The heroic achievement of Nelson Mandela was to end apartheid‘s evil racial legal categorisations and associated injustice in South Africa, right? Alas not: The idea of defining and rewarding citizens by race continued. The argument was that drastic measures were needed to help the mass of people who had lost […]
I have been sent this noteworthy message (expletives deleted): /blog/south-africa-and-mandela SOVIET-WORSHIPPERS???? YOU FAT NAZI ******* TURD!!!! NO WONDER YOU WERE FIRED FROM THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE, YOU WORTHLESS ****!!!! IP address: 188.123.252.24 My modest grasp of technology lets me look up IP addresses on the Internet. And this is what we […]
I have written three pieces about South Africa, Nelson Mandela and all that. Two for the Commentator. The first here: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Fine, soaring sentiments. And quite untrue. Between 1985 and 1996 […]
The ‘Guidance’ document External Speakers in Higher Education Institutions put out by Universities UK (‘the Voice of UK Universities’) is attracting attention, and rightly so, for its proposed approach to ‘segregation’ of men and women at speaking events involving speakers whose religious views require such segregation. The document in fact […]
Reader Nigel Sedgwick reminds me of his long insightful comment here back in mid-2011 on the subject of where or not to draw the line when it comes to state eavesdropping. I reproduce the whole comment here. See especially his concluding thoughts (my emphasis) An understanding of the current issue […]
In case you missed it, and I have done my best to miss it, there has been a puny but noisy row in the UK media over a piece in the Daily Mail that pointed out that Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph Miliband, was a communist whose ideas – has they […]
This is a grim article to read, showing as it does how the more exotic parts of modern feminism have plunged deep into the worst sorts of coercion and stupid thought control that echo what goes on in North Korea. Thus on one Canadian university campus – a space supposedly […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT is out. It recalls in some detail my happy time in the Foreign Office dealing with the end of the USSR and then the Russian transition from communism: I was posted to Moscow as Political Councillor in 1993. We watched this giant country start to […]
An elegant piece by James Taranto over at WSJ looking at arguments that libertarian-minded solutions to the supposed problem of ‘soaring inequality’ may do more harm than good, and that conservatives just don’t get what ‘public’ issues really are: Further, even the idea that equality of income is just flies […]
Here is my latest Commentator piece about what the Zimmerman case tells us about self-defence laws here in the UK. Namely nothing at all: A desperate piece in the New Statesman by Jacob Turner strains every sinew to link the Zimmerman case in the USA with the UK’s self-defence laws: […]
