Six things I liked about Oslo (and one thing I didn’t)

I spent Easter weekend in Oslo, the capital of Norway. Norway is an interesting country – tiny in population terms, but very wealthy due to its oil production. It is also not a member of the European Union, though it is in the European Economic Area, meaning that it has to comply with EU legislation in order to access the single market, but has no input into the formation of that legislation through the parliament or commission.

Oslo is a delightful city, and exactly what one would expect of Scandinavia. Being Easter weekend it was fairly quiet, and also rather cold, particularly in a morning.

Anyway, here are some things I particularly liked:

1) Norwegians – Scandinavians generally are pretty grounded, rational sensible people, and that’s certainly true of Norwegians. Part of that surely has to do with the economic security provided by having the third-highest GDP per capita in the world. But it is also a northern-European trait which I think we share. The standard of English spoken by Norwegians is excellent – indeed on many occasions it I thought I was talking to an American but was actually talking to an Osloite (I would imagine that has something to do with the pervasiveness of US TV shows).

2) Frogner Park – the park is located in the suburban west of the city, and houses the Vigeland Sculpture Arrangement, a selection of works by Gustav Vigeland. He specialised in nude portraits in some rather interesting positions, and the centrepiece of his work is a tower of intertwined nude statues (see picture) which takes pride of place in the park. The Vigeland Museum, located just outside the park, is well worth a visit.

3) The museums - Oslo has a ton of museums, with everything from Viking ships to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The city provides something called the Oslo Pass, which enables free or reduced-price entry to many of the museums, as well as free use of all the public transport (see below). Well worth it.

4) The public transport – as befits the capital of a wealthy nation, the transport infrastructure is impressive. It is also pretty cheap, which is not something that can be said of everything in Oslo – a 24hr pass for all the forms of transport (bus, tram and underground) costs 80 kroner, about £10.

5) The coffee and cakes – Norwegians, apparently, drink more coffee per person than any other nation on earth. That is probably true in volume terms (given the tendency of southern Europeans to drink short coffees – espresso, ristretto – and the northern preference towards longer drinks). Norwegians like their coffee hot, black, strong and long. They accompany it with bolle, small sweet bread cakes. My favourite (pictured) was the iced cinnamon version. No visit to Oslo is complete without at least three visits to United Bakeries, a chain found all over the city. There’s a nice one near Frogner Park (see above).

6) Frognerseteren – anyone who has spent any time in London is used to unusual sites on the tube. But you don’t often see fully clad skiers, carrying their skis, on London’s public transport. You do in Oslo, thanks to the skiing available just 30 minutes or so away in Frognerseteren. Even for non-skiiers like me the journey by T-bane is worth making. There are some stunning views down over the city (see picture) and some restorative apple cake (and more coffee) to enjoy at the Frognerseteren Restaurant. You can jump off and visit the Olympic ski-jump en route.

So, a lot to like about Oslo. When I go back I will definitely do the journey from Oslo to Bergen by train, which is supposed to be spectacular. As it was I couldn’t fit it into my schedule – it takes 7 hours each way.

There was one thing, though, that I particularly did not like about Oslo, and that was the number of people sleeping rough – Norway in winter is not a place one would want to be homeless. But one couldn’t walk down a street in central Oslo without being asked for money, usually several times. For one of the world’s richest countries, and one with a left-leaning population and a social democrat government, I found this surprising and depressing. If Norway doesn’t have the resources to solve this problem, then nowhere does.

Call for 100% tax on lecturing, illiberal doctors

Campaigners have today called for a 100% tax on the nonsense spouted by lecturing doctors calling for illiberal, regressive taxes to tackle just about every problem the country faces.

The call comes after a spate of examples of medics forgetting that their job is to treat patients  rather than produce seemingly identical reports suggesting new taxes to solve the various crises that they believe society faces.

In a statement, the Royal College of Letting People Get on With Their Own Lives said:

The endemic condition of doctors not being able to propose solutions to problems that don’t involve the state dictating how people should live their lives by making food, drink, cigarettes and, well, just about everything more expensive is a serious risk to the public’s mental wellbeing.

We therefore propose that each time a doctor decides it is their role force people to pay more for the products they buy they should pay everything they earn in a special “illiberalism tax”.

It is estimated that the tax could either raise approximately £3000 bn in additional revenues, to be used to reimburse people for the amounts of extra tax they have paid as a result of whinging doctors over many years. Alternatively, the tax may free up so much time amongst doctors that GP appointments may be extended by 10%, to an average of 98 seconds.

Obama calls for US-EU trade deal

Here’s what the President had to say on the matter in his state of the union address last night:

And tonight, I’m announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union — because trade that is fair and free across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.

Court of Appeal praises government’s back-to-work programmes

There’s a headline you won’t read in many other places today. But in the pieces you do read on the Court of Appeal’s ruling on the government’s back-to-work programmes, a good test of the author’s approach to journalism is to see whether they make reference to the following passages of the judgment. First it’s a good indication of whether or not they have actually read the judgment, and secondly if they have read the judgment whether they believe in reporting court decisions in a balanced way.

