Brown has his bounce
It's official: the Scottish National Party's honeymoon is over. Glenrothes gave the SNP leader Alex Salmond a salutary lesson in not taking voters for granted. And they gave the Scottish chattering classes a lesson in not getting carried away with nationalist propaganda. This is a personal blow for the first minister. His face was all over the SNP campaign literature and he visited the constituency 13 times. For Gordon Brown, the bounce has finally arrived. Indeed, on the strength of this extraordinary victory the prime minister might wonder if now might be the moment to call that general election that he failed to call a year ago. For Brown realises that as far as the economy is concerned, things can only get worse. Iain Macwhirter The Guardian
Full article: Brown has his bounce 
The Mole: Does Glenrothes represent light at the end of the tunnel for Brown?
The great rate cut
The cut is nothing but financial hair of the dog: trying to cheer up credit-bingers by promising them another shot of even cheaper credit, says Ross Clark. It isn't sound economics; it is just populist politics. The idea that Gordon Brown made the Bank independent is laughable: he gave it instructions last week when he said: "Inflation is on its way down, which will enable the Bank of England to make decisions on interest rates." Actually, inflation hasn't yet fallen a jot: it is at a 17-year high. Recently the policy of slashing interest rates at any hint of economic trouble has proved disastrous. It was panic cuts in rates in 1998, in response to the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, which sparked the idiocy of the dotcom boom and more panic cuts after 9/11 which inflated the housing boom. Ross Clark The Times
Full article: The interest rate cut is bad economics and bad politics
Britain's economy is in the early stages of a deep and painful recession, and the cut in the bank rate to its lowest level since the mid-1950s should eventually help both to arrest the decline and ensure that recovery begins slightly sooner than it would have done otherwise, writes Larry Elliott. But the scale of the cut was evidence of how far behind the curve the Bank of England found itself after its comprehensive misreading of the state of the economy throughout 2008. This is no longer the world as it was in the 1970s, although the Bank has been behaving as if it is. Fighting the war against inflation has proved desperately costly - to the economy, to the concept of central bank independence, and to Mervyn King himself. Larry Elliott The Guardian
Full article: This U-turn shows the Bank to be way behind the curve
Stop congratulating yourselves
Good for the people. They turned out in numbers and did the right thing, says Martin Samuel. The United States belatedly turned its back on a corrupt, cancerous administration, and voted for the man who promised to be different, regardless of the colour of his skin. We can get very smug about this in Europe, but in France, Italy and Spain there is still more chance of a vote being cast for a guy who identifies with the theories of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan than there is for one who looks like Barack Obama. Even so, can we stop now? Can we stop patting each other on the back? Come on, you know the trouble we're in. It is amazing the Republicans won any states at all, let alone 46 per cent of the vote. Martin Samuel The Times
Full article: Just the man to clear up an unholy mess
Coloureds of Africa won't claim mixed race Barack Obama
Obama's Cuban missile crisis
An early test will be his response to the extraordinary sabre-rattling by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, says Simon Jenkins. Medvedev's proposal to station missiles in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania is a crude reaction to George Bush's location of defence installations in a number of former Warsaw pact countries. It is so clearly a challenge to Obama's resolve that it demands an immediate reply. The opportunity is for a classic show of firmness combined with an openness to negotiate. Kaliningrad could yet be Obama's Cuban missile crisis - the geographical parallel is eerily similar - before he has even taken office. Simon Jenkins The Guardian
Full article: All the cliches about colour obscure the real challenges awaiting Obama
Our two-tier NHS
Patients who buy drugs the health service refuses to fund will no longer have to opt out of public medicine and pay for their own nursing and care, says Mark Lawson. So the ill who are able to fund a last chance will lie in beds alongside the poor, swallowing pleb medicine. This backdown has happened because of a series of emotive stories about terminal patients who have been forced to use their savings to pay for an extended life. Now they will only be required to spend half. Flat-lining the values of their founders, NHS wards will have first-class and coach-class patients. The human truth is that any of us who could do so would buy another few months, but this stark differentiation in death dates feels like one of the most ghastly applications of the market. Mark Lawson The Guardian
In Brief
Brown’s triumph
Lindsay Roy is the new MP. But Glenrothes is Gordon Brown’s triumph. Mr Brown may well be punished for the recession eventually. But his own position within his party is now secure. Six weeks ago there were huge questions over whether he would lead Labour into the next election. Now there are none. Philip Webster The Times
Full article: A gamble that paid off
Labour sees off SNP to hold Glenrothes
How Obama won Florida
Dewy-eyed liberals like to think the election was all about a burning desire for a fairer America (whatever that means), a more racially tolerant America, a more diplomatically sensitive America. But, from where I was sitting in downtown Miami, a hotbed of hustling, bustling American enterprise, the picture was very clear. Most people wanted to pay lower taxes and that's what Mr Obama was promising. Jeff Randall Daily Telegraph
Full article: How Barack Obama seduced Florida: he promised to cut their taxes
Airtime: CNN cleans up while Fox plays to an empty room
Fairy dust
A joke is doing the rounds in Whitehall and no doubt in other similarly sized countries, too. The joke is deadly serious. What Gordon Brown would give to utter the words "I've been invited to Washington by President Obama..." before any other leader does so. Steve Richards The Independent
Full article: Is our relationship with the US about to become special again?
Motown Obama
To hark back briefly to 1960s Detroit, Motown Records defined itself not as the 'Sound of Black America', but as the 'Sound of Young America'. In doing so, it broke soul and R&B out of the black ghetto and opened up the world to some of the greatest popular music ever made. Obama has done something similar. He presented himself brilliantly, not as a black candidate, but as a young candidate. Richard Littlejohn Daily Mail
Full article: Let's hope that Obama doesn't turn into America's Tony Blair...
Posts
