After leaving the FCO in a noisy cloud of sparks, my former colleague Craig Murray has made a name for himself as an activist promoting all sorts of Progressive Causes. This BBC account from 2004 does a good job in summarising some of the professional issues the Murray saga threw up […]
A long self-promoting piece by David Edgar on how generations of ‘renegades’ have left the Left is worth a quick glance, if only to see how some privileged people can end up in a severe state of confusion. Edgar names many renegades. Thus: [C]ommentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew […]
The BBC reports firm action by Iraqi security forces against ‘militants’ in and around Basra as well as various ‘fighters’ in Baghdad. Not long ago these various violent factions were known as ‘insurgents’. Has General Petraeus done so well with his Surge in killing or neutralising a sufficiently large number of ‘insurgents’ […]
What is unfolding now in Zimbabwe is what we would have seen in Serbia in 2000 if Milosevic had had his way in the elections which brought him down. An extended attempt to avoid declaring a result through trite, pompous bureaucratic and legal manoeuvres. This is aimed at taking the psychological […]
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian shrieks today that pink ‘Girlification’ is destroying the ‘hopes of 1968’. She cites National Statistics Office numbers as showing that "women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. This is the motherhood penalty – and the more children a woman has, […]
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 […]
Having worked for the FCO for nearly 30 years, I now tend to brood in a maudlin sort of way on the Big Picture. Not for me any more the excitement of the next Ministerial visit or the latest meeting of world leaders. See for example the outcome of the recent Progressive […]
The BBC shows us pretty pictures of a display of Chairman Mao badges at the British Museum: they are said to be "very red, very bright, and very shiny" by Museum Curator Helen Weng. One of the striking features of living in Poland is to visit flea markets such as […]
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 – […]
