Top 10 beaches in Turkey
Forget Turkey's teeming resorts. Here are 10 crowd-free beaches, from hidden bays to pristine secluded coves
1. Ovabuku
Accommodation The Olive Garden Hotel (+90 252 728 0056). Doubles from €60 per night B&B.
2. Butterfly Valley
Spectacularly situated between two towering cliffs, Butterfly valley stretches out in a v-shape, ending in a sweep of pristine beach. Most visitors access the beach by boat from Olu Deniz or Fethiye, but for adventurous trekkers there is a rocky path that leads down from the road (around 40 mins down and an hour back up). There is no electricity, roads or buildings in the valley but camping is allowed and there are shelters in the trees. Alternatively, stay in the peaceful hamlet of Faralya and gaze down to the beach, hundreds of feet below.
Accommodation The Mandarin Boutique hotel, from £775pp per week, B&B, through Cachet Travel (+44 (0)20 8847 8700; cachet-travel.co.uk).
3. Amos
Hidden between the resorts of Turunc and Kumlubuk on the Bozburun peninsula, Amos is a small cove tucked between two headlands. It's a bit rough and ready and the pebbles are scattered with ancient wooden loungers, but there is an unspoilt beauty that makes a stark contrast to the bling and bright lights of Marmaris, which lies across the bay. Amos was once a sizeable Roman settlement and there are some remains, including a small amphitheatre with breathtaking views. Better still, there's an excellent restaurant right on the beach, serving up fresh fish and meze.
Stay at The Serendip Select, in neighbouring Kumlubuk, from £440pp per week, B&B through Anatolian Sky (08448 757681; anatoliansky.co.uk).
4. Gemiler
It's hard to believe that Gemiler lies just a short way away from the heavily overpopulated Olu Deniz beach; it's rarely crowded and reached by boat or bus ride from Hisaronu, through the fertile Kaya valley, past tobacco and wheat fields and out to the very tip of the Fethiye peninsula. Surrounded by pine and olive trees, the beach looks across to St Nicholas Island, and there are a couple of good restaurants serving up fresh meze and cold Efes beers.
Stay at Tangala Evi, in nearby Kaya, costs from £825pp, self-catering, through Exclusive Escapes (+44 (0)20 8605 3500; exclusiveescapes.co.uk, sleeps 2 adults and 1 child).
5. Cirali
Olympos beach, famed for its treehouse accommodation, has been on the backpacker trail for years, but neighbouring Cirali has managed to avoid the same level of development. The 3km sweep of beach is a protected area, thanks to the loggerhead turtles who clamber out of the sea to nest on the sand. Flanked by two huge mountains, the whole area around Cirali is dramatically beautiful, while the village behind offers simple restaurants and pensions, with a pleasingly hippyish atmosphere.
Accommodation The Canada Hotel (+90 242 825 7233; canadahotel.net) has doubles from €50 per night, B&B.
6. Kaputas
On the breathtaking road between Kalkan and Kas, the beach at Kaputas is formed by a gorge that opens out into a stretch of sand. The long flight of steps down from the road means there are no facilities on the beach, so take water and a parasol if you're planning to stay a while. It's a popular beach with locals, which gives it a very different feel to many of Turkey's more accessible stretches of coastline. Dolmuses (minibuses) between Kalkan and Kas stop off at Patara, and if you go on a windy day there are fabulous waves.
Stay atKorsan Apartments Kalkan, from £ 427pp per week, self catering through Simply Travel (0871 231 4050; simplytravel.co.uk ).
7. Hisaronu Bay
Stay at The Golden Key in Hisaronu, from £553pp per week, B&B, through Simply Travel (as before).
8. Ortakent
Stay at The Tamarisk Hotel (+90 252 358 5072; tamariskbeachhotel.com) has doubles from £25pp pn B&B.
9. Gunluklu
Avoid Gunluklu on the weekends, as locals flock to this stretch of beach, to camp and watch the sunset over campfires and barbecues. On weekdays, however, it remains peaceful â€" hidden down a long track from the Fethiye-Gocek road, surrounded by pine forests and sweet gum trees. Gunluklu is an ideal option if you want a feeling of total escape, with the option of a bit of a bustle if you feel like a night out or shopping spree â€" Fethiye is just a short drive away.
Stay atBay, in the woods near the beach, with £ 710pp per week, B and B through Cachet Travel (as before).
10. Kabak
If you're staying in Faralya but the trek down (or boat trip across) to the beach at Butterfly Valley seems a little like hard work, head instead for Kabak â€" a totally unspoilt stretch of shingle beach that is surrounded on three sides by lush pine forest. There is nothing on the beach, and only a few secluded campsites behind it; if you're looking for a back-to-basics beach experience this is the perfect spot. Visit at night and the lights of Olu Deniz twinkle across the bay; 15 minutes' drive and a whole world away.
Stay atReflections Camp (+90 534 204 9118; reflectionscamp.com ) has tents from 40TL (around £17) per night.
• All packages include a tour operator safety.
Where McChrystal led, Britain followed | Robert Fox
General McChrystal's dismissal should make commanders, diplomats and politicians think hard about our Afghan policy
So Obama has bitten the bullet - and the General McChrystal had for his insolence and dysfunctional personal command, and insubordination. Obama took a leaf out of the book of his hero Abraham Lincoln, who sacked general after general in the American civil war until he found the right one.
Honest Abe was as tough as old boots, and he sacked primarily because he thought the generals incompetent. The problem with McChrystal is that the arrogance of his special forces team that formed his headquarters couldn't hide that they just weren't delivering enough on their new counterinsurgency strategy which was to bring the fighting to an end within a couple of years.
This is the most dramatic sacking of an American commander by a president since President Truman fired Douglas MacArthur because he wanted to nuke the North and their Chinese allies in the Korean War some 60 years ago.
Following his month-long assignment to follow General McChrystal Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings concluded that: "Obama lost control of the Afghan policy about a year ago," as he told a radio interviewer. With this sacking, the president is trying to grab back the policy joystick on Afghanistan.
By appointing General David Petraeus to the Afghan job he has someone with a proven track record. He was the architect of the so-called surge in Iraq, which brought levels of violence down dramatically, at least enough to allow the Americans a semblance of an exit strategy. He is also the real architect of the counterinsurgency doctrine McChrystal preached â€" indeed he had been, and was until a few hours ago, McChrystal's superior officer.
Above all, Petraeus has shown a lot more political savvy than his erstwhile pupil. He knows how to work with Congress and how to work with politicians in the field. Part of the problem, which was identified in the Rolling Stone piece, is that McChrystal tried to run the military operation and the political one at the same time. Meanwhile his staff disparaged senior international diplomats that might get in the way. This week Britain's senior negotiator Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles quit because he thought the McChrystal plan couldn't work.
So far, not so good. The first big operation this spring â€" to take, hold, and redevelop the fertile poppy growing district of Marja in Helmand is still far from successful. The Taliban at first lay low, went home for the poppy harvest, are now back in action raiding farms and killing and threatening the farmers. McChrystal himself has described Marja as "a bleeding ulcer".
