Iceland’s new Social Democratic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir is to lead a coalition government with the left-green party, expected to be formally announced today, with external support from another small Progressive Party, which is expected to seek a mandate for European Union membership in a General Election in May.
As day follows night, here is a dissenting note from our favourite deeply Eurosceptic Tory MEP Dan Hannan. He is a close observer of Iceland, particularly as a possible model for Britain’s own EU-free future, but he does rather, in these tricky circumstances, massively overplay his standard ‘EU as enemy of democracy card’.
I don’t know what confluence of planets has caused me to notice this at the present time, but the media are really, really bad at their jobs. I’m signed up to a number of RSS feeds, from the BBC and Sky onwards. I read the Guardian and the Times if not daily then every other day.
A few weeks ago, Chris Dillow warned of some of the nasty social side-effects of the recession. He noted that “the main effect of recession is not to cause poverty, but insecurity. And when people are insecure and anxious, they care less for others.” In short, fear makes us all more selfish.
Digital Britain is one of those government initiatives that might provoke a degree of cynicism, since it comes at a point when many people are not expecting the authors to hold power for much longer.