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The Sunday review: Paul Ryan

19/08/2012, 07:00:56 AM

by Anthony Painter

What must it be like to be a guy who can only feel he’s succeeded in life if he becomes US President? It is difficult to look at Mitt Romney without posing this question. It is this basic fact that is making his campaign always feel edgy, nervy, gaffe-prone and slightly desperate. It was in sore need of a bit relaxation and that is what the choice of Paul Ryan constitutes – a therapeutic massage. It is a luxury that is unaffordable even for a man as well-heeled as Mitt Romney.

Scanning Mitt Romney’s biography, it is impossible not to be impressed unless one applies some perversely high standard. He was a successful – and moderate – governor of Massachusetts. His business career was, on its own terms, highly successful. He rescued the Salt Lake Olympics. Regardless of his undoubted advantages in life, this is a very impressive curriculum vitae. It earns him the right to considerable respect. For himself, it is nowhere near enough.

Mitt Romney, as is well established, is in the shadow of his father. George Romney, who was certainly seen as a possible contender for a presidential run himself, was a Rockefeller Republican. He walked out of the 1964 Republican Convention in protest at the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, who stood opposed to the Civil Rights Act.

This was the last election before the politics of race swiveled the geography of American electoral politics. Goldwater wanted to hold the south, governor Romney of Michigan, wanted to retain the moderate Republican presence in the industrial north. Goldwater Republicans won the party while being trounced in the election – in part, as a consequence of the division precipitated by Romney’s objection to Goldwater’s approach.

His father’s biography is a lot to live up to. The paradox, however, is that this enormous pressure seems to be taking its toll. In his quest to out-achieve an over-achieving father he seems to be making mistakes. The appointment of Paul Ryan as his running mate falls into this category.

Ryan is no Sarah Palin – far too bright and sophisticated a politician for that – but it is a Sarah Palin-esque decision. Seeking to “game change” more often than not backfires. The point of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book Game Change, however, is that when it comes to vice-presidential picks, the “game changing” option is more often in your opponent’s favour.

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Time to clean up the banking sector in London, New York style

17/08/2012, 07:00:48 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Ben Lawsky. Remember that name. This week he changed how banks and financial institutions across the world will be regulated.

While the UK relies on esteemed commissions like Vickers or waits for its parliamentarians to stroll through detail of the the Libor scandal, the state of New York has re-defined how to regulate.

Lawsky runs the department for financial services. If a financial institution wants to do business in New York, they need a licence from Lawsky.

This week the superintendent – for that is Lawsky’s title – humbled Britain’s mighty Standard Chartered Bank (SCB).

Eleven days ago he issued an order against SCB on its failure to stop money laundering for Iranian organisations. The order was scathing, stating Standard Chartered was “rogue” and was engaged in “dealings that indisputably helped sustain a global threat to peace and stability.”

The bank pushed back strongly, other regulators briefed financial journalists that Lawsky was over playing his hand and even the governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King weighed in, rebuking Lawsky for his precipitate action.

The clue as to what would happen next was in Mervyn King’s intervention. Given his track record on effective banking sector regulation, there was only going to be one outcome.

Earlier this week Standard Chartered settled to the tune of $340m.

It is an enormous win for Lawsky and re-writes the rules for financial regulation in a way that will have major political ramifications in the UK.

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The obituaries are premature. Cameron’s not finished yet

16/08/2012, 02:44:12 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Received opinion, that fluttering butterfly, often dazzles and deceives.

Two bits of conventional wisdom are doing the rounds at the moment; both are hopelessly wrong. The first is a feeling that this government will fall before 2015. The second is a prediction of David Cameron’s early demise.

First the government. A poll in the Guardian the other day shows only 16 per cent of voters expect the coalition to last until May 2015 – just half the 33 per cent who had said the same thing to pollsters ICM two weeks before.

With coalition rows about House of Lords reform and parliamentary boundary changes dominating the airwaves before the summer recess it’s hardly surprising that onlookers question its longevity.

