Gordon Brown in a nutshell

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The Bagehot column in the Economist gets it about right:

It is true, or seems to be, that Mr Brown is maniacally ambitious but politically timid. He is intellectually curious but cripplingly indecisive. Witness the barrage of procrastinating policy reviews that he unleashes in every speech; unsurprisingly, more were set up this week, after the tragicomic loss of two doomsday discs by the revenue and customs service (HMRC). It is true, as the uncharitable gave warning, that Mr Brown copes badly with criticism—so badly, it turns out, that he sometimes shakes with pain and rage. He appoints supposedly independent ministers, then bullies them into line-toeing submission. He shies from blame when it is due and sucks up credit when it is not.

Unfortunately, the gristle and the guts—the ugly secrets of the Brown abattoir—have been gruesomely displayed for all to see. During the non-election fiasco in October, the country witnessed the low political calculation and fake ecumenicism, the shallow bombast and obfuscation, the indecision and ultimately the cowardice. In the first days of the Northern Rock crisis, it saw—or rather didn’t see—Mr Brown hide behind the sofa that he kept in Number 10 when Tony Blair left, just as he kept the uncollegial approach to government associated with it. Those who thought he could shuffle off his old skin when he realised his prime-ministerial dream, or at least that his psychological tics would not warp his tenure, seem to have been wrong. For Mr Brown, perhaps personality is destiny after all.

Pollution 2.0

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MapEcos is very interesting — an application that superimposes location and emission data on Google maps. Go to a location and see where the local polluters are. Click on one of them and up pops date from the EPA database.

It works only for the US at present, but it’s a really neat application of Web 2.0 tools.

The BBC iPlayer shambles

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Cory Doctorow isn’t impressed…

In a recent podcast, Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology for the BBC, remarked on the difficulty of creating an “open source Digital Rights Management system”. This is a system of software locks that prevents unauthorised copying, while still being “open” in the sense of allowing users the freedom to take it apart, understand it and improve upon it.

Highfield is right: you can’t make a free and open DRM system. That’s because DRMs (which some like to call “Digital Restrictions Management”) treat their users as untrusted parties who have to be policed lest they transgress and make naughty copies. DRMs are designed to resist user modification and “tampering” because users might just open them up and remove the prohibitions they impose. For example, the BBC’s iPlayer DRM prevents you from watching a show more than 28 days after you downloaded it. By contrast, shows that you record on your VCR or PC can be watched forever…

Recession ahead, drive carefully

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From today’s Telegraph…

Forget inflation and the manufacturing figures. Stop looking at the latest existing home sales figures or the data on non-farm payrolls. One of the most accurate indicators of an imminent recession is in and Americans should start tightening their belts.

Winnebago, maker of the famous recreational vehicles, expects its first drop in sales in six years

Winnebago, the makers of the famous recreational vehicles so prominent on the highways of the US, is expected to post a decline in sales this year for the first time in six years. Buying a motor home is seen as the ultimate discretionary item, and over the past three decades, declines have always heralded a rapid slowdown in the US economy.

“Recreational vehicles are at the swing end of discretionary spending because no-one needs an RV, and certainly no-one needs a new RV,” said fund manager Ron Muhlenkamp, who began selling Winnebago shares last year.

As the US housing slump continues, petrol prices head above $3-a-gallon once more and consumer confidence takes a nosedive, sales of motor homes, along with other typical discretionary items such as Harley Davidson motorcycles and plastic surgery, are forecast to fall…

Helpful information: The model shown is a 2008 Damon Tuscany 4055. Yours for $231,070 on the road. Cash in that sub-prime mortgage now.

The smell of burning toast

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The latest Brown cock-up du jour is a gift to right-wing nutters like Simon Heffer. Here he is, this morning, in full spate:

Some of us remember not merely the submersion of the Major government under its tide of lies, peculation, rent-boys and mistresses, but also the Poulson affair of the early 1970s. That, too, like this present funding crisis and the Northern Rock debacle, had its roots in the North East, which since then has become the heartland of Labour’s client state. Poulson and his comrade-in-arms T Dan Smith bribed local councillors and officials to get lucrative building contracts. I am sure that this sort of thing has no bearing on the business interests of the real donor of £558,000 to the Labour Party, said to be David Abrahams, alias David Martin, aged 53/63? What are we to make of the decision by the Highways Agency at a time when the Transport Department was run by Mr Brown’s blue-eyed boy, Douglas Alexander, to waive objections to a development scheme that stood to earn Mr Abrahams/Martin £60 million?

It might seem that Labour has netted a one per cent rake-off of Mr Abrahams’/Martin’s earnings on this scheme. I am sure that this couldn’t be true. But it smells to high heaven, does it not? What is Mr Abrahams’/Martin’s link to Harriet Harman? Why did he feel he had to fund her successful deputy leadership campaign surreptitiously? Is it at all a coincidence that her husband, Jack Dromey, is the party’s treasurer? Is her position compromised by this association with a man with interchangeable names, who uses others to shell out huge amounts of money on his behalf, who was deselected when he stood as a Labour candidate because he invented a wife and child, and who appears not even to have a fixed date of birth? Is that the sort of man Mr Brown wants funding Labour, or his deputy leader wants funding her? Is this the sleaze-free, whiter-than-white image that Labour smugly boasted would prevail once the wicked, venal Tories were ousted? Is that a pig I just saw flying past the window?

Tut, tut. He was doing ok until that last sentence. One mustn’t over-egg literary puddings.

What’s interesting, though, is how bad Brown is at handling this stuff compared to Blair.