Fraser Nelson

The UK, land of fantasy
Fantasy politics, it's a very popular thing right now. Both at the EU and domestic level and therein lies the problem, it does have a downside. In the end the fantasy turns to comedy and then to misery. Take the fantasy of the coalition harping on about growth. What does this mean? It's not just the cynical who might say all this will lead to more wind farms and yet more immigration. What can grow? Industrial output is hemmed in by the environmental obsession. Pro-Green means anti-industry if the promoters of the greening are ideologues rather than realists. And they are.

So the de-industrialisation of the UK has to be accepted as a fact. When did it start; who to blame? However, this won't be a fruitful line of inquiry for anyone, least of all any of the post-WW2 governments. For they all, to a greater and lesser degree, made the right noises but all just watched as industry slid down the slippery slope. Not to worry! We have other things to do, alas the other things, what we now call financial services, did not turn out to be a problem free area either. So what happens now?

Well we are at the stage of something must be done, which is always dangerous for the temptation will be to grab at straws. It's no good talking about apprenticeships, that route will take far too long to show results.

Son of the Manse and his thug
There is always a steady stream of criticism directed towards the MSM, not all is deserved. In the past we have praised Fraser Nelson for his work, but his recent article on Damian McBride was terrible. As a spin doctor McBride will always be measured alongside Alistair Campbell, awkward that. For Campbell was a different sort of person doing a different job. The term spin doctor covers just about anything the person using the term would like it to mean. The job of media manipulation goes back at least to Bernard Ingham who helped Margaret Thatcher get her message across. Or at least that is how these things are explained. However, once you start manipulating, stopping is a hard thing to do and it's not just the message that gets distorted. Never once since the days of Ingham/Thatcher (or perhaps the other way around) has anyone in government worked out, then set out for all to see, why these spinners and their craft are needed; that insults the general public.

Fraser Nelson
Journalist Fraser Nelson could well end up Mayor of London, he writes beautifully and is funny too. A man of many skills, he caused havoc for Gordon Brown in the run-up to the General Election. The trick here was to ask serious questions about the economy at press conferences. This spooked Brown who, despite the claim made by his spinners of him being an economics genius, was unable to answer the questions from Nelson, odd that. Brown the economics guru studied history at university and has no formal economics related qualifications. Not that this should have been a bar to Brown becoming Chancellor as Nelson, like Brown studied history. However, it seems that Nelson 'learnt on the job' and so became able to understand economics and produce in depth articles packed with detail and complete with graphs to illustrate his opinion. What a pity Brown could not manage to create for himself the same path to knowledge, never mind, it's all water, and public money, under the bridge now!