But soundings off from within the government are just that, exuberant rows. No terminal schism is in the offing. There is nowhere for either partner to go. This remains the immutable truth of British politics. Any early collapse of the government would precipitate a general election where both parties would suffer.

The Lib Dems flirt with electoral annihilation and struggle these days to sustain a clear lead over UKIP. They are in no shape to go to the country and need to play for time. What is more, most of the politically painful aspects of the coalition’s programme are now in the past. For Nick Clegg’s troops, things can only get better.

The second fallacy is that David Cameron might not see out his term of office, shaded out by the golden lustre of his Eton contemporary Boris Johnson or knifed by his right wing critics who see his hybrid government as insufficiently Conservative.

A YouGov poll from last weekend shows Labour’s lead at 12 per cent. But when party labels were replaced by party leaders’ names the gap shrunk to six per cent. As John Rentoul at the Independent notes, the most interesting thing about the poll “was how much of an asset David Cameron still is to his party”.

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As party conference season approaches, have these political menageries ever been less relevant?

16/08/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Peter Watt

So the Olympics are over and the Premier League is about to start (apologies to Scots readers, I know that the SPL has already started). We have the fantastic Paralympics to look forward to and possibly even a little bit of late summer sun.

But, for the political world the next few weeks are the calm before the conference season madness begins. Already political obsessives will be beginning to think about their conference itineraries.

The odd invite or two for receptions will have arrived in advance of the tsunami that will hit from early September. Labour colleagues will be secretly smiling at the excitement of the priorities ballot; they will be wondering about this year’s conference slogan and keeping their fingers crossed about the leader’s speech. For what it’s worth I predict that the words “fair” and “future” will feature large.

For activists, attending conference is a mix between a holiday and a religious vocation. Party democracy is revered, the rule book studied, senior politicians are scrutinised and friends socialised with.

Anyone who is anyone makes sure that if they possibly can be there then they are. People who would never normally willingly forego their middle class comforts are suddenly prepared to sleep on floors and worse if it means that they can attend. If you can’t be there then you find yourself guiltily justifying yourself by saying “no, but I will definitely be there next year”.

It costs a fortune in travel, accommodation, food and of course booze. But for a whole week of your life you feel at the centre of the world as the stories that emerge from the conference dominate the news and it’s worth every penny. And you hungrily devour the news morning, noon and night while you’re there to make sure that the hugely important events that you are witnessing are covered fairly.

Which of course they never are; as while the conference that you are attending is always united friendly and optimistic, those rats from the press insist on reporting splits and rancour.

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Three things we learned about Romney when he picked Paul Ryan as his running mate

14/08/2012, 07:00:55 AM

by Nikhil Dyundi

As the immediate buzz around Paul Ryan’s selection subsides the real implications are becoming clear. Suffice to say, they don’t paint a picture of a campaign in rude health. Here are the top three.

1 Romney is still running in the Republican primary

The Ryan pick tells us that Romney is worried about his back.

Neither the Republican elite, as embodied by the Wall Street Journal, nor the tea party base has coalesced around Romney as he would have wanted. Background chatter criticising the campaign and candidate are a constant.

Paul Ryan is the darling of the Republican elite and seen as sufficiently fiscally sound/insane (delete as appropriate) by the base. His choice will firm up these groups’ commitment to the campaign. But this support was meant to be sewn up months ago. At this stage in a presidential contest, the candidate should have swung into the centre, not headed out further into base territory.

By picking Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney is essentially still fighting the Republican primary and just permanently ceded large tracts of the centre ground to team Obama.

2 The current campaign narrative is killing Romney and he is trying to change the conversation

So far the campaign has been defined by two questions: Did Bain destroy American jobs and businesses while Romney ran the show? And, has Mitt Romney paid any taxes, ever?

The facts have been against Romney on Bain. Despite his protests that he left the company in 1999, before they really amped up their mania for outsourcing, documents filed with the financial authorities have one Mitt Romney as the CEO and chair till 2002.

On tax, Romney has signed a blank cheque for the Democrats by refusing to release past tax returns. Whatever the Dems say about Romney, he will not release the evidence to contradict it. Which naturally leads most to think he really must have something awful to hide.

Picking Ryan is a bold enough play to shift the conversation.

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Making Bristol a world class city

13/08/2012, 01:20:54 PM

by Amanda Ramsay

What makes a world-class city? That’s the question on Marvin Rees’ mind right now. Labour’s candidate to be Bristol’s first directly elected mayor, set out his vision to a group of business people and local experts from across Bristol last Thursday, at an event on the Bristol economy chaired by shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna.

Rees wants to see Bristol become “a world-class city”, he told the roundtable last week, the culmination of an illuminating set of events as part of the City Conversation – the Bristol-wide policy consultation being held by Rees.

With the national economy officially flat-lining, after the Bank of England revised down its growth forecast to 0% and the latest trade figures last week show the worst trade deficit since records began in 1997, how to kick-start the local economy was a key topic for discussion.

Umunna pledged that an incoming Labour government would set up a British Investment Bank (BIB) to widen the availability of credit to small firms.

It would be an extension of the recently-launched Green Investment Bank and fill the gap left by the main UK banks. Local branches, with managers in tune with the needs of local businesses, would strengthen local economies.

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Sorry Tessa, there’s no justification for spending more on elite sport

10/08/2012, 07:00:03 AM

by Kevin Meagher

The Olympics provides us with an interesting quandary. Is spending money on our top athletes really a good return for the country?

Tessa Jowell thinks it is. Yesterday she echoed an appeal by Olympic gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy who wants to see continued investment in elite sports.

“Chris Hoy is absolutely right” she said. “It has been the investment in elite training which has created stability for high performance training for those athletes. We have got to make sure that money continues.”

On its website UK Sport says “more than £100 million per annum is being invested directly into the UK’s high performance system’ through a combination of ‘Exchequer and National Lottery funds”.

A further £58 million is spent on “providers of the key services” that underpin elite sports while the “Team 2012” scheme tries to lever-in private funding.

It would be churlish not to concede that Tessa and Sir Chris are right in their analysis: investment in sporting infrastructure and elite programmes has clearly helped Britain to a medal tally few thought likely a fortnight ago.

But apart from the athletes themselves and a small supply chain of trainers and managers, who else benefits from this taxpayer-funded largesse? What’s the return for the county?

I let that theoretical question hang there for a moment because I honestly can’t think what it is. We may all celebrate the achievements of British Olympians and readily pay tribute to their industry and example; but outside the Olympic bubble we continue to face the biggest retrenchment in public spending in a century and an economy in the deep freeze.

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All parties are responsible for the disgrace of Winterbourne View

09/08/2012, 07:00:48 AM

by Peter Watt

Sometimes you read something so depressing and so disheartening that it ruins your day. I have just had that experience as I read the report from South Gloucestershire Safeguarding Adults Board into the appalling events that took place at Winterbourne View hospital.

You will remember the case; Winterbourne View was a hospital based in Bristol for adults with learning disabilities and autism. A BBC Panorama undercover journalist secured a job there following a whistle-blower contacting them with concerns about the abuse of patients. The resulting programme shocked all who saw it and has resulted in eleven former workers pleading guilty to almost 40 charges of abuse and Winterbourne View, owned by Castlebeck Ltd, being closed.

I should declare an interest here. Two of my children have special needs and may very well need some form of supervised accommodation as adults. I also have a brother in his early thirties who is in a smallish supervised accommodation unit. Worrying about what happens when they are older and you aren’t there to protect them is something that all parents worry about. To be honest, as a parent of children with special needs, the fear is debilitating.

Reading the report into events at Winterbourne View is like reading an account of some of my very worst nightmares.

