Category: Politics

The Woolwich murder and foreign policy

There are many cogent and valid arguments against using drones to assassinate terrorist suspects in other peoples’ countries, invading Muslim or other countries on false pretexts, and keeping our troops in Afghanistan a day...

Ephems on the death of Lady Thatcher

This blog is on extended holiday while its owner is writing a book (of which more some time later).  But it’s impossible to let Margaret Thatcher’s death pass without adding a few drops to...

Notes on February 2013

David Cameron certainly seems to have got more than anyone (probably including himself) expected out of the EU budget summit.  But before we all go overboard with the congratulations, we might register three churlish...

Cameron’s EU speech: a fraud and a gamble

David Cameron’s long-awaited speech of 23 January on the EU was certainly a game-changer. It was also a fraudulent and reckless gamble. It was a game-changer because it represented a dramatic shift in Cameron’s...

What Labour should do about honours

The publication of the 2013 New Year’s Honours List reminds us (or should do) of how unsatisfactory the whole honours industry has become, and of the need to decide what the next Labour government...

The US Right wants the West to intervene in Syria: when will they ever learn?

The  Financial Times unaccountably published, prominently, an article on 8 December 2012 provocatively headed:  The West must intervene to finish the Assad régime.  Its author was Ambassador James Francis Dobbins, Jr., according to Wikipedia...

Notes on December in a Christmas-free zone

It’s striking but sadly predictable the way almost every media commentator on the affair of the ‘prankster’ Australian DJs and the tragically dead nurse have missed the main point:  namely that a hospital, any...

Leveson’s press law and the prime minister’s defection

There are several possible explanations for David Cameron’s (and other Conservative ministers’) hardening objection to Lord Justice Leveson’s “essential” proposal that the new, press-initiated, independent and voluntary regulation of the press should be “underpinned”...

Depriving prisoners of their right to vote: an imaginary dialogue

On 10 February 2011, Jack Straw co-sponsored a resolution in the House of Commons condemning the European Court of Human Rights for declaring Britain in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights by...

Indeterminate Sentences abolished from 3 December

The Ministry of Justice has at last set the date for the abolition of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), in accordance with the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act of 1...