This month American, Afghan, British and Canadian troops were supposed to begin the next major operation to restore order and government to Kandahar. This was to be the litmus test of the whole McChrystal strategy â€" at least for 2010. President Karzai, who has spoken up for the general â€" grounds for suspicion enough â€" has prevaricated about final approval for the Kandahar mission. The most powerful man in the town is his half brother Ahmed Walid, who is a law unto himself. So the week before last it was quietly announced that the operation was postponed until the autumn at the earliest.
So the McChrystal operational plan is stalled. Out on the ground McChrystal was losing the confidence of a lot of the American and British soldiers on the ground because of his instructions for "courageous restraint"
This of course hasn't affected the special forces, who became an informal Praetorian Guard for McChrystal and his command cell: they increased the number of special force squads to 19 recently. The critics accuse them of doing too much shooting and too little negotiating and reconciling with the Taliban. American special forces are accused of a number of nasty killings of civilians round Kandahar this spring, including shooting two pregnant women and a passenger on a commuter bus.
There will be a lot of sucking of teeth now and quiet rethinking about where to go in Afghanistan, not least among British commanders who had a particularly close relationship with McChrystal.
Yesterday another Royal Marine was killed in Sangin, where British soldiers have been trying to hold the town for the past four years in an area surrounded and infested by Taliban. Some 100 of the 303 British fatalities in Afghanistan have been recorded there, and about 1,000 wounded. Our generals say that not much is likely to change there, because in the McChrystal thinking, "Sangin is not on the main effort". But as one of the main entrepots on the east-west heroin trading route from Kandahar into Iran, it sure is on somebody else's main effort.
The most chilling aspect of the Rolling Stone article is that no one in it talks of victory or success, even. "The facts on the ground are not great," says Celeste Ward of Rand, a McChrystal adviser, "and are not going to become great in the near future." Another adviser, Marc Sageman, formerly of the CIA, adds: "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest; there's nothing for us there."
The McChrystal episode is not just a matter of an exasperated president sacking one of his generals for cheek. The whole debacle, the stalling campaign, the wavering focus, and the weird way it was all revealed to Rolling Stone, demonstrate the odd one-dimensional quality, very common in the special forces milieu of Stanley McChrystal.
From being the man of the hour last year, he now looks a bit like the wrong general with the wrong plan in the wrong place at the wrong time. A friend who knew McChrystal well in the special forces has just texted: "McChrystal's virtue is his vice: military obsession at the expense of breadth of vision. Wrong man for a profoundly political job."
GDC's new DSLware products deliver next gen DSL technology.(General DataComm Industries Inc., Digital Subscriber Line): An article from: Software Industry Report
[[[GDC's new DSLware products deliver next gen DSL technology.(General DataComm Industries Inc., Digital Subscriber Line): An article from: Software Industry Report]]]
Discription :
Citation Details
Title: GDC's new DSLware products deliver next gen DSL technology.(General DataComm Industries Inc., Digital Subscriber Line)
Publication:Software Industry Report (Newsletter)
Date: January 24, 2005
Publisher: Millin Publishing, Inc.
Volume: 37 Question: 2 Page: 8
Distributed by Thompson Gale
More review coming soon.
Buy Here (for discount) GDC's new DSLware products deliver next gen DSL technology.(General DataComm Industries Inc., Digital Subscriber Line): An article from: Software Industry Report
State pension age could rise to 66
State pension age for men likely to rise eight years earlier than expected and government considers retirement for all at 68
The state pension age for men is to be raised to 66 as early as 2016, and the government is to consider bringing forward a rise to age 68 to "be fair to the next generation of taxpayers".
This step will be eight years shortening raise the state pension age: The Labour's intention to raise it to 66 years by 2024, and 68 by 2046.
Men aged 59 now will be the first affected. Women are already experiencing a gradual raising of their state pension age from 60 to 65 by 2020. Although the government has not yet clarified its plans for raising women's state pension age to 66, if it then increases by another year, women now aged 54 will be the first of their sex to draw their basic state pension at 66.
The government also announced plans to consult on axing the default retirement age of 65 â€" the minimum age at which employers can force staff to take retirement â€" and on the automatic enrolment of employees into workplace pension schemes.
It re-iterrated its intention to restore the link between rises in the state pension and earnings from 2011, as announced in the budgetTuesday. Nevertheless, the link will be the consumer price index, rather than the retail price index is now below the two measures of inflation. Conservatives violated the relationship between the state pension and the RPI in 1980 in accordance with the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In a speech this morning, work and pensions secretary Ian Duncan Smithand Pensions Minister Stephen Webb said: "Britain used to have a pensions system to be proud of, but due to years of neglect and inaction we are left with fewer people saving into a pension every year and the value of the state pension has been eroded, leaving millions in poverty. We must live up to our responsibility to reinvigorate the pension landscape.
"And we will reward their longer working life by making sure that when they do retire, their pension is worth getting. We are taking radical action to restore the earnings link with the triple guarantee, ensuring our pensioners get the best possible deal.
"Everyone needs to take responsibility for achieving the income in retirement they aspire to. We will support them in doing so by giving people the chance to save into a workplace pension and the freedom to work beyond retirement age if they want to."
Pensions Minister Steve Webb added: "I 've worked all my life to get a fair deal for pensioners. Up to 10 million people not saving enough, and we can not allow this situation to continue.
\\ "Our plans to enhance pension savings will be based on the automatic enrollment of pensions in the workplace, 2012. But we have to make sure we get the details right, so we re 'announcing a thorough and quick review to make sure that he pays to save. "
Light-Khalaf, pensions analyst at independent financial adviser Hargreaves Lansdown , said the move was driven by the cost of providing pensions for a rapidly ageing population, and added that the review could consider raising the state pension age to 70. "Compared to today, the number of people over 65 will be half as many again in 2030, and will have doubled by 2060, according to the DWP. The government could save £13 billion for each year that it increases the state pension age."
Unions reacted with anger to the news, accusing the government of showing its "class bias" just weeks after gaining power. Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, said: "The government knows that manual workers in the industrial regions of the UK do not enjoy anything like the same life expectancy as professionals or other classes or employees.
"To force someone who has done a lifetime of toil on building sites, farms or in factories to work until they are 66 is completely unacceptable. What on earth are the Liberals doing in this coalition?"
Age UK, the charity for older people which has been campaigning for abolition of the default retirement age, expressed concern about the speed at which the government wanted to introduce the increase.
\\ "Any revision in the promotion of the age of entering the state increase of pensions to take into account the full impact on these workers. Obviously, there are enormous challenges facing the new government, but now it's time to renew the fight against poverty, pensioners and efforts to eliminate it again and for all. "
The National Pensioners Convention also criticised the government's plans to raise the state pension retirement age, describing it as an attack on the poorest members of society.
The group said the decision ignored important information that showed that life expectancy is linked to affluence.
Ministers were accused of failing to articulate the quality of jobs that will be on sale to the elderly, pensioners losing volunteers to society, and common work.
