UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband is having a thin time of it. His visit to India featured several apparent misjudgements (wrong tone on terrorism, ill-judged observations on Kashmir and an inappropriately Nu Labour matey conversational style with senior Indian interlocutors). See this vivid demolition job. Plus there is a claim […]
A sturdy piece by Harry Phibbs who got to the point about David Miliband’s misplaced informality and linked it to Blairish ‘anti-stuffiness’ before I did: In a triumph of style over substance, Blair declared a moral crusade against stuffiness in our domestic affairs. Not being addressed as Prime Minister was […]
Back when the Euro was launched, senior US economist Martin Feldstein annoyