Snowmail: the government strikes back

Last Modified: 02 Sep 2008
By: Jon Snow, Alex Thomson

On tonight's show...

From Alex Thomson in the UK

Hello people, and first off a thank you for the kind comments some of you sent about recent Tomomails.

As some of you say, it is a useful chance for us to get in a bit of context and background on stories which the tight live TV format doesn't always allow, like Mr Putin's "tiger shoot" etc. What a hoot!

And so to this evening, where Numbers 10 and 11 are, if not fighting back against the slings and arrows, then at least trying to be seen to be helping those in direst need.

And I'm talking about the housing market. It's a vast problem and a huge issue. Should you just play hardball and say it's just market forces? People knew they were gambling on hyper-inflated house prices - so tough. Do nothing. Houses have essentially increased in value by 300 per cent and have not yet gone down by anything like that.

Well, rightly or wrongly, governments don't see it like that. Like farmers and banks, the housing market seems to be a special case, and large amounts of public money must be brought to bear to help out.

So we have a stamp duty holiday for properties costing up to £175,000, at least for one year. We have measures to help people facing repossession, 6,000 of them, and we have measures to help new buyers by sharing some of the equity in their property.

So leaving aside the wisdom of any of this, what's the deal? Who will benefit? And why would anyone take advantage now, when the package will still be there in six to eight months and houses will have fallen in price? You sense that the people who really might benefit are those who have to move and have no choice in the matter.

Our political editor Gary Gibbon has been speaking to the chancellor, Alistair Darling, about what is on offer, why, and to whom, and why now? And, of course, the wider political context on all this, including his own future after his comments at the weekend.

All that on a night when we have a startling new insight into how far support for the Labour party has ebbed away in what used to be its core constituency.

Recession looms

All this as - it's official - Britain will slide into a recession this year, according to a leading international economic body. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the UK will be the only leading industrial nation to shrink in two consecutive quarters, the definition of a recession.

Hot on the heels of the chancellor's dire assessment, it doesn't bode well for the prime minister's claim that Britain is well placed to withstand the global economic turmoil.

Arson house tragedy

As I write, West Mercia Police have finally voiced the inevitable, that they believe Christopher Foster killed his wife and daughter before destroying his family's mansion and then turning the gun on himself. It is a terrible family tragedy and police still need to try and sequence just what happened at the house that day.

Whither the toon?

Alan Shearer, where are you? Come off the golf course, your Geordie nation needs you. Or does it? Or does he need it?

I'm referring, of course, to Kevin Keegan, the Geordie Messiah, who has now performed the Second Going, sacked by that well-known national soap opera, Newcastle United FC.

He did not have the dosh he wanted to buy the players he needed, said Kevin. Well, that's not a problem the other side of the Pennines, where Manchester City have performed the miracle of out-flashing Manchester United and outbidding Chelsea to the Premier League's latest Brazilian acquisition, Robinho, for whom they paid some £32 million. How much would they pay for Batman himself?

That's what Serious Gulf Oil Money does for you. But what does it do to what used to be known as the "game" of footie?

Ah yes, game... sport... genuine competition... Well, I'm going back a few years now, I suppose.

From Jon Snow in the United States

This is Jon Snow with Snowmail. Yes, the nominee for the Republican party vice-president is in the news here in America as never before.

Turns out that McCain Googled her before making the appointment. When we were in Alaska over the weekend we discovered there had been no vetting teams go north to check out who she was.

Today eight members of the McCain vetting team are in Wasilla, the small town of which she was the mayor, and they are now launching a major investigation plus damage limitation.

The explosion of fascination over her familial situation, in which her teenage daughter is pregnant, has done much in many ways to further the enthusiasm for Palin's candidacy.

The more she is attacked, the more women seem at the moment to be feeling, "Hey, we're with her. Her experience is our experience." And that is the danger of what is happening, which is that whatever her qualifications to be vice president, the issues are becoming gender rather than her capacity.

And her capacity is something that I have been to Alaska to try to assess. She is anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-creationism. She is also one who does not believe in the science of either evolution or indeed of climate change. She does not believe that man is behind global warming.

So she is, in conservative terms, absolutely pure root and branch.

But the issue now seems to be such a wildfire that it is difficult to tell what her candidacy is going to do to this election. And a big question mark will be how far Hillary is prepared to come out and attack her.

But at the moment the question of McCain's judgement is to the foreground. The sense seems to be that McCain did not do a very thorough job of vetting her before he announced her.

He had only met her once, spoken to her on the telephone, but it appears as if this was a rushed and hasty decision. It had the hallmarks of the politics of desperation.

But so far it may have played better for him than he might have imagined. and the pregnancy of the teenage daughter may be playing better than anything he could have hoped for.