New beginnings
In line with the BBC's new policy for all the editors and correspondents who blog, Idle Scrawl is coming to an end in its current form. In future you will be able to find all of my writing here .
BBC NEWS | Paul Mason's Idle Scrawl
I'm Paul Mason, Newsnight’s economics editor, a job that takes me from Kenyan shanty towns to Russian hedge funds and Chinese factories. My blog is called Idle Scrawl. It veers wildly across the subject: from house prices, to global poverty; from deconstructing glib terminology to devastating critiques of the England football management. It is occasionally meant to be funny. Follow me on Twitter
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Latest posts
Lady Gaga for IMF boss: Wael Ghonim for ECB?
So IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned , meanwhile ECB boss Jean Claude Trichet has merely walked out of a meeting with the man who runs the Euro group (says the FT). Trichet and his fellow ECB board member Jurgen Starck are currently holding a hard line against EU politicians who want to begin the process of letting Greece default on its debts; meanwhile back in the IMF, a process that…
Strauss-Kahn: how it will make a difference to the bailouts
The IMF exists to do, above all else, two things: raise money from governments and lend it to other governments while extracting structural reforms in return. Ten years ago the Fund stood accused of doing that in a way that - during the 1980s and 90s - actually increased poverty in the developing world, blighting the lives of millions of people; and then in the Asian crisis - imposing solutions…
O Brave New Blog...
I am about to migrate the blog yet again to a new platform ; having started out as a side-of-desk operation on Typepad (see here ) the BBC then set up a blogging platform on Moveable Type that went through two iterations; the first exists here and somebody is currently writing a PhD about it; the second here . I start with these links because they will instantly become hard to find from the…
NHS Reform: Goodbye Year Zero
What's changed over the weekend, in the light of the Lib-Dems' drubbing, is not the Coalition's willingness to re-look at the NHS reforms; it's the scale of the re-appraisal. Having tried to do several things at once, they may now struggle to achieve just one. Having drifted into presenting the reforms as a kind of market-led Year Zero (and allowed numerous private sector participants to hail it…
Strong personalities with narratives win elections, shock
I've just flown in from Egypt to be confronted by a media awash with the early results of the UK local, Welsh, Scottish and AV polls. It's a big switch from the slums of Cairo to the psephological niceties of Blaenau Gwent. However coming in from abroad always brings you to the essence of a situation: you see it vicariously as foreign journalists might, filtering out the local detail. Here's my…
#OBL: "Politically, he died on 25 January"
By the time I woke up the global rolling news was in full mental jacket. There was not much actual material, only the mobile phone footage of the site of Bin Laden's death. I spent the day on the streets of Cairo, interviewing people. They did not seem as breathless as the news people. In fact a great many people were hardly interested at all. The newspapers here in Cairo had missed the news,…
Chilled out and stunned to be there: Egypt's workers do May Day
I've been in and around Tahrir Sq for most of the day - Egypt's first May Day for decades to be held in relatively free conditions. In the taxi there was the official trade union conference blaring from the radio, and it sounded like they, too were trying to come up with a tone differentiating their event from it's usual atmosphere - which was as befits a state run union full of factory managers…
Tahrir: "Enjoy the revolution" (they are, up to now)...
Mayday in Tahrir Square In white letters, across a wall next to Tahrir, is grafitti which says: "Enjoy the Revolution". In English. At midnight local time, on the eve of 1 May, a lot of people are out doing precisely that. The zippy motorbike youths, the youths arm-in-arm on the bridge over the Nile, the families on their plastic chairs taking in the air on the Nile bridges. Tomorrow (today) will…
Images of Tahrir Square
Tahrir Square has become a mini speakers' corner, with knots of people constantly forming; sometimes impromptu demonstrations. I met a woman whose son has been snatched by the police; a man who believes his three year old daughter has been kidnapped by members of the former ruling party "to create chaos" and a small delegation of steelworkers from a town in northern Egypt who have come to Cairo…