General secretary Dot Gibson said: "There can be no doubt that the wealthier you are, the longer you live, so raising the retirement age is a direct attack on the very poorest in our society.
The NPC also criticised the intention to link state pension to CPI rather than RPI, saying it "will take decades before it has any real impact on tackling pensioner poverty".
Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said: "While we welcome the decision to end the arbitrary retirement age, raising the state pension age over this short timescale is clearly driven by a desire to cut spending rather than a planned approach to introducing more flexible retirement.
"Raising the state pension age will hit the less well-off far more than the rich. Sixty-five-year-old men in Kensington and Chelsea can expect to live a further 23 years, while those in Glasgow only 14 years.
"A majority of 64-year-old men are already out of the labour market. Raising the state pension age will not help any of them stay in work. It will simply turn a generation of 65-year-olds from pensioners into the unemployed.
"The government must also spell out what will happen to women, as only increasing the pension age for men is almost certainly a breach of sex discrimination law."
Nevertheless, Ian Naismith, head of pensions market development of Scottish Widows , said bringing forward the increase would be a positive move, but added that people needed to prepare for the change by saving more.
\\ "We live in an aging society, and we all need to work longer need, which only have been increased by the economic climate in recent years. Raising the state pension age will give an additional call to plan for longer life.
"This has also been reinforced by the announcement that the default retirement age of 65 will be scrapped, which is a clear message that the government is acknowledging that everyone should be able to work for as long as they are able. Although this gives employees the freedom to choose when to retire, employers may need to consider late retirement provisions under pension schemes, with more staff likely to work beyond scheme normal retirement ages.
Duncan Smith's announcement comes as former Labour Cabinet minister John Hutton embarks on a review of public sector pensions. As the head of the Independent Pensions Commission, he has been tasked with identifying immediate savings by September and full-scale reforms in time for next year's budget.
The new Office of Budget Responsibility has suggested the public sector pension bill could more than double to £9bn a year by 2015.
Society daily 21.06.2010
Full budget coverage, prison governors call for halt to £4bn building plan; and a little light reading
Today's top Society Guardian news and comment
Prison governors call for halt to £4bn prison building plan
Patients with learning "mistreated," says NHS staff
Teenager repellent "mosquito" should be banned, says Europe
Gary Younge on the collapse of the charity Refugee and Migrant Justice
All of today 's Society Guardian stories
Budget: Full coverage
Osborne faces budget backlash
How it works: Politics live blog
Leader: "progressive austerity" - a hollow phrase?
Letters: the sharp reality of budget cuts
David Blanchflower: dole queue beckons for Britain's young
Jackie Ashley: Osborne's big gamble
Polly Toynbee: we must map the detail of these cuts
Other news
• The chief executive of the Fifteen Foundation (now the Jamie Oliver Foundation) Penny Newman, is to depart after less than two years in post, reports Social Enterprise magazine.
• Nurses, teachers, police officers and other public sector workers face a steep rise in pension contributions, the Daily Telegraph claims. It says the a new government commission headed by former Labour minister John Hutton "could" recommend this as early as next Spring.
• Ofsted head Christine Gilbert is under pressure from ministers to quit her £200,000 a year post before her term of office expires in October 2011, reports the Mail on Sunday. The Daily Telegraph this morning reports she has "no plans" to go
I read ...
• Anna Coote's briefing for the New Economics Foundation on the "big society". The best and fairest critique I've read so far.
• And also this blogpost, verging on the mystical, from Lord Nat Wei, entitled: "Why big Society may be confusing - and why this is alright."
"There will always be a part of Big Society which will remain mysterious and yet also enticing â€" like life itself."
• Blogger Public Strategist's thoughts on the uses of government data:
"If you work hard with this data, you can get a sense of what government spent money on. But you can't get much of a sense of what it used the things it bought to do, still less what happened as a result."
• Blogger Artbitrary Constant's reflections on the closure of the Independent Living Fund.
• The Local Government Officer's blog post "Ongoing churlishness about money." Or why Nick Clegg's call for public sector pay restraint is a nonsense ...
• This letter from the Treasury solicitor Paul Jenkins to Mr Justice Foskett, apologising for his department's mishandling of the Sharon Shoesmith case in which large numbers of Ofsted documents relating to the case were presented to the court only at the eleventh hour.
"It is clear that the handling of the case did not meet the high standards that are expected of those entrusted with the conduct of litigation on behalf of the government and for this ... I apologise."
• A PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey report into the (bleak) future of social housing. Its conclusion sounds a little understated:
"The affordable housing sector is bracing itself for a sharp and prolonged period of public funding cuts."
?€? Blogger Family Lore 's thoughts on a class action started (in the International Criminal Court in The Hague) 100 British families claim that their rights were violated when their children were evacuated family courts
In case you missed them ... the weekend's top Society Guardian stories
Wei outlines plans for "big society" ISA to raise funds for social projects
GP admits "hastening" deaths of patients in his care
How facebook changed adoption forever
All Sunday's Society Guardian stories
All of Saturday 's Society Guardian stories
Society Guardian blogs
Joe Public
Sarah Boseley's global health blog
Guardian awards
Guardian Public Services Awards 2010
Guardian charity awards 2010
Society Guardian Social Enterprise Summit
We are starting to plan this year's Society Guardian Social Enterprise Summit. Last year's summit was a great success - you can read about it here. We are again looking for the demonstration of inspiration, innovation and practical ideas about how social enterprises can deliver public services. Whether you are from the public sector or social activities, we want you to tell us who you 'look like and what you would like to discuss. An Email to charmian.walker-smith @ guardian.co.uk . You can Follow Guardian Social Enterprise on Twitter
Society Daily blog
Society Daily blog editor: Patrick Butler
Email the editor: Patrick.Butler@guardian.co.uk
Follow Patrick Butler on Twitter
Sign up to Society Daily email briefing
Society Guardian Links
SocietyGuardian.co.uk
Follow Society Guardian on Twitter
Enter the Guardian Public Services Awards
The audience - Guardian 's site senior public sector executives
The Guardian's public and voluntary sector careers page
Hundreds of public and voluntary sector jobs
Society Guardian Editor: Alison Benjamin
Email editor SocietyGuardian: society@guardian.co.uk
Key Cabinet, Hook-Style, Wall Mount, Locking, Plastic, 72 Keys, Almond GEN33020
[[[Key Cabinet, Hook-Style, Wall Mount, Locking, Plastic, 72 Keys, Almond GEN33020]]]
Discription : Keys store on numbered hooks with key locator index inside door. Complete with key rings, key tags, labels. Two keys included. Mounting hardware included. Expand with optional wing panel. 72 Keys, 19-1/2"Wx4"Dx15-3/8"H, Almond.
More review coming soon.
Buy Here (for discount) Key Cabinet, Hook-Style, Wall Mount, Locking, Plastic, 72 Keys, Almond GEN33020
Wimbledon: A very British obsession
For most of the year we ignore the game. But for two weeks in June the British become obsessed with tennis â€" and queue for days to get into Wimbledon. Why?
