Update carried also at the Commentator * * * * * Here is Ed Miliband’s Labour Conference speech today – in full. A bad idea to hand out to the print media the same version in micro-sentenced blank verse as used to help the delivery. It looks oddly like something from […]
I am entranced not only by the sound of my voice, but also by the sight of it. Here once again is my contribution to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, describing my long and ever-fascinating diplomatic career. Many points of interest here, including on South Africa’s not-so-peaceful transition away from […]
Just back from seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The good news is that it is pretty faithful to the original story, cramming a lot into the film while maintaining moody and sometimes tense mystery. The bad news is that it is pretty faithful to the book in having a feeble […]
Almost the defining characteristic of an active sense of community is that it is only aroused when people perceive that the established structures of control are failing. And while that might result in a lot of engagement, it is too volatile to be trusted Here she is. Zoe Williams, Guardian […]
Here’s my take on the Riots: For a gold-plated example of progressive sneering, check out the Nobel Prize lecture of Harold Pinter: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either […]
Andrzej Lepper, turbulent leader of Poland’s left-populist Self-Defence party, yesterday was found dead. Apparently by hanging himself in his party office in Warsaw Where to start? The English Wikipedia page gives the basics of his lively career, describing how he came from a modest rural family background and with little formal education […]
Polly Toynbee at the Guardian is the latest victim of an appalling new medical condition, USTPDS (US Tea Party Derangement Syndrome). I mean, listen to this: Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where […]
One for Whitehall, Washington and Brussels to mull over as they lie on the beach: Political forces cannot redistribute the wealth that the economic system does not produce
So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad. Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on. Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of […]
Fascinating and important piece by FT’s Clive Crook on the deep moral assumptions underpinning the USA’s latest public spending dramas: Prof Haidt finds that liberals are driven mainly by intuitions about fairness (who gets what) and harm to victims. Conservatives are guided by those intuitions too, but also by intuitions […]
