian crunch” in years to come, at least in the short term it’s weaning Afghanistan off its poppy addiction.
“Mag as Hell!” is the New York Observer’s first annual survey of magazines, addressing such burning issues as “Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now?“. For a more doom-laden take on the industry, try Private Frazer. (Frazer’s take on Prospect is here.)
Did someone delete your Wikipedia entry? Don’t worry, there’s another place for it.
“Are you a habitual drunkard?” and other questions asked at US citizenship interviews.
There was a hilarious interview on Newsnight last night between Jeremy Paxman and an Amercian called Paul Dennison, who is the creator of “Brain Gym.” Brain gym, for those of you not in the know, is an exercise technique increasingly used in schools all over the world (including several thousand in the UK, apparently) as a means to sharpen children’s mental powers. Seemingly derived from acupuncture, the technique works on the assumption that there is a series of reflex points, or “brain buttons,” positioned all over the body, and that stimulating these improves blood flow to the brain, thereby increasing concentration, mental alertness and so on. Dennison’s grilling by Paxman was preceded by interviews with various scientists, who dismissed the theory as nonsense.
A wide-eyed mumbo-jumbo spouting Californian would-be guru like Dennison was always going to prove easy fodder for the likes of Paxman; and so it proved. “Can you just explain what a brain button is, please?” Paxman began, feigning interest, before having fun with Dennison’s wackier claims—among them, the belief that the human body is “electrical” and that “processed foods do not contain water.” (By way of justifying the second of these propositions, Dennison expressed his view that “pure water is more active and immediately available to the brain,” which to my mind made him sound unerringly like the demented General Ripper in Dr Strangelove, with his talk of “pure bodily essences” and the threat of “fluoridation”).
The inverview is well worth watching—someone should put it on YouTube—but at the moment the only way to see it is by going to the Newsnight site, clicking on “Watch Last Night’s Programme,” and then scrolling through the programme until you get to it (it starts on just over 30 minutes).
Extra Note: Actually, I tell a lie….as as the enigmatic commenter “K” has pointed out, you can actually see just that bit by clicking on the relevant link here.
Extra Note mark 2: Actually, it’s not me, but “K,” who is telling the lie; that link only connects to the report that preceded the interview. I think you do have to scroll through the actual programme to see the interview.
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