Serbia has voted again. Last time round in February Boris Tadic – the ‘pro-Europe’ candidate – handily beat the Radicals’ Tomislav Nikolic to stay on as Serbia’s President. This time round in new Parliamentary elections brought about by the political convulsions of the Kosovo independence decision the Tadic bloc of […]
At an FCO Leadership event in 2006, a presentation on Globalisation argued that we were now beholding one of the most momentous changes in human history roll out before our very eyes: the addition in only a decade or so of a billion new people to the global jobs market-place. […]
Does it matter if Europe’s population declines faster than in other regions? If it does matter, why does it matter? Here is a neat summary of a few of the issues. I like this line: I can’t shake the idea that the demographic projections are a civilization-wide vote of no […]
The website Biased BBC brings together people dissatisfied with tendentious or evidently slanted BBC reporting and analysis. I have had my own moments of supreme dissatisfaction with poor BBC work, so I share their pain. See especially this, when the BBC got it 100% damagingly wrong at the height of […]
Back in April 1986 Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe made a powerful speech at the Lord Mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet in London in which he called for an an end to the global agriculture subsidy race. I remember it well, as I helped him draft it. Some changes have happened since […]
Great news from Cuba! More reforms! Take the cases of Cuba and, say, Singapore. Both islands in a nice warm climate. Cuba in 1958 had a per capita GDP of $3,170 according to the OECD. (Canada‘s was $8,947) … the island nation’s per person wealth was higher than any East Asian country […]
An article today in the unhappy New York Times purports to describe the Republican Party’s "fractious" divisions around John McCain’s foreign policy ideas. Pragmatists are locked in fierce battle with Neoconservatives, among them the "prominent neoconservative" Robert Kagan. Aaargh. This clumsy piece maybe explains why those NYT share prices have been […]
Once, back in the days when UK/Russia relations were excellent and purposeful (ie 1994), I had to fly from Moscow to Murmansk to help set up a meeting there between British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd and Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev. Murmansk was chosen because it was Kozyrev’s Duma constituency – […]
As Titanic-Mugabe steams urgently towards the rocks one asks oneself: what is really going on here? The key ‘deep’ point to remember in all this is that Zimbabwe leader Mugabe is not (like South Africa President Thabo Mbeki) a Communist, but rather an Africanist. The European Communist tradition stressing class struggle as […]
Type “South Africa peaceful transition” into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Wikipedia has been spotted proclaiming that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made […]
