In a recent Guardian article, Simon Jenkins hit the nail on its proverbial head when he argued that the coalition's austere economic policy was actually attempting to usher in a revolution in political culture. This is the end of the politics of expectation: recognition that high growth rates, increasing incomes and enhanced quality of life are not a national right. The truth, however, when frankly confronted, is not that a round of communal belt-tightening is required, but that the UK needs to buy a new pair of trousers. But perhaps the general public, and certainly the media, have not yet acclimatised to the grim realities of post (should that be pre?)-crash life. When Cameron recently indicated that public spending would not be adjusted back to previous levels after the deficit had been tackled, there was outrage from even moderate parts of the Left. The truth, however, when frankly confronted, is not that a round of communal belt-tightening is required, but that the UK needs to ...

These days leadership is a big business. Familiarise yourself (if you don’t already mentally edit your C.V. during intercourse and practice your sneer in the mirror every morning) with any of the corporate paraphernalia distributed to undergraduates and you can’t avoid the idiom. For example, on page nine of Citibank’s 2009 recruitment brochure, the text smugly states: ‘at Citi, we create leaders,’ right next to the image of a pinstriped man shitting on some starving sub-Saharan children. [Not true - ed.] In his book, The Junior Officer’s Reading Club , Patrick Hennessey describes how Sandhurst currently markets itself as the ‘greatest leadership course in the world,’ which must strike fear into the hearts of Iranians. Our generation is constantly being hectored by politicians that we represent ‘the leaders of tomorrow.’ This gives me heart as I wolf down my line of methadrone while nonchalantly uploading sex tapes of my ex-girlfriend onto the internet. In politic ...

There was no rolling 24 hr news coverage, no saccharine-drenched rock concert memorials, no morbid fascination with the state of his psychological or physical health. Grieving relatives avoided the unwelcome interest of tabloid reporters and modern-day tricoteuses. Robert McNamara’s death was greeted with a perfunctory nod by the news media, the story digestible for the attention spans of their audience – the ‘news’, after all, was simply the death of a long-gone American politician, who wasn’t even President. Tom Massey writes eloquently about Michael Jackson’s cultural shock factor in the Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. It was through Jackson ‘that people expressed their desire to live as freely as he and his countrymen did.’ Massey broadens the horizons of the cultural inquisition that has appeared in the wake of his death, yet remains part of the same inquisition, seeking to define explicitly the extent of the former pop star’s significance, to extract ...

It has been said that some people in Britain display indifference to the murder of a human being but inflate with righteous indignation at the merest hint of maltreatment to a fluffy rabbit. It should now be said that Britons disdain the policy decisions that will affect their lives and the world in which they inhabit, but revel in mawkish glee in denouncing their politicians’ minor lapses in professional conduct. The media coverage of this month’s expenses row bears more resemblance to the explosion of pornographic and scurrilous literature that prefigured the French revolution than the workings of a mature democracy. The Daily Telegraph has morphed into a self-appointed Robespierre, executing its attacks on leading politicians from all of the main parties with precision timed to cause maximum political decapitations and a logic that conforms only to an enjoyment in the act itself. Politicians themselves have responded to this offensive with a mixture of paralysed fear and hype ...

The long struggle to establish democracy in Latin America reads like a Chaucerian epic: protagonists and storylines change but images and motifs flash up in the most unexpected places, jolting the reader into seeking some profound explanation. On Thursday, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, declared an unconventional war on his recalcitrant legislature by going on hunger strike. The idea is to force the issue of a package of electoral reforms which would give upland indigenous Bolivians, his natural constituency, increased electoral power. Curiously, these unstatesmanlike tactics have a precedent in the region’s politics. In May 1989 the bloodthirsty dictator of Panama, Tony Noriega, voided the results of an election won by opposition parties. Their leader, Guillermo Endara, was beaten up by Noriega’s paramilitaries on his victory parade and a state apparatchik, Francisco Rodriguez, was appointed president. Endara responded by holing himself up in Panama Cit ...

James Macadam is right to point out that climate change campaigners must revise their sanctimonious rhetoric if they want popular appeal in a time of belt-tightening and penny-counting. However, the ill-informed ramblings of climate camp enthusiasts, the footsoldiers of the movement, are relatively harmless. Far more worrying is the language emanating from the government itself, which has taken on dizzying heights of aloofness and abstraction. This week Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, declared that opposing windfarms should become ‘socially irresponsible…like driving through a zebra crossing or not wearing a seatbelt.’ A cabinet minister was not only dismissing the well-evidenced and widely-supported arguments against wind farms as one would a 14th century astrological treatise, he was denying that any debate at all over this issue was legitimate. This stance is extraordinary. Firstly, the reasons to oppose windfarms are numerous and compelling. They are inefficient ...