Wimbledon has been agog with anticipation of the Queen's visit all week. Would Serena curtsey, would Andy bow? Yesterday, after a four-course luncheon at the club comprising salmon millefeuille, chicken on fruity couscous, the obligatory Kentish strawberries and English cheese, the Queen was in the royal box to see Andy "Of course I'll bow" Murray, the grumpy Scot we can't quite take to our hearts, easing past a spiky-haired, underpowered Finn. She managed the odd spasm of animation and a graceful wave to her courtiers, but whether she really enjoyed it is doubtful: though patron of the club, her infrequent visits to Wimbledon do not suggest love. At least she might be grateful for not having attended the epic encounter between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, which began on Tuesday and finally finished yesterday afternoon on a worshipful court 18 after a mind-bending, body-warping 138 games in the final set.
I ask Ian Ritchie, Wimbledon's chief executive, why the Queen has put in an appearance this year, but he has no idea. "We invite her every year, but what suddenly provoked her to come this year we don't know." My guess is she was anxious to find a World Cup and vuvuzela-free zone â€" she likes football even less than tennis. "She'll be astonished to see the difference since she was here in 1977," Ritchie adds. Fields have been concreted over, new stadiums erected, centre court redesigned and a controversial roof added. I've been here for four days and I still keep getting lost around the 45-acre site, though the surfeit of Pimm's (at a steep £6.70 for a plastic beaker) may be a factor.
I've lived close to the All England Club, which stages the tournament, for almost 30 years and have always been fascinated by Wimbledon, though I've generally found the queue â€" or, as the signs call it, "The Queue" â€" more diverting than the tennis. My son and I used to go up on the day before it started to see the queuers in their tiny tents camped along Church Road, ready to snap up on-the-day passes for the show courts. It would be easy to make the event ticket-only and dispense with the logistical nightmare of what becomes a thousands-long snake of people stretching back a mile or so, but the All England Club is nothing if not savvy. It recognises that "The Queue", a feature of the championship since the early 20th century, is integral to "The Fortnight". "It's part of the excitement and atmosphere," says Ritchie, "and adds to the mystique." It reminds me of those blockbuster art shows where the length of the queue is supposed to testify to the greatness of the art; the act of queueing becomes an aesthetic statement. Wimbledon is not a tennis tournament; it is an Event. The British public and media more or less ignore tennis for the rest of the year, barely noticing tournaments in places such as Miami and Montreal. But for these two weeks, even in a World Cup year, tennis comes something close to a national obsession.
Despite the list of dos and don'ts, the atmosphere in the camp is mellow. Young people are strumming guitars, throwing frisbees, limbo dancing; one family has erected a makeshift net and is playing tennis; two older couples have combined for a game of Cluedo; a group of about a dozen foreign students have arrived without a tent, but my guess is some will peel away as temperatures drop â€" one young woman from Colombia already looks extremely doubtful about the enterprise.
"What's the attraction of queueing for 36 hours?" I ask two women who are 28th in the line of tents and whose Primus stove suggests rather greater readiness than the student from Colombia. "I've watched Wimbledon since I was eight," says Liesel, who comes from South Africa but is doing a masters degree in the UK. "I used to count the hours until it was time for the championships to start. I love all sport, but the great thing about tennis is that it's never over till the last point. I've seen miraculous comebacks, and people managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I love the whole tradition of Wimbledon, too. The great thing is you think you're obsessed and crazy, but then you come here and find lots of other obsessed and crazy people, and you don't feel quite so mad any more. I imagine it's like that at a Star Trek convention."
The next day, amid the river of people with tickets heading for the gates of the club â€" kept well away from the heroic queuers, who enter the grounds via a purpose-built bridge â€" stands a lone young man with JESUS on his T-shirt. "Remember your sins," he intones. But he has a hard time competing with stewards telling us to "Enjoy the day". This, after all, is suburban heaven on earth.
Once inside, there is a dizzying array of matches to choose from on the outside courts, which are open to anyone who has queued for a £20 ground ticket (tickets for the show courts cost at least double that): Bozoljac v Massu, Voegele v Kirilenko, Przysiezny v Ljubicic. It feels like some enchanted journey across eastern Europe. I settle on Karolina Sprem of Croatia v the American Bethanie Mattek-Sands on court 16, and am quickly gripped â€" mainly by a middle-aged man in tennis gear who keeps jumping up and down and shouting "C'mon Karo", while jotting down notes about the match. This, I assume, is the obligatory obsessed Croatian dad, a key element in eastern Europe's tennis success. Sprem also has a majestic â€" and ultimately irresistible, for Mattek-Sands at least â€" grunt.
By mid-afternoon Henman Hill is packed with people watching Federer's thrilling match with the Colombian Alejandro Falla on the big screen. It's still called Henman Hill, even though Tim retired three years ago. "People tell us to call it Murray Mount, but it will always be Henman Hill to us," I hear a woman on the information desk say. One of the quirks of Wimbledon is that people queue for hours to sit on a grassy knoll watching the telly. Others, once they are inside the grounds, immediately join another queue for returned tickets for the show courts (available for a fiver as the original holders leave). The British may be feeble at tennis, but in queueing we are champions of the world.
Ritchie believes Wimbledon's quirkiness is central to its appeal. "Some of these decisions that were made for all sorts of different reasons â€" white clothing, keeping the grass, the queue, ticketing policy, honorary stewards â€" now make very good business sense," he says. "They help make it what it is. But we have to strike a balance between tradition and innovation, and we have to be prepared to do new things." Wimbledon has become a successful global brand, with scores of retail outlets in China and Japan, and last year generated profits of almost £30m, all ploughed back into British tennis with so far meagre returns.
There may, though, be a downside to the tournament's pre-eminence. "The success of Wimbledon gives the impression that we are a tennis nation," says Jon Henderson, author of a recent biography of Britain's last Wimbledon men's singles champion Fred Perry (winner in 1934, 1935 and 1936), "but fundamentally we are not a tennis nation. We get beguiled and sidetracked by Wimbledon, and as a result of that we don't try hard enough."
"Tennis hasn't really moved on from its roots as a genteel middle-class sport," says Henderson. "It was originally conceived as a way of whiling away sunny summer afternoons, and the great majority of tennis clubs in this country remain middle-class social clubs." Go to a club in France, where some of the parents are even more committed than the Croatians â€" one father was even jailed for poisoning his children's opponents, which is taking things a little too far â€" and you will find a very different atmosphere, which is why France has numerous players in the top 100 and we just have Murray, steely, truculent, uncompromising, one man (and his scarily intense mother) contra mundum .
The text of Rudyard Kipling's poem If is shown on a large tablet in Wimbledon's museum, with the two most famous lines â€" "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same" â€" picked out over an archway. My guess is this poem would not find favour in Croatia or France or the US, or with two exhausted players so determined to win they will play for 11 hours, refusing to give way, defeated only by the dying of the light.
