Kosovo yet again (sorry!) With 24 Apr update
My good intention to leave the Kosovo issue alone for a while, lest I be accused of obsessing about it (which I am, and do), was torpedoed by David Clark’s stout defence of the...
Category: Politics
The Tory MP and his Home Office spy: part 3
As yesterday’s statement by the Director of Public Prosecutions said with some emphasis, the decision not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative front-bench MP who for two years has been receiving official documents stolen...
Mr McBride and Mr Draper: but who let the cat out of the bag? With update 19.04.09
There’s mercifully little to add to the Canadian forests of newsprint and gigabytes of bandwidth devoted to this foolish and shameful caper in which a political adviser at No. 10 Downing Street and a...
The campaign against development aid: a counterblast
From time to time books and articles appear announcing that aid to developing countries does more harm than good. These have proliferated recently, just at the time when the global recession and collapse of...
Americans debate torture
Some of us on the eastern side of the great ditch have been bemused by what appears to be a certain ambiguity in American attitudes to torture. Waterboarding and other ‘harsh’ interrogation techniques had...
Musical but not comedy in English jails — Straw
Last autumn our most debased and shameless tabloid newspaper, Murdoch’s Sun, denounced with its usual fake indignation a ‘comedy workshop’ at an English prison, attended by a convicted Muslim terrorist and other assorted evil-doers. ...
An open letter to my MP: Stop Government abuse of personal information (with triumphant update 8 March 09)
An open letter to my MP, Sadiq Khan, MP [but now see update appended below]: Dear Sadiq, Here is an appeal with which you, as a former civil rights lawyer of great distinction, will...
Gaza’s borders are Israel’s too
During and after the recent conflict in and around Gaza, the media in the UK and many other commentators commonly referred to Israel’s ‘blockade’ of Gaza, imposed by closing the frontier crossing-points between Gaza...
More on the scandal of indeterminate sentences
In an uncharacteristically short letter published in today’s Guardian I have compared the outrage of our system of indeterminate sentences with Cuba’s practice of locking people up on the charge of being a “social...
Interviewing Netanyahu and analysing the Gaza phenomenon
Two and a half years ago I posted on this blog a provocative extract from a BBC interview with Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the issue of proportionality....