‘This place is shit.’ I had been talking to Mirad for all of thirty seconds before he felt obliged to preface my stay in Bosnia with this cautious disclaimer. ‘I want to get out of here as fast as possible. There’s nothing but shit for me here.’ After the Adriatic warmth of Croatia the night air was cool and alpine in Mostar, formerly the second biggest tourist destination in Tito’s Yugoslavia, as we walked from the bus station to his parent’s cottage. Mirad had been working in a bar in Amsterdam over the summer and had returned for a few months to help run his brother’s hostelry, but, he assured me, repeating his pithy assessment, his stay would be temporary. The opinion was hardly startling in itself – it is possible to hear it across what has been dubbed, in an inaccurate epithet, ‘New Europe,’ by bullish young small-towners dreaming of Western social security and minimum wages. But Mirad’s forceful and unprompted candour was startling. Mirad’s overrid ...

In 1998 Alfonso Lopez was selected by then Colombian President Andres Pastrana to act as a negotiator for peace talks between the government and the insurrectionary guerrilla force FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). The stated intention of this peace process was to end the FARC’s four decade long war against the Colombian state, predicated on the establishment of a Marxist revolutionary government. It was prompted by the guerrilla’s growing strength, whose numbers counted in the tens of thousands, almost all of whom were recruited from the southern rural poor, and the near total breakdown of law and order in the country that saw Colombia with the highest police mortality rate in the world. In May last year, the Colombian government reported the death of Pedro Antonio Marin, more commonly known as Marulanda, or by his nickname ‘Tirofijo,’ - ‘sureshot’, FARC’s military leader and spiritual figurehead. This came as a series of successes against the guerr ...

In every conflict rhetoric and supposition shapes argument and fact seems to become fluid, or in many cases gets twisted beyond all recognition as both sides lay claim to the high ground, whether moral or on the battlefield. This is not just a problem confined to the spokesmen or state-owned media of banana republics. In 2003 we laughed heartily at Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, for his endearingly absurd breakdowns of Saddam's war effort as American tanks trundled in the background, but we might have remembered that the American government had used the equally ludicrous assertion that the dictator was harbouring Al Qaeda as one of its casus belli. Leo Davidson is right to suggest that 'people tend to hold onto dogmatic beliefs with outstanding tenacity on this subject like no other.' For a good example read Elizabeth Wurtzel's particularly misinformed tirade. But the salient point about the current Gaza crisis is that there is a perfectly rational positi ...

Barack Obama has not taken long to disappoint. With a vacuum of world leadership over the tragedy in Gaza and a nauseating deference being displayed by the outgoing administration to Israel, the time was perfect for Obama to start the change in American politics he had so long and robustly advertised. The Israeli government, determined to take the pulse of the new administration, was listening intently to the transitional offices in Chicago for word or prayer. They might as well not have bothered. Obama has been as silent as a Trappist monk on the issue and has used his chief of staff David Axelrod to signal where he stands when he blamed rocket attacks from Hamas for the offensive in an interview on the CBS channel - a courteous nod to the Israelis. Indeed, the man who promised to make politics accessible again has diligently joined the ranks of Washington politicians who have chosen to reinvent reality in Palestine for reasons utterly incomprehensible to the ordinary person. It ...

2008 was a good year for news. The credit crunch, which was initially very good bad news because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with human beings, quickly turned sour as collapsing house prices in America and Europe began to feed a nasty recession. By March the American elections had changed into a stage show of such astonishingly high calibre that it maintained the attention of the world for the rest of the year. Meanwhile the two major world conflicts turned corners – in Iraq one of nervous promise, in Afghanistan sadly predictable deterioration that sent the casualty rates of British soldiers in Helmand into ones comparable with the First World War. When the British press were supposed to go on holiday in silly season, the Georgian war appeared seemingly out of nowhere, reminding everybody that the end of the Cold War had not put a stop to Russia’s imperial ambitions. In the same summer, the narrative of China’s rise to superpowerdom, which James Kingston eloquently ...