To win, to produce an entire generation of Murrays, we may have to rethink our attitude to tennis. It is part of our ambivalence about Murray that we find his singlemindedness, his occasional gracelessness, his sheer will to win, so hard to square with our cultural construct of the sport. We continue to celebrate the plucky loser, though this year, with no Englishman in the singles draw and the half-dozen British women mown down by assorted Serbs and Croats in the first round, that tolerance of dignified defeat may be wearing thin. We now want more Triumphs and fewer Disasters.
Should Wimbledon itself change? Well, I discover something else in the museum. Major Walter Clopton Wingfield is usually credited with inventing lawn tennis in 1874, and the first championship was held at Wimbledon three years later. But, as the museum acknowledges, the real inventor was a more monochrome Birmingham solicitor called Harry Gem, and it suggests (others dispute this) that the first game of lawn tennis was played at the Manor House Hotel, Leamington Spa, in 1872. Why not move back to the Midlands, and concentrate on the tennis rather than the tea party? OK, the market in strawberries will collapse, TV will lose interest, and nobody will bother to camp out any more . . . Ah yes, I see, we'd have a tournament like Miami or Montreal, and I don't suppose a tennis agnostic like me (or, indeed, the Queen) would show up. The wrong version of history is now established fact; Wimbledon, for better or worse, is British tennis; it's too late to change the rules of the game.
Anxiety over housing revolution
Local people are being given more control over how many homes are built in their area, but there are fears it could escalate the housing crisis. By Peter Hetherington
Housing targets have been removed at the national level. Planning strategies for determining the level of new homes should be in the eight regions, currently with an ax. Public funding of social and affordable housing remains strong. And this is only the beginning.
Housing experts, who believed that the influence of the Liberal Democratic Party in the coalition government will be the mood of the revolutionary enthusiasm of the last Conservative manifesto, are in shock, because they are responsible for key conference housing during the week.
Already these cutbacks are biting. The national affordable housing programme, and other ventures â€" a scheme to kickstart work on sites where building has stalled, and a market renewal drive to turn round older areas of terrace housing in the north and Midlands â€" have faced cuts of £230m since the coalition came to power.
Richard Capie, director of policy at the CIH, fears that another ?? 610 million allocated to the treasury HCA 'this year will disappear, which further undermines the agency' s program. And this is before the next triennial review of the costs starts to bite, the shelter is another blow.
More worrying for Capie and other professionals is the removal of house completion targets â€" a way of measuring progress since the early postwar years â€" under a new planning framework in which councils will have to decide the level of building in their areas. To be fair, the outgoing system â€" "Stalinist", according to Shapps â€" was cumbersome and increasingly out of touch with reality. National targets fed down to regional targets, with little democratic accountability. The previous government wanted 2m homes by 2016, and 3m by 2020, but since the credit crunch three years ago building has fallen so far below these targets that the case for a reappraisal was strong.
Housing experts also have serious concerns that the new planning guidelines that replace those objectives and regional strategies, which already seems to be sending wrong signals to builders and developers, after the letter of advice from the local community and the Secretary of the Government, Eric Pickles - Shapps 'Boss - effectively give them the green light to put the housing plans.
In some growth areas, notably Oxfordshire, two district councils â€" Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire â€" are doing just that, to the alarm of private developers wanting to press ahead with new housing. According to the Home Builders Federation, Pickles's letter has created a dangerous vacuum with no clear strategy at a time when the country is facing an acute housing shortage. "The government says it is committed to building more homes, but without urgent guidance this aspiration will not be achieved," warns Stewart Baseley, the HBF's executive chairman.
A third district in Oxfordshire â€" Cherwell â€" is keen to hang on to a proposed new "eco-town" earmarked by the last government, although some in the coalition seem keen to scrap the proposal along with other eco-town developments.
In areas facing new growth pressures, progressive Tory authorities â€" such as Oxfordshire county council â€" see the Cherwell eco-town as preferable to piecemeal housing expansion because development will be concentrated in a planned community. Keith Mitchell, the council leader, has written to Shapps pleading for the Cherwell eco-town to go ahead. Like othes senior Tories in local government, Mitchell welcomes the principal of the planning reforms in which councils will be given the power to determine housing levels. But, along with builders and developers, he is concerned by the speed of their introduction â€" with no transition period.
Bob Neill, planning minister, is adamant that urgent reform is needed because, he insists, regional targets failed to deliver sufficient housing. At a conference this month, organised by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), he told delegates: "It may be controversial, but there is a clear mandate for the coalition to remove the regional planning apparatus, and that will happen. Swift steps will be made to remove targets and take the necessary legislative steps to dismantle those arrangements."
Yet in London, blessed with its mayor and his strategic authority, the picture will be very different. While regional planning and housing strategies will be scrapped in the rest of England, the capital will keep its London plan, housing targets and all. Ironically, the pragmatic Tory administration in the capital is living proof that, contrary to the assertions of ministers, targets do work; this plan has already delivered over half the mayor's target of 50,000 affordable homes by 2012, 60% of them in the social rented category.
"Ministers have made clear they will treat London differently," says one insider close to negotiations with the government. Agreement has been reached to transfer the HCA's functions in the capital, with a current annual budget of around £1.1bn, to the mayor. In turn, Boris Johnson will devolve housing powers to 32 boroughs under a "delegated delivery" programme. It should all be wrapped up before the summer recess.
Elsewhere, however, little, if any, spending in this area is ringfenced.
Yet at the same time, Neill said the coalition was committed to bringing forward new incentives to encourage "responsible and sustainable development". These include the government matching council tax receipts on new developments for six years by creating a special "matching fund" by top-slicing the revenue support grant to local authorities.
"We will match pound for pound the extra money councils get on council tax for six years," said Neill. "Localism is at the heart of our approach to planning because we genuinely believe it is important to give local people control over the shape and the future of their communities. We are determined not to go back to a situation where central government controls the content of local plans."
A year ago, it all seemed so different. The previous government â€" acting irresponsibly, according to the new regime, with little or no "real" money on tap â€" made a housing pledge of an extra £1.5bn to deliver 20,000 new homes over four years, with much of the cash coming from other departments and "underspends" elsewhere. This funding is no longer seen as secure, and the pledge has been dropped.
Up to now, the fragile housing market in England has been propped up by state intervention, in the form of the HCA which has, effectively, rescued much of the housebuilding industry by funding it to build affordable social housing for housing associations. Last year, for instance, almost three-quarters of housing starts â€" 64,811 â€" were partly funded by the agency. It has become a key player in the market.
The National Housing Federation, which represents not-for-profit housing associations, partly funded by government, has already written to Shapps warning that the number of affordable homes in England this year could slump by as much as 65% â€" the lowest since 1990. And this week it further underlined the looming housing crisis in a statement warning that the government's housing budget could be cut by a third over four years, with the loss of 200,000 further construction jobs.