Here’s what Lord Justice Pill had to say towards the end of his judgment:

49. I readily appreciate the need for flexibility in devising arrangements which will achieve the statutory purpose of improving prospects of obtaining employment. The needs of jobseekers will vary infinitely as will the requirements of providers prepared to participate in arrangements with them. I am impressed with the care shown in attempting to devise arrangements and with the resources devoted to attempts to achieve the statutory purpose. There is an important public interest in getting people back to work as well as a major saving in not having to pay Jobseeker’s Allowance, and possibly other benefits.

50. I also appreciate that there could be a substantial saving of public money if effective sanctions are available when jobseekers are not cooperating with proposals properly put to them under the Act. The Secretary of State’s object in these proceedings is not to end Jobseeker’s Allowance but to ensure that it is only paid to those actively seeking employment and prepared to cooperate with attempts made by the state to achieve that end. The entitlement to receive the weekly sum should depend on such cooperation. 

 

Why Deborah Orr is (mainly) wrong

Slightly curious piece by Deborah Orr in the Guardian today.

If I had to sum up her thesis in a sentence it’d be this: the Lib Dems should stop banging on about raising the threshold and taxing the wealthy and instead argue the merits of the “granny tax” and creating a “cliff-edge” where family tax credits are withdrawn.

That’s a slight caricature, of course, but I think it’s broadly accurate.

A couple of points. Yes, the abolition of age-related income tax allowances is a good idea and well overdue. But first it was the Tories who wanted to do it (the Lib Dems wanted instead to limit the tax reliefs higher earners receive on their pension contributions). And secondly on what possible basis does Orr think that claiming credit for this, instead of the raising of the personal allowance for millions of low earners, would benefit the Lib Dems politically?

The things the Lib Dems actually did achieve in the budget were the raising of the personal allowance and the increases in taxes on the wealthy, both of which are long-standing policy priorities. How would it be at all beneficial to stop talking about those and start claiming credit for much less popular things?

But there is another, more ephemeral, point in Orr’s article which is unfortunately slightly lost beneath the rather bizarre arguments I have just discussed. It’s probably best summed up in her final paragraph, which as far as I can see bears little relation to the rest of the article:

The Lib Dems have got a little wiser since the early days, when they were forever on the stump, disingenuously flogging Conservative policies and looking shocked because no one was thanking them for their trouble. But not much wiser. They are still nakedly thrilled that they got to hang out with the big boys at all. This only serves to emphasise what little boys they are themselves.

There is, I think, some truth in that. The Lib Dems in government have been naive. George Osborne, master strategist that he is, constantly has an eye on the effect of government policy on his party and its electoral prospects. The Lib Dems have been less focussed on that and more focussed – admirably one might say – on ensuring that the coalition not only survives but prospers.

I think the point is that we can do both. The difficulty, though, is that’s quite a difficult job for Nick Clegg to do. Governing is tough enough. Perhaps Clegg, then, needs to find his own Osborne; someone who unashamedly keeps an eye on the strategy, on the raw politics. The Tories are better at it than us – they’ve had more practice. But we’ve been in government for nearly two years now, and we should be doing better.

UKIP MEP’s EU falsehoods condemned as damaging to small businesses and the economy

Late last year, UKIP MEP Paul Nuttall made some small waves (eg here) with a press release about an “outrageous” EU directive that requires small businesses to pay €25,000 to set up. The problem is that it is complete and utter nonsense.

The Directive in question has been in place for over 30 years and only applies to publicly traded companies – hardly your average small business.

When contacted by North West Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies, here’s what the Federation of Small Businesses had to say on UKIP’s blatant scaremongering:

It is clear that this directive only applies to PLCs and not to limited companies..

Nowadays it is hard enough for small businesses to start up and survive without knocking confidence further.  Publishing the wrong information is severely discouraging small businesses, especially start-ups.  While this deters the individual business, spreading false information could damage the recovery of our economy as a whole.

Indeed.

On tie knots and continuity

Nice windsor, Mr Bond - but for how long...?

Continuity in television and film is absolutely vital, not to please the people who watch things just to spot the errors, but because attention to detail is a prerequisite to a film or programme being as enjoyable as it possibly can be. A great plot, compelling characters, the newest technology do not make a good film unless the details – however subtle – are spot on.

Film and television programme makers know this, of course, which is why people are employed specifically for the task of ensuring ‘continuity’ – making sure things don’t go missing from or appear on set during a break in the filming of a scene, for example.

However, I’ve spotted one area where these continuity people don’t seem particularly successful: tie knots.

I first spotted this in one of my favourite US drama series, Boston Legal. The same character can be shown twice in the space of a minute and look essentially the same apart from the knot in the tie. It’s not that the type of knot changes, but that the way the knot looks does – dimple or no dimple, left large and untightened or smaller and more taut.

