Gordon Brown’s YouTube triumph
The prime minister decided last week to announce his new policy on MPs’ expenses by posting a clip on YouTube. I defy anyone to watch it through without falling about with incredulous laughter. Is...
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Government defeated on Gurkha settlement: now demand justice
Joanna Lumley (pictured below with the much-decorated Gurkha veteran and holder of the Victoria Cross, Tul Bahadur Pun VC) describes on the Gurkha Justice Campaign website the campaign for a decent deal for former...
Notes on the present discontents
Some interconnected thoughts on the financial and economic crisis that have struck me in recent days: 1. The media pundits (including the lead story in the FT of 25-26 April) and opposition spokespersons have...
What public expenditure should be cut?
BBC’s Newsnight programme is appealing for viewers’ proposals on how best to cut public expenditure. Myself, I agree with the government that cutting public spending in the early stages of a massive recession would...
The financial crisis: tell the panickers it’s all relative
All the press loves a crisis: it sells papers. The Opposition loves a crisis: it attributes it to the government’s failure — sometimes correctly, sometimes not. The masochistic British in general are easily convinced...
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...
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...
Smearing the opposition: déja vu department
From the Sunday Times extract from Paddy Ashdown’s memoirs, published 12 April 09 (Lord Ashdown relates how news of a long-ago extra-marital affair was leaked to the News of the World in January 1992):...
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...