With the government placing all its faith in councils to deliver the level of housing needed â€" and some small authorities have precious little planning capacity and expertise to meet this challenge â€" Capie argues that a commitment to devolve more powers to town halls, and communities, could still work well, given time. But why such a rush? "Local planning has the potential to be good, but managing the transition is not being done brilliantly," he warns. "Central government cannot abdicate its responsibility, and house-builders are very concerned about the [emerging] planning framework. Housing was in crisis before the election, and that crisis looks like it is going to escalate."
Emma Cariaga, head of strategic projects for Land Securities, one of the biggest developers, voices the concern of many private developers. "The view from the private sector is not about change itself," she insists. "But my question is one of time and whether the scale of change is what we need right now." Far better, she thinks, to test the new planning regime in several areas before rolling it out nationally.
In short, the government is embarking on a high-risk strategy at a time when house-building is emerging from one of the deepest crises many in the industry can remember. But Neill insists change is long overdue. "The reason we embarked on [this] is not because we are anti-planning or anti-growth; on the contrary, it's precisely because we recognise the role a good planning system can play in delivering the economic growth the country needs that we are moving swiftly."
Anxiety over housing revolution
Residents given more control over how many houses are built in their area, but there are fears it could lead to an escalation of the housing crisis. On Peter Hetherington
Housing targets have been dropped nationally. Planning strategies, determining the level of new homes needed in eight regions, are being axed. Public funding for social and affordable housing is taking a nosedive. And that is just for starters.
The housing professionals who thought that Liberal Democrat influence in a coalition government would temper the revolutionary zeal of a recent Conservative manifesto, are in for a shock as they meet at a key housing conference this week.
Tomorrow, in his first major speech, at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) in Harrogate, housing minister Grant Shapps is expected to underline the scale of this revolution in his department by announcing that a quango charged with safeguarding tenants' interests and monitoring the finances of housing associations will be scrapped. Key functions of the Tenant Services Authority, launched only 18 months ago, will go to another quango, the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), which channels public money into social housing and regeneration projects and which itself faces severe cutbacks.
Already these cutbacks are biting. The national affordable housing programme, and other ventures â€" a scheme to kickstart work on sites where building has stalled, and a market renewal drive to turn round older areas of terrace housing in the north and Midlands â€" have faced cuts of £230m since the coalition came to power.
Richard Capie, director of policy at the CIH, worries that another £610m allocated in the HCA's budget this year will disappear, further undermining the agency's programme. And that is before the next three-year spending review begins to bite, dealing housing yet another blow.
More worrying for Capie and other professionals is the removal of house completion targets â€" a way of measuring progress since the early postwar years â€" under a new planning framework in which councils will have to decide the level of building in their areas. To be fair, the outgoing system â€" "Stalinist", according to Shapps â€" was cumbersome and increasingly out of touch with reality. National targets fed down to regional targets, with little democratic accountability. The previous government wanted 2m homes by 2016, and 3m by 2020, but since the credit crunch three years ago building has fallen so far below these targets that the case for a reappraisal was strong.
Housing professionals also have serious concerns that a new planning framework replacing these targets and regional strategies already seems to be sending out the wrong signals to builders and developers, following a letter to councils from the communities and local government secretary, Eric Pickles â€" Shapps's boss â€" effectively giving them the green light to put housing plans on hold.
In some growth areas, notably Oxfordshire, two district councils â€" Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire â€" are doing just that, to the alarm of private developers wanting to press ahead with new housing. According to the Home Builders Federation, Pickles's letter has created a dangerous vacuum with no clear strategy at a time when the country is facing an acute housing shortage. "The government says it is committed to building more homes, but without urgent guidance this aspiration will not be achieved," warns Stewart Baseley, the HBF's executive chairman.
A third district in Oxfordshire â€" Cherwell â€" is keen to hang on to a proposed new "eco-town" earmarked by the last government, although some in the coalition seem keen to scrap the proposal along with other eco-town developments.
Yet in London, blessed with its mayor and his strategic authority, the picture will be very different. While regional planning and housing strategies will be scrapped in the rest of England, the capital will keep its London plan, housing targets and all. Ironically, the pragmatic Tory administration in the capital is living proof that, contrary to the assertions of ministers, targets do work; this plan has already delivered over half the mayor's target of 50,000 affordable homes by 2012, 60% of them in the social rented category.
"Ministers have made clear they will treat London differently," says one insider close to negotiations with the government. Agreement has been reached to transfer the HCA's functions in the capital, with a current annual budget of around £1.1bn, to the mayor. In turn, Boris Johnson will devolve housing powers to 32 boroughs under a "delegated delivery" programme. It should all be wrapped up before the summer recess.
Elsewhere, however, little, if any, spending in this area is ringfenced.
Yet at the same time, Neill said the coalition was committed to bringing forward new incentives to encourage "responsible and sustainable development". These include the government matching council tax receipts on new developments for six years by creating a special "matching fund" by top-slicing the revenue support grant to local authorities.
"We will match pound for pound the extra money councils get on council tax for six years," said Neill. "Localism is at the heart of our approach to planning because we genuinely believe it is important to give local people control over the shape and the future of their communities. We are determined not to go back to a situation where central government controls the content of local plans."
From the Oxfordshire perspective, Mitchell, for one, has his reservations. "Will those incentives work?" he asked the TCPA conference. " I don't know ... I have asked David Cameron this question. He is convinced they will. I've told him I'm very doubtful. I'm not sure they're big enough or quick enough, and I have a real worry about this. I think perhaps in three or four years' time someone will be scratching their heads and saying, 'What will we do now?'"
A year ago, it all seemed so different. The previous government â€" acting irresponsibly, according to the new regime, with little or no "real" money on tap â€" made a housing pledge of an extra £1.5bn to deliver 20,000 new homes over four years, with much of the cash coming from other departments and "underspends" elsewhere. This funding is no longer seen as secure, and the pledge has been dropped.
To be fair, the coalition recognises that England needs new and improved homes. Among other reasons, this is because household formation is outstripping house-building, people are living longer, and others are staying single â€" all placing greater demand on the market and on the need for social and affordable properties. More than 4 million people are estimated to be on waiting lists for social housing.
The National Housing Federation, which represents not-for-profit housing associations, partly funded by government, has already written to Shapps warning that the number of affordable homes in England this year could slump by as much as 65% â€" the lowest since 1990. And this week it further underlined the looming housing crisis in a statement warning that the government's housing budget could be cut by a third over four years, with the loss of 200,000 further construction jobs.
With the government placing all its faith in councils to deliver the level of housing needed â€" and some small authorities have precious little planning capacity and expertise to meet this challenge â€" Capie argues that a commitment to devolve more powers to town halls, and communities, could still work well, given time. But why such a rush? "Local planning has the potential to be good, but managing the transition is not being done brilliantly," he warns. "Central government cannot abdicate its responsibility, and house-builders are very concerned about the [emerging] planning framework. Housing was in crisis before the election, and that crisis looks like it is going to escalate."
