So here’s a new idea. People who have essential services get to pay a cutesy new tax to fund provision of those services to people who do not have them: The Prime Minister said a fast internet connection is now as vital as electricity, gas and water, and will help […]
Craig Murray links approvingly to the opinions of one Yassamine Mather of Hopi (Hands Off the People of Iran). She takes a view commendably similar to that of Christopher Hitchens, albeit from a rather different lumpen Marxist angle: It is no surprise that the highly contested results of the presidential elections in […]
Here is part of a comment on a previous posting of mine on Western policy in the Balkans: It isn’t the US’s or the UK’s business to "achieve stability or long-term solutions" in the Balkans, the Middle East, or anywhere else. The sooner these two moralising countries (whose own morals […]
Back in 1973 I was at Oxford University with the likes of notorious toxophilist Tony Blair and Benazir Bhutto. It was a time of student so-called unrest, with a mass sit-in at the Schools Building in autumn 1973 to demand a Central Students Union. Basically, see, the point was that the […]
Brown was not discomforted alone. Parties of the centre left fell back across Europe despite the crisis of global capitalism. Michael White in the Guardian glumly picks through the wreckage of the Labour Party’s crashing failure last night in the European elections. Maybe parties of the centre left fell back […]
Or maybe its corporatistic Socialism? Who cares? Part of the problem here is definitional. No mainstream liberal actually wants government to completely seize the means of production, and no mainstream conservative believes that there’s no room for any government regulation or social insurance. Both sides believe in a "mixed economy" […]
Last night I was back again at the Frontline Club to hear Allan Little talk to Nick Hawton about the latter’s new book The Quest for Radovan Karadzic: When everybody else seemed to have given the hunt, one journalist doggedly followed his trail, travelling from the snow-capped mountains of Montenegro […]
Michael Yon has built up a great reputation for going to look at tough places under his own steam and reporting on them to an Internet readership. Here he is following a major US diplomatic push in Asia (not something much covered in the UK). US Defence Secretary Gates talks […]
Craig Murray writes approvingly of the zany survey of political opinions run by Political Compass. But it was posted at 0200 hrs, so maybe baby Cameron Murray was stopping him getting a much needed rest. Read the Political Compass FAQs. They are a hoot. See eg this description of why […]
The goings-on in and around North Korea and its nuclear ambitions takes us back to our old friend Negotiation. See eg this early piece I wrote in April last year about Power and Purpose: Part of getting what you want is projecting a sense of Power and Purpose, so that when […]
