Cicero's Songs

 In some ways, but far from all, I was a mildly precocious kid. For example I began to be a regular reader of The Economist from my early teens, long enough to see long term pictures and trends, but equally long enough to develop a brand loyalty.  From the beginning, I appreciated the conceit of the The Economist : that it was a newspaper, not a magazine, like the lesser titles based in America, such as Time or Newsweek , but more, that its editorial judgement was based on a set of principles that emerged from an almost high table approach to the issues of the day. Structured and academically rigorous, sure, but most of all intelligent.  The Economist was committed to political ideas, a liberal-conservative point of view that was not subject to the whims of fashion. More to the point, both editors and contributors were not merely ivory tower thinkers, they were often financial practitioners and extraordinarily well connected and well informed. Thus the opinions express...

In the past few weeks an Internet meme has emerged concerning gay marriage. It started with a college humor video suggesting that gay guys would marry straight guys girlfriends'. It was a winsome piece of humour , playing to the idea that certain gay stereotypes would be very attractive to women, and that therefore straight guys should support gay marriage in order to eliminate the competition. Then a bunch of gay women thought that lesbians could follow up on this and came up with a whole load of reasons why straight women should support gay marriage . There was a pretty dramatic response, which the girls also responded to themselves with great good humour . Meanwhile straight men also decided that they could support gay marriage, although disparaging the idea that gay men would want to marry their girlfriends... since they did not even want to do that themselves. Gently they too took the rip out of some of the stereotypes, this time straight stereotypes . On the other hand the ...

As I read through the Sunday news, I am struck with a sense of fatigue. The responses to the Leveson Report might have come straight from an episode of Yes, Minister . The self-serving posturing of the corporate press merely confirms all we feared most: they have a profit-driven agenda which is little or nothing to do with the national interest and which they will ruthlessly defend. The switch from open contempt of David Cameron to mild adulation, merely because the Prime Minister has essentially rejected the core recommendation of the report- that new arrangements should be underpinned by statute- reveals the Press at its cowardly, bullying, lick-spittle worst. As it happens I am disappointed in Leveson. I think the report failed to address the rapidly changing nature of the media- the increasing diversity of media channels and the rise of citizen-journalism- and this is a critical failing. However the hysterical vituperation that has been delivered by the press, defending ind...

The past couple of weeks has seen a concerted defence of the British media by, er... well the British media. Articles such as " Don't Make us North Korean ", " We must defend a free press " and so on have been a spectacular case of special pleading. So many people who cross the boundary between politics and journalism, from Boris Johnson to Paul Goodman, have been rushing to tell us why any regulation amounts to the end of the free press as we have known it.   Well frankly Bul***it. The fact is that the Press has been ignoring its own (self) regulators for years and- it is now blindingly obvious- have been routinely breaking the law of the land with impunity. As more charges are brought against News International, is it not a scandal that the same management, in the shape of Rupert Murdoch and his family, remains in control of the largest private media business in the UK? Is it not outrageous that the Express refuses even the toothless sanctions of the s...

The problem with the latest corrosive scandal to engulf yet another UK institution is that... well it's all so predictable. People, or organisations for that matter, that believe themselves untouchable quite often end up doing fairly unspeakable things. Although I didn't know Jimmy Savile from a hole in the ground, it does rather seem as though he believed he was untouchable, and lets face it he is dead and was given something of a hero's send-off- so in life he surely was untouchable. Those who have come out to complain about his behaviour since he died do seem to have the smack of truth about them and of course those "in the know" now say that they knew all along that there was something untoward about him.  So far so tragically sordid. What the BBC has done about "Savile" as we must now call him (certainly not "Sir Jimmy", although that is the style he knew until the day he died) has revealed the very culture that allowed this seeming...

In a way the bombshell that has hit the BBC in the past 24 hours over the raft of allegations about the sexual conduct of Jimmy Savile- and the apparent long-term cover-up- is entirely appropriate. Yet to my mind the storm that has broken is also slightly mis-aimed. It is rather like Al Capone being convicted of tax evasion, rather than the much grosser crimes that he undoubtedly also committed. The fact is that the BBC has an ever longer charge sheet of misconduct, and the cover up of what seems, to say the least, the creepy, probably criminal, antics of one of its stars is actually a bit beside the point. Although I believe Rupert Murdoch to be a criminal who should himself now be in gaol, his constant criticism of the Corporation was not entirely self-serving. The fact is that from the gold plated hypocrisy of its expense accounts culture to the naked bias of its news programmes, the BBC has moved a long way from the trusted, Reithian ethos that prevailed even up to a couple of de...

Viewed from the perspective of the Euro's newest member state, the British political and media narrative still seems completely off the point with regard to the single currency. To reiterate: this is not a currency crisis, it is a debt crisis. The majority of the members of the Euro zone have controlled their deficits and are retrenching their debts. It is where deficits are not being controlled- in Greece and in the Latin bloc that the crisis has its centre. There are two sources of deficit pressure: one is fiscal incontinence, that is to say that the structure of debt is wrong or as the result of welfare or other general calls on the public purse government expenses are not being controlled versus government income. The second is the need to recapitalize the banking systems following a largely property inspired meltdown. The scale of the recapitalization is so large, because governments have undertaken not merely to compensate depositors, but all those, including bond holders...