Emma Cariaga, head of strategic projects for Land Securities, one of the biggest developers, voices the concern of many private developers. "The view from the private sector is not about change itself," she insists. "But my question is one of time and whether the scale of change is what we need right now." Far better, she thinks, to test the new planning regime in several areas before rolling it out nationally.
In short, the government is embarking on a high-risk strategy at a time when house-building is emerging from one of the deepest crises many in the industry can remember. But Neill insists change is long overdue. "The reason we embarked on [this] is not because we are anti-planning or anti-growth; on the contrary, it's precisely because we recognise the role a good planning system can play in delivering the economic growth the country needs that we are moving swiftly."
LIVE: Budget reaction and PMQs
All the news from Westminster including minute-by-minute coverage of PMQs and all the latest reaction to the budget
11:05 am: Peter Walker, energy secretary during the miners' strike and one of the leading "wets" in the Thatcher government, has died. Jonathan Isaby has got more details at ConservativeHome.
10.42am: The Guardian's budget coverage is all here. These are some of the best budget articles from the rest of the papers.
• Hamish McRae in the Independent does not believe all the spending cuts will actually happen.
Is this government in the last year of his life (if it is, finally, a full term) will actually be on the introduction of cuts, the last piece of the 25% reduction in most departments, when she was about to face the voters? I know the plans of work translated into 20% compared with unprotected departments, and 25%? This does not happen, right?
• Martin Wolf in the Financial Times says George Osborne has taken a huge gamble.
Massive fiscal tightening was ultimately inevitable. But perhaps only such a young government â€" in age and in time in office â€" would gamble so much on such a fast adjustment, so early in its life. As a citizen of the UK, I hope it pulls it off. Maybe, its sense that the UK could not get away with a measured approach is right: we will never know. But this gamble has now defined the government. If it is seen to have failed, it will be finished.
• Tim Harford in the FT says we're all going to feel the effects of the budget.
I have recently taken to dividing budget numbers by 60m, roughly per capita, or by 25m, roughly the number of households in the UK. The effect is bracing: Britain is borrowing £6,000 per household this year. This is, to use a technical macroeconomic term, a fair whack ...
Over the next four years we shall see £90bn of tax rises and spending cuts, more than half of which were inherited from Labour. That is £1,500 a year per person or £300 per household per month. We are going to notice.
• Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail says the budget will tear the coalition apart.
Many backbench Liberal Democrats, whose party had been out of power for 70 years before the formation of the coalition government last month, have only ever known the irresponsibility of opposition.
For them, Osborne 's strict, clear and great responsibility budget horror.
That is why, in due course, I believe that this coalition will start to split apart â€" and that George Osborne's budget can only have brought that moment closer.
• Daniel Finkelstein in the Times said that cutting spending won't inevitably make the government unpopular.
In the US, there have been two attempts at tracking the relationship between spending and popularity. Both showed that increases in public spending actually reduced votes for the incumbent. And a survey across the OECD found no evidence that looser fiscal policy is related to longer political tenure.
To this work, [a Goldman Sachs study found] that "the three governments that have executed the most high-profile expenditure-based deficit reductions â€" Ireland in 1987, Sweden in 1994 and Canada in 1994 â€" were all of them re-elected".
• Benedict Brogan in the Daily Telegraph says that Osborne has some similarities with Gordon Brown.
He would reject the comparison, but in some ways he is like Gordon Brown â€" political to his fingertips. He calculates for advantage; he delights in the fray. He will have enjoyed telling Labour MPs, for example, that nothing in the budget would make child poverty worse, or that his statement was "progressive".
10.36am: I've just finished going through the papers. Generally, Osborne's budget has got a better reception than he might have expected. Here's a rough guide to how the papers are responding to it in their editorials.
Very positive: The Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Sun.
Broadly positive: The Financial Times, the Daily Mail.
Neutral: The Independent
Negative: The Guardian
Very negative: The Daily Mirror
10.31am: Today we'll get the Institute for Fiscal Studies' verdict on the budget. They're holding a briefing at 1pm.
10.09am:MPs will have to start paying more for their food and drinks in the House of Commons. Commons Commission, which runs the place, just put out a press release stating that it had decided to reduce the budget of the fund to ?? 12 m in 2010-11, about 5% more than originally planned. The budget of the fund will now be ?? 219m this year.
The initial savings will be made in various ways including: by scaling back a number of programmes and projects, reducing the parliamentary works programme and freezing all but essential recruitment.
This year £800,000 will be cut from the budget for select committee travel, and to save a further £500,000 catering prices across the house will be raised. This will bring cafeteria prices into line with benchmark workplace venues and bar prices into line with a competitively-priced high street pub chain.
More detailed consideration of further reductions in the catering subsidy will be part of a savings programme set up to identify and achieve additional budget reductions over the next three years.
It was inevitable with David Cameron is currently running the country. Last year, Cameron made a speech saying that MPs should no longer have their food and drink subsidised by the taxpayer. He was particulary angry about the fact that MPs could get a "lean salad of lemon and lime-marinated roasted tofu with baby spinach and rocket, home-roasted plum tomatoes and grilled ficelle crouton" for just £1.70.
Not any more!
9.32am: More about the Cameron/Clegg joint TV appearance tonight (see 8.30am). It will be shown on BBC News at 7pm, and then it will be repeated on BBC 2 at 11.25pm.
9.15am: If you want to know more about what the budget says about where the government is going to gets its money, and what it's going to spend it on, my colleague Paddy Allen has produced a wonderful interactive graphic revealing the state of Britain's finances.
8.55am: Alistair Darling has also been giving interviews this morning. This is what he told the Today programme.
I'm very concerned, and I'm not the only one - there are a number of commentators and others who are extremely concerned that this government is taking a risk. This is not pain-free. Get this wrong and the consequences could be dire for many, many people and businesses in this country.
In addition, they announced a whole screed material yesterday, and as the days go by, I suspect some of the fine print will show one or two of the horrors that Aren t 'catches the eye. And besides, with the coalition government and puff set of partners such as the Liberal Democrats, I just wonder whether they will be able to deliver some of these things.
8:54 am: Osborne has also been doing television interviews this morning. From what I've read about them on the Press Association wire, it doesn't look as if he said anything original. But it sounds as if the GMTV interview was quite lively. This is from the PA report.
Osborne, who looked stony-faced when he played angry and disturbing messages from viewers about his GMTV ad budget, defended the decision to freeze the child's benefit."I didn't want to get rid of it. Some people were telling me 'abolish child benefit'," he said.
"I care about helping mothers who receive that benefit. For many people it's the one thing they get without asking.
"Instead of abolishing it I've frozen it, which keeps child benefit, and means hopefully in a couple of years' time we'll be able to increase it."
You can watch the footage of it on the GMTV website.
8.43am: It wasn't one of the all-time great interviews. But there were four points that stood out.
• Osborne suggested that welfare cuts could go even deeper. He said that if further money can be saved from the welfare budget, then the spending cuts in other areas won't have to be so severe. He made this point when he was asked how the Home Office could cut spending by 25%.
