Saddam is a murderous monster fully deserving punishment, but the death sentence at the end of a chaotic shambles of a show trial pre-ordained and organised by the Americans is a moral obscenity as well as another act of political folly [More >>>]
Stephen Grey, principal exposer of Extraordinary Rendition, chronicles this criminal enterprise in a highly readable but chilling book, ‘Ghost Plane’. The moral: never trust even the most benign government with sweeping powers that will sooner or later be exploited and abused by a successor. [More >>>]
Here are the names of those MPs who voted for an inquiry into the government’s conduct over the Iraq war, including a dozen intrepid Labour MPs, and the names of the 298 who either chickened out or valued their ministerial salaries more than their consciences (perhaps an unduly harsh way to put it?). [More >>>]
The home secretary seemed to be doing the right thing by bowing to expert opinion and dropping his plan to abolish the office of the independent chief inspector of prisons, but then apparently achieved the same result by sneaking last-minute amendments into the Bill [More >>>]
Jack Straw’s leaked proposals for House of Lords reform are deeply flawed in almost every respect: flabby compromises and barely disguised ploys to give the party machines control of the second chamber as well as the contgrol they already have over the first. We can do better than this [More >>>]
The Americans have no business attaching unacceptable conditions to the release of former residents of the UK from Guantanamo: their obligation is to close it. That they are deemed not to pose a serious security threat makes their detention in Gitmo even more scandalous. [More >>>]
The controversy over the wearing of the niqab (full veil) has largely overlooked its most objectionable feature, namely the attitude that it implies to relations between men and women in a free society [More >>>]
The former prison service head’s blistering attack on David Blunkett in reply to the latter’s criticism of him in his published diary is all too credible in the light of the flaws of judgement, character and behaviour revealed by the Blunkett diaries themselves. How did such a man survive so long as a minister, Mr Blair? [More >>>]
Q. What's the connection between (1) the public comments on Iraq policy by General Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, and (2) the television comedy drama "The Amazing Mrs Pritchard" in which a...
“Dr” John Reid’s and Mr David Davis’s respective party conference speeches suggest a strange left-right role reversal — and I offer reasons for the inverted commas round Reid’s “Dr” [More >>>]