The FCO website publishes astonishing and shaming statistics about the huge number of demands by Brits abroad for consular assistance following e.g. deaths, arrests, hospitalisations and lost passports, with intriguing discrepancies between figures for different countries [More >>>]
Some comments on a few good and rather more less good things collected recently from the print media [More >>>]
Read the vivid description of an Australian’s visit to Vietnam in June 2007 by Jill Greenwell, sharp observer and writer of clarity and precision: https://barder.com/misc/vietnam.php
Anne Lapping’s and Andrew Rawnsley’s TV retrospective of the Blair years offers many new insights and familiar footage, prompting disagreement with its misleading account of Blair’s role at Kosovo and Chirac’s at the UN before the Iraq war. But many good things redeem the programme [More >>>]
Stephen Grey’s latest revelations of extraordinary rendition by US intelligence are recounted in a major UK TV programme. How can such criminal misdeeds continue in the US, of all countries? [More >>>]
An unpublished letter to the Guardian shows that the 1999 NATO attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo was not a Blair triumph, as often claimed, but an illegal, unnecessary and unsuccessful misadventure whose misrepresentation as a justified success led on to Iraq [More >>>]
The evidence does not support the recently repeated myth that in resigning over the Falklands war, Lord Carrington and his FCO ministerial colleagues were selflessly carrying the can for the errors of their officials. But the myth persists [More >>>]
The Iranian kidnapping of the fifteen Brits has divided UK opinion into romantics who blame the Brits for not resisting capture and for cooperating with their captors, and those who are relieved that they were released without bloodhsed. The usual suspects condone the Iranians’ action because they ‘understandably’ hate the British [More >>>]
My meme on what I was doing the day the Iraq war began: watching the destruction of Baghdad live on TV with horror and disgust, but distracted by simultaneously selling our house, by an imminent visit to New York and by a computer bug [More >>>]
Four of Mr Blair’s expensive follies, Iraq, Trident, ID cards, the Olympics, are costing us around £143 billion over just a few years. How did the Chancellor, successive cabinets and a majority of Labour MPs allow this gross waste of money to be approved? [More >>>]