Private Eye is well known as a satirical magazine, equally well known is their detestation of the pudgy former editor of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan. Morgan, for all his later appearances on television, is a pretty discount celebrity. He was, after all, heavily implicated in the " City Slickers " scandal at the Mirror. Although he was able to escape gaol at that time, he was not able to prevent his reputation being permanently tarnished. As a result- and rightly- ever since, he has been a figure of ridicule and contempt, at least on the pages of Private Eye. His turn as a judge on "talent" contest has been followed by another as an interviewer for CNN. always though, the results of his highly questionable activity as a British newspaper editor have been out there, waiting to trip him up. His testimony to the Leveson inquiry  was as mendacious and partial as we have come to expect from  this pustulous figure. Essentially he gave evasive half truths ( =whole l...

In the current blitz of publicity I am not sure I should say that I have met Adam Werritty a few times, and the Defence Secretary a few less, usually on pleasantly social terms. The stories that the press are running today bear no resemblance to anything that I could recognize. They are certainly not gay- so far as I can tell- and I think the innuendo is childish and rather unpleasant.     Neither are they crooks. Adam Werritty is not some Svengali making millions out of his connections: far from it. It seems to me that out of principle, he refused to go on the government payroll as a special adviser, even though, for several years (as the world now knows) Adam was Liam Fox's SpAd. So, Defence contractors spoke to Adam Werrity? He is the Defence minister's closest adviser. Is that what people hate?  That Mr. Werritty would not sign up for the SpAd junketing?  I can see that they should have signed up for more government oversight, but this press witch hunt...

As a relatively small hurricane moves the east coast of the United States in a relatively rare direct hit, can really be the only one to regard the media coverage as ludicrous? Every trite cliche, every slick and empty phrase has been trotted out in support of the IMPORTANCE OF THE STORY, and for a day or two it will doubtless be a nuisance to my friends on the East Coast. It is not, however, the end of the world if New York experiences a bit of sea flooding- and the City and indeed the country are well prepared: Hurricane Katrina, this ain't. So why treat it as though it is? This is news as a horror show. This is news as "entertainment". It shows the media at its most base, most trivial, and most dangerous. The great pictures and the potential for nasties justifies the massive editorial commitment to the story, even if -as we hope, and as seems likely- it turns into a pretty minor event. Such editorializing should remind us of the essentially tabloid natur...

OK, so Osama is now officially a stiff, although it turns out that his influence was waning anyway. It should not take away from the skills of the Americans who raided the Bin Laden compound and finally laid the ghost that has haunted the United States for over a decade. It should also not take away from the steely-eyed way that President Obama faced his country's national nightmare. One more thing we now know: it is probably a very bad idea to play the President at poker. Yet I can not be the only one who finds the descent of the media onto the smoking ruins in Abbottabad to be pretty disgusting. The place is now a sea of OB trucks, helicopters and well coiffured but mostly ignorant journalists glibly informing us that a few days ago something dramatic happened in the background behind them. The slightest detail is not too small to be turned into a story before said coiffured journo returns to his or her five star hotel in Islamabad and thence via a premium ticket to the first wo...

As I was coming through Heathrow yesterday, it was hard to avoid the blizzard of ink yet again being focussed on Nick Clegg. This time, apparently, he was being put in the stocks because he has spoken out against the idea that so many middle class kids get ahead because their parents can sponsor them through an unpaid internship in one of the professions. What's so shocking? Well, apparently- get this- Nick Clegg too benefited from taking an unpaid internship. Cue a football crowd level of abuse for Clegg's so-called hypocrisy. Of course you would never find nepotism, favouritism and indeed unpaid internships in the media. Well, apart from the large number of people in television with rather familiar names, from Dimbleby to Cellan Jones; apart from so many journalists being called Lawson or Coren; apart from so many people in the media having been to the same schools. The fact is that the most arcane Spanish practices are found in media and journalism- a group of people so narr...

The political discourse of Britain has become gloomy of late. Rational assessments of the position of the country are being drowned in a flood of negativity and invective. Perhaps it is particularly bad at the moment, as we see the bad news from Japan and Libya filling our screens, but I don't really think so. The fact is that the Brits seem to have become more than a little Eeyore-ish in recent years. For example, despite the clear success of the construction work on the Olympic park, were are encouraged to complain that the games will crowd out London, that things won't be that good and so on. In fact London seems set to give a games that will have a lot more heart than the vainglorious Beijing Olympics, and a lot more commercial nous than the incomplete Athens Olympics. Britain is not a failing country- it is a modern and successful country, for all the various problems that we face. Yet, of course there is the terrible word "still", as in Britain can "still...

