In my eccentric Left phase as a student I got very depressed by a popular book by a young David Horowitz, a prominent American Leftist who railed at great length (460 pages) against the iniquities of Amerika and its unforgiving anti-communist foreign policy machinations. Not only was the USA surrounding the […]
Maybe it all gets just too complicated. Too many things go wrong at the same time. The capacity of the world’s leaders and institutions to respond in a coherent and authoritative way on several huge problems at the same time ebbs away. This opens the way for calculated lunges by different regional […]
When I was growing up, Israel was a favourite in some progressive quarters – an open-minded and successful society in a national-socialist Middle East, with trendily progressive kibbutzim where gap year students could go and hang out in the sunshine. Israel had been created in 1948 with the best possible level of international credibility […]
Craig Murray rumbles in Tashkent: There is much consternation at the apparent decline of Gulnara Karimova’s multi-billion dollar company, Zeromax – which owns Uzbekistan’s most valuable economic assets … Gulnara is of course the daughter and favoured successor of dictator "President" Islam Karimov. And we all recall what an appalling piece of […]
Austin Bay mulls over the (as usual) limited options facing South Korea in responding to North Korea’s role in sinking a South Korean ship and killing 46 sailors. This seems a good scheme: Explicit naval tit-for-tat, which exposes and exploits North Korean strategic weakness before a global audience, has more political […]
John Redwood MP puts it tersely: Its first task, as stern budget superviser urging member states to rein in deficits, should be to make dramatic reductions in the EU budget. From each member states point of view the money spent on EU matters and projects is of more marginal importance […]
As readers will have noticed, someone describing himself/herself as George Dutton is now following this site closely and commenting with oh-so-clever remarks celebrating Socialism. He quotes from a remarkable essay by Albert Einstein on Why Socialism? from 1949. Here is Albert fretting over the survival of the human race (as well […]
Over at Business and Politics: Driving back home yesterday I almost crashed the car, so overwhelmed I was by a blast of noxious fumes verily of Icelandic proportions erupting from the radio. A senior TUC person was intoning that it would be wrong for the new government to make deep […]
The grim machinations unfolding in and around Westminster are merely what would happen every election if we had some sort of more ‘proportional’ voting system. In countries where coalition politics is the norm governments can take many weeks, sometimes even months, to form. This wastes time and demoralises the public. It […]
Question What’s the only thing on any political party’s mind after winning an election? Answer The next election Why? What else do political parties think about? Having won an election because their policies and style had the most appeal, the winners think only about how best to […]