Remember that we are talking about some of our most vulnerable fellow human beings here who are least able to defend themselves. The quality of their lives really is in the hands of those entrusted with their care; if bad things happen when noone else is looking then nobody may ever know.

And at Winterbourne View there was certainly abuse (I personally would call it torture) with patients being humiliated, physically restrained, covered in cold water and left outside, hurt and over-prescribed sedatives.

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Standard Chartered: these are the real ills of modern banking

08/08/2012, 12:31:21 PM

by Rob Marchant

Banks, eh? On the British left, we’re often so busy disliking them in general that we don’t always take the time to differentiate between their misdemeanours.

While we’ve been exercising ourselves greatly about irresponsible bankers who have largely been operating within the rules – and where arguably we ought to be looking first to governments, for not having done their jobs in regulating them properly – we miss something else.

And so, much less attention has gone, until recently, on a much more serious problem: those who actively flout the rules. In particular, the illegal transfer and laundering of money.

On Monday the stock of Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), one of Britain’s oldest banking institutions, dive-bombed as it was accused of sanctions-busting with Iran. Accused, because the bank currently denies this. We shall see. If true, it is a sad and ironic tale, which I can perhaps help explain, because I used to work there.

SCB has been, in fact, a real British success story, formed from the merger of two old colonial banks in 1969, although its success was largely due to seeking its fortune in Asia. Although not so well-known to the British public, in Hong Kong and Singapore it is as much a high-street bank as NatWest is in the UK. And although it still keeps its legal HQ in London for regulatory – and perhaps historic – reasons, its real revenue and headcount is in these Asian hubs, as well as, more recently, China and India.

It’s an interesting place to work, because it has a culture which is international, and yet unlike many multi-nationals, not particularly American (its New York branch is actually quite small). Indeed, although it has modernised, and “Asianised”, its corporate culture since the stuffy 1960s, it might also be viewed as a microcosm of what multinationals might look like, had the sun not set on the British Empire during the 20th century: a British-Asian fusion, a latter-day East India Company.

For all these reasons, it surprises me not a jot that one of its British execs might utter the words “You f—ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?”

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The conventional wisdom is wrong: David Cameron and Nick Clegg are now bound even more tightly together

07/08/2012, 09:00:17 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Another pained press conference from Nick Clegg, another central plank of the Lib Dem’s beloved constitutional reform agenda disappears for a generation.

So farewell then Lords reform, we’ll see you in twenty-five years when all of the politicians who have witnessed first-hand the Lib Dem’s failure on the Lords and electoral reform, have passed from this parliamentary coil.

But, all this was known the moment 91 Tory backbenchers decided to use the Lords as an excuse to attack their leader. The votes weren’t there. The real news from Clegg’s study in sanctimonious defeat yesterday was confirmation of the tit for tat blocking of the Tories’ boundary review.

According to Lib Dem sources, Clegg attempted to mount a damage containment exercise when the extent of the Tory rebellion became obvious, sounding out MPs about the prospect of not vetoing the new boundaries.

As frustrated as Clegg was by the Tories, he privately accepted the position in which David Cameron has found himself. It’s a position Clegg empathises with and experiences himself with his own backbenches.

But the Lib Dem leader had to accept political reality. For all the fanciful recent talk of Vince Cable as a future leader of the party, the message went back to the Lib Dem leadership that there really might be regime change if Clegg did not strike back at the Tories.

The immediate reaction to this spat among much of the commentariat is to conclude that the coalition is headed for the rocks.

Certainly the massed off-the-record ranks of Tory backbenchers have done their bit to promote this notion with blood curdling talk of revenge on Clegg for the boundary betrayal.

But the reality is that the leaders of the Tories and Lib Dems are now bound even more tightly together. Assuming the projections of Tory advantage from the boundary review are correct, then David Cameron will need his Lib Dem coalition partners all the more if he is to stay in office after the next election.

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