I noticed a quite gratuitous example in Tomorrow Never Dies, which was on ITV yesterday. Early in the film, when Bond is travelling in the car with M and others, he is shown wearing his tie in a properly dimpled four in hand knot. Literally seconds later, after the shot cuts away to M and then back, he is wearing the same tie, tied in the same way but completely dimple-free.

Does this matter? Well, not massively. Indeed I suspect I’m most certainly in a minority in even noticing (!). But if continuity is deemed important, why not go the whole way and really pay attention to the details?

Review: The Ides of March

‘Expectations management’ is a crucial tool of modern politics: what matters is not how objectively effective or ineffective a person is, but whether they can exceed the standard people (or, more importantly, the media) expect of them.

My expectations of what to expect from The Ides of March had been raised pretty high – I mean, George Clooney and US politics: what could possibly go wrong…?

Well, quite a lot actually. I can’t, of course, say much more than that the film didn’t match my expectations (by a rather long way).

But I found the film very disappointing. The plot was weak, the drama was, well, non-existent and the characters (particularly those played by Ryan Gosling and, in particular, George Clooney – ie the main ones) were utterly unconvincing.

But do you know what my first thought was? It was that the film was not a patch on The West Wing.

It’s inevitable that we West Wing fans are going to judge the film relative to what is one of the finest political dramas ever made, and because of that it was always in the back of my mind that the film wouldn’t be up to the challenge. But I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so wide of the mark.

All of which, incidentally, shows the difference between expectations management in film-making and politics: high expectations help film companies (after all, I still bought the ticket, whatever my opinion of the film now) but high expectations are terrible for politicians (ask Barack Obama).

In short, West Wing fans should prepare to be disappointed. And if you’ve not seen The West Wing, pick up the box set on your way home from seeing The Ides of March and look forward to political drama with characters worth investing in, interesting plots and plenty of drama.

P.S. The film had one redeeming feature: the rather cool poster advertising it:

More economically responsible than Labour and more socially just than the Tories – but are we underselling ourselves?

That phrase – that the Liberal Democrats are more economically responsible than Labour and more socially just than the Tories – is a catchy one. It also represents in quite a pithy way the strategy that the Lib Dems should be pursuing.

But, I can’t help thinking that it is slightly…unambitious.

After all, my goldfish is more economically responsible than the Labour party, so that is hardly difficult, and the Tories, for all their talk of compassion, have no realistic basis to call themselves the party of social justice.

Thinking about it, aren’t we (and shouldn’t we be) not only more economically responsible than Labour and more socially just than the Tories, but more economically responsible and socially just than both parties?

Just think how much more sound this government’s economic policy is because of the Lib Dems – no front-loading of cuts (which would have been politically clever for the Tories but economically bad), a decent balance between spending cuts and tax rises to balance the budget, protection of the science budget by a Lib Dem business secretary and a demand-stimulating income tax cut for the low paid. All good for the economy, and all done by the Lib Dems in government.

And Labour scarcely have a better claim on social justice than the Tories – rising inequality on their watch, the ludicrous axing of the 10p income tax bracket and, worst of all, an education system where the wealth of one’s parents still determines success in school – more than almost anywhere else in the world.

So while this slogan represents sound strategic thinking, there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious – particularly when it is quite clearly justified.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing 130 years ago, on the future

There’s a fascinating story in today’s Independent on Sunday about the discovery of a long-lost manuscript of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s early novels, The Narrative of John Smith. The book is being published by The British Library, having been bought by them at auction.

The Sindy have a few extracts from the book, the most fascinating of which I thought was the following:

What is to be the end of it all? Since first a man scratched hieroglyphics on an ostracon, or scribbled with sepia upon a fragment of papyrus, the human race has been puzzling itself over that question… We may safely suppose that man will win fresh victories over mechanical and natural difficulties. That he will navigate the air with the same ease and certainty with which he now does the water, and that his ships will travel under the waves as well as over them. That life will be rendered more refined and more pleasant by countless inventions, and that preventative medicine and sanitary science will work such wonders that accident and old age will be the only causes of death. That the common sense of nations will abolish war, and the education and improved social condition of communities will effect a marvellous diminution in crime. That the forms of religion will be abandoned but the essence maintained, so that one universal creed will embrace the whole earth, which shall preach reverence to the great Creator and the pursuit of virtue, not from any hope of reward or fear of punishment, but from a high and noble love of the right and hatred of the wrong.

These are some of the changes which may be looked for. And then? Why, by that time, perhaps the solar system will be ripe for picking.

We all know just how ahead of his time Conan Doyle was from the Sherlock Holmes novels, but it’s always easy to forget. Let’s just hope that some of the things he predicted which haven’t yet come to pass (‘the forms of religion’ being abandoned and the abolition of war, for instance) do so in ‘the future’.