A view of the Australian election result — (1)
John Langmore, former Australian Labor Party MP and international civil servant, now an academic and writer, reflects on last week’s Australian elections [More >>>]
Category: Politics
Gordon Brown: thoughts on the present discontents
Gordon Brown’s misfortunes mostly don’t deserve current savage allegations of incompetence, but the government needs to show more humility by dropping some discredited policies and reacting more flexibly to its own and others’ mistakes [More >>>]
Kosovo looms yet again
My letter in the Times (23.xi.07) exposes some myths about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999. Need to head off a Kosovo Albanian UDI [More >>>]
What are the LibDems for?
The LibDems should be pressed to abandon their current flabby refusal to say what they would do in a hung parliament: would they put Labour or the Tories into No. 10? We have a right to know [More >>>]
Some observations on this and that
Comments, serious and less so, on a smattering of recent happenings, from the Queen’s speech and Jack Straw walking backwards in drag, to Camilla, Princess of Wales, and the death of an exorcist [More >>>]
A federal UK ticks all the boxes
An open letter to my MP proposes an eventual fully-fledged federal system for the UK’s four nations, the only solution to the W Lothian question and other anomalies in our current semi-federal, semi-unitary constitution [More >>>]
Abortion: foetus viability is a poisoned red herring
Those who respect pregnant women’s freedom to do as they choose with their own bodies should beware of accepting the criterion of ‘viability’ in deciding the point at which abortion is banned: that way lies a return to a ban on *all* abortion, and perhaps on contraception too [More >>>]
Profiting from crime
The same issue of the Guardian reports proposed curb on criminals benefiting from proceeds of their books and interviews, and Tony Blair’s book deal with publishers for his memoirs, reportedly worth over £5m [More >>>]
A referendum on the EU treaty: bad idea
My letter in today’s Times argues that the risk of losing a referendum on the EU treaty, with catastrophic consequences for the UK, is one no responsible government should take [More >>>]
Rendition, the Movie
New US film ‘Rendition’, about the illegal CIA practice of kidnapping a terrorist suspect for interrogation in a country practising torture, deserves to be seen both for its political message and as excellent cinema, notwithstanding some misconceived criticism in some of the UK media [More >>>>]