Someone at the BBC seems to have it in for Ethiopia, for some reason. Newsnight, the BBC’s most trusted and supposedly authoritative of current affairs programmes, this week (on 21 September 2011) thriftily recycled...
The government’s proposals for House of Lords ‘reform’ are a nonsense, but that’s no reason to give up on more sensible and progressive options for change. Devolution has brought us half-way into a UK...
As soon as the Libyan rebels appeared to have captured most of Tripoli, there was an outbreak of decidedly premature triumphalism by some, but not all, of the noisiest cheer-leaders for the NATO bombing...
On 3 July New York Magazine (not to be confused with the New York Times magazine) published an analysis of the challenges threatening President Obama’s re-election which has a huge resonance for us in...
More than enough has been written from all parts of the political spectrum about the underlying causes of the recent riots, looting and arson all over England. Most of those causes are too obvious...
I venture to disagree with the view expressed on LabourList by Claude Moraes MEP that there are significant lessons to be learned from the horrific mass murders committed, by his own admission, by Anders...
Dear D.I.D.: Here are some reactions to your ideas about a federal system for the UK, as seen from your viewpoint in Canada (itself of course a federation). I appreciate your kind remarks about...
You’d think we hadn’t noticed, years ago, that scruple-free muck-raking newspapers eavesdrop on phone conversations (forgotten Squidgygate already?), or that squalid media organisations bribe the police for information, or that cowardly politicians of left...
In my last post on this blog, I celebrated what looked like the impending abolition of the vicious system of IPPs, or Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection. It seems I spoke too soon. Ken...
There are more good things in what’s left of Ken Clarke’s sentencing reform measures than most liberal commentators admit. The biggest and best is the promise to scrap Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs). ...