I have blogged on the subject of Earthquakes a few times over the years, the last time was during the General election last year. The fact is that several major cities: San Francisco, Istanbul and of course Tokyo, stand in areas of occasionally severe seismic activity. In fact the earthquake that hit Japan was not the one that they expected: along the Kanto fault beneath the City of Tokyo itself, but rather along the plate boundary, somewhat out to sea from the Japanese archipelago. Nevertheless the 'quake when it hit was huge: probably the largest in recorded Japanese history, a possible 9.0 on the Richter scale. As I feared in May, the devastation- largely caused by the tsunami that followed the earthquake itself- has indeed dominated the news agenda. In fact the wall-to-wall coverage of dramatic footage: the quake, the tsunami, the aftermath, and now the explosions at the nuclear stations that have been wrecked by the catastrophe has formed a weird kind of disaster porn. It is ...

The dead tree press seems to devote a remarkably large amount of space to the opinions of the conceited. Some proclaim their conceit with wit: Julie Birchill for example; some with noxious venom: Jan Moir; yet others are not only conceited but also ignorant and just plain dull: step forward Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph. Today's hurricane of bombastic ignorance covers a detailed and complicated subject that Mr. Heffer knows nothing about, namely high speed rail. In Mr. Heffer's world ignorance of a subject does not preclude having the most forthright and determined opinions. So, despite having no understanding of the economics or the engineering of transport, he is able to share with his readers his clear view that a high speed line in the UK is "pointless folly". I have no clear idea as to whether or how a high speed rail network in the UK makes sense, but I am equally sure that Mr. Heffer has the same or less knowledge of the subject as I do. I am prepared to...

Blogging has been even thinner than usual: despite much to write about, I have found so little time. Fittingly, perhaps, I choose to break my silence by focussing on time, or rather time zones. Since daylight saving was first adopted in the UK in 1917 (interestingly, one year after Germany had already done so), there have been various attempts to get the best use out of daylight. During the Second World War there was even "Double Summer time", while in the late 1960s I can remember that clocks stayed on GMT+1 all year for several years. In short there is nothing ordained about the time zone in the UK. In recent years however, the UK has settled on GMT in the winter and "British Summer Time (BST)", i.e. GMT+1 in the summer. There are pros and cons about reverting to GMT for the winter- it does allow more daylight in the morning hours, but of course this is at the cost of an earlier dusk. For school sports, such an arrangement is not ideal, and in any event in the far...

I have known David Laws vaguely for several years. He has total integrity. He gave up a burgeoning career in finance because he had "already made enough money". For several years he worked for essentially no money to help craft a set of economically coherent policies for the Liberal Democrats. He has a forensic intelligence- a deeply impressive understanding of economic and financial context. He is a genuine star in a field where mediocrities are more usually the norm. In the first few days of the new coalition he was already establishing himself as a key figure at the very heart of government, and was becoming not just respected but popular on both sides of the government. David has always been intensely private about himself. Those who knew him best have generally assumed that he was gay, but if he chose not to discuss his private life then that was entirely his choice. To see the obvious personal distress that he is in as the result of the attacks against him in the press...

Perhaps because Central & Eastern Europe is a relatively obscure topic, I often find myself asked to comment on events by different television channels. It is an interesting contrast. For example, Bloomberg television is very high-tech, CNN far less so, while BBC Television is positively spartan, not even having a "green room" where one can wait before being interviewed. Over the past few days the events in Dubai have caused the global markets to examine the finances of Greece and Hungary. As a result I have been called by several media outlets. Yesterday I did the early morning slot for BBC TV news. This morning I was called in to talk to the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. "Today" does have a green room, and given that it is radio, one can take notes into the studio- as a couple of fellow guests did. The green room even has breakfast, including yogurt and toast- a distinct improvement on the simple dab of make up powder that television provided yesterday. It w...

From time to time I appear on various television programmes being interviewed about Central and Eastern European business issues. Usually it is Bloomberg TV, sometimes CNBC or CNN or, as today, on the BBC. Being a "talking head" is a rather odd existence. Usually you only have about three minutes to try to convey often very complicated issues to a journalist who may still be struggling to understand how to pronounce people's names, never mind understand how they fit into the bigger picture. It is something of an art and rather tricky to maintain fluency when it is important to be as clear as possible. Nevertheless I quite enjoy the challenge. In fact I appear regularly enough to have started to play little games. One is to incorporate an unlikely word suggested by someone else into the interview. I think my favourite was "crepuscular", although this morning I also managed "precipitation" - some harmless fun and it brightens my approach to what even I w...

A pot of green slime was being scooped up tonight after it was covered in Peter Mandelson. A spokesman for the slime said that, although naturally shaken by being forced to come into contact with something so unpleasant, the slime was determined to return to normal as quickly as possible. "It all happened so quickly" said the slime, 55. "One minute I was gently fermenting and bubbling methane, the next I was having to deal with the unpleasant aftershave of the notorious Mandelson. I mean, it's not as if you know where he has been- it could have been very dangerous". The Spokesman added that despite its unsightly appearance, the Mandelson had been tested and found to have been only slightly toxic. "At no time was the slime in genuine danger, however unsightly the Mandelson might have been". The slime was praised by a blue-green algae "It is astonishing how calm the slime has been, when you consider that the Mandelson could have been anywhere, and t...