It doesn't have to be 25%, in the sense that if over the coming couple of months we can find further savings in the welfare budget, then we can bring that 25% number down. In the end that is the trade-off we've got to make in the spending review, not just between departments, but also between the very large welfare bill and the departmental expenditure bill.
Osborne is already committed to cutting welfare spending by £11bn. It's hard to see how he could win political support (especially from the Lib Dems) for even deeper cuts.
• He said there would be a "big public engagement" about the spending review. Cameron and Clegg are expected to say more about that tomorrow.
• Osborne insisted that the Tories were not planning a VAT increase before the election.
• He claimed that being part of a coalition had "enormously" strengthened his hand as chancellor because it meant there was a democratic mandate for what he was doing.
8.30am: David Cameron and Nick Clegg are due to make a joint television appearance together today to discuss the budget. Nick Robinson has just told the Today programme that he will be doing the interviewing. Apparently he will be chairing a Q&A type event. It's due to take place some time late this afternoon.
8.27am: Davis and Osborne are still talking about spending cuts. Osborne says that David Cameron and Nick Clegg will be saying more today about how the public will be engaged in this debate.
Davis asks about the election. He says the debate about spending was not conducted in an honest way. Why couldn't politicians discuss cuts honestly?
Osborne says he doesn't agree. The issue of spending cuts did come up.
Q: What about VAT?
Osborne says the issue of whether of not the government needed to go faster in cutting spending was aired during the election.
On taxation, Osborne says the Tories were not planning seven or eight weeks ago to go ahead with a VAT rise. They only decided to implement this rise when they saw the borrowing figures.
Davis says the figures were reasonably well known before the election.
Osborne repeats the point on the need for immediate reduction to be a central issue in the election. The presence of two parties working together, and strengthened him as chancellor, he said.
That's it. I'll sum up in a moment.
8.22am:Evan Davis asked about the balance between tax increases and cost reductions.
Osborne said that international studies have shown that where most of the work carried out cost reduction program to reduce the budget deficit, usually more successful.
Q: But you could have put taxes up more to avoid spending cuts. Why did you want to shrink the state to below 40% of GDP?
Osborne says that is not being done for "ideological reasons". He is taking spending down to average levels. He could have increased taxes more. But that would have posed a risk to the economy.
Q: But aren't spending cuts a risk to the economy?
Osborne says he needed to tackle the root cause of the problem, "a decade of over-spending".
Q: Budget of the Ministry of Internal Affairs is £ 10 billion. How are you going to cut it by 25%?
Osborne says the spending review will be a "real challenge".
First, he inherited a situation, when there were 20% reduction in any case, according to the plans of work 's.
Second, he decided to tell the public by how much departmental budgets would be cut.
Third, if the government can find more welfare savings, then other budgets won't have to be cut by 25%.
Q: Will you feature programs in general? Or you'll be a piece of sausage?
Both, says Osborne. In some cases the government will look at what functions the state is performing and ask if those are necessary. He mentions the child trust fund as an example.
8.14am: Evan Davis is interviewing George Osborne. He says that Osborne's policies will take state spending as a share of GDP to below the level it was in the Thatcher years. Has Osborne gone too far?
Osborne says Britain should live within its means.
Q: But is this is a political project? It's as if you want to cut spending for political reasons, now, while you can get away with it?
Osborne says his plan is credible. He says that he needed to announce deep cuts because he needed to act with "caution". He needed to plan for the unexpected.
8.00am:What do the UK budget? It 's the question that will dominate the day. I LL 'look at the documents properly later, but here are three sentences from today' s Guardian.
Polly Toynbee says it was a Tory budget.
This was a Tory budget, a very Tory budget, with only a little Lib Dem icing. All its headlines flashed out Tory policies of the past: on their watch unfair VAT always rises, fair income tax never does. To take only 23% from taxes with 77% in cuts ordains that the pain will fall on the poorest people in the poorest regions most dependent on public spending and the rollcall of familiar blighted zones will grow.
Larry Elliott says it was "brutal stuff".
Eat your heart out Geoffrey Howe. Take a back seat Norman Lamont. Austerity has a new champion and his name is George Osborne. Today's budget was billed as tough but that failed to do justice to a package that made Sir Stafford Cripps look like a soft touch. Not content with the £73bn of tax increases and spending cuts inherited from Alistair Darling, Osborne added an extra £40bn of tightening of his own.
And Jonathan Freedland says it will hit the poorest hardest.
Yes, Osborne now feels obliged to speak of fairness, to appear to be whacking the banks and shielding the poorest children in the land; but these are moves born, above all, of presentation and political calculation. Look closely and you see that this is by no means the "progressive budget" the chancellor claimed. It does not pay more than superficial deference to the terms of trade laid down by the last government.
David Cameron will have his chance to defend the budget at prime minister's questions. I'll be covering that, plus all the other reaction to the budget. But first we've got George Osborne talking about it on the Today programme at 8.10am.
Gulf oil spill - A hole in the world | Naomi Klein
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident â€" it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism
Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.
\\ "Talk to others as you would like to say," the chairman of the meeting pleaded one last time before giving the floor to questions.
And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to "doing better" to process their claims for lost revenue â€" then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that "the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up".
"Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O'Brien approached the mic. "We don't need to hear this anymore," he declared, hands on hips. It didn't matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, "we just don't trust you guys!" And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you'd have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.
It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground â€" shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish â€" will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages â€" much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like "make it right".)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money â€" not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn â€" can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things â€" corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.
BP's mission statement
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans â€" like indigenous people the world over â€" believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother", including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man".
Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called "the energy frontier", it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that "a new area of investigation" would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had "the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry" â€" as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: "I don't think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we're faced with now." Apparently, it "seemed inconceivable" that the blowout preventer would ever fail â€" so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: "If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?" Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent "$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year."
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase "little risk" appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology", adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels". The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons". (In BP's telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, "little risk of contact or impact to the coastline" because of the company's projected speedy response (!) and "due to the distance [of the rig] to shore" â€" about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean's capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry's four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" â€" with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be â€" locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore â€" was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, "in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty". By the time the infamous "Drill Baby Drill" Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. "My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death," she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. "Let's drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!" And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: "We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event." And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the "Drill Now" crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster â€" at the corporate and governmental levels â€" has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, ""Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response â€" in the open ocean â€" was "You can't be here then". But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company's claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August â€" repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address â€" is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavour is ever without risk", while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly". By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld".
Make the bleeding stop
Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
The experience of following the oil's progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba â€" then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub â€" everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
There must be emphasized that a uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans know where foreign countries by bombing them. Now it seems we all know about the nature of 's vascular system to poison them.
In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria , "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, So pulling oil will lead to their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying that the Wasn 't as much oil as it was previously.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world â€" in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests â€" as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama's undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere â€" and of course it's all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP's former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP's supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash."
The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward's "If you knew you could not fail" credo, the precautionary principle holds that "when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health" we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. "You act like you know, but you don't know."
Naomi Klein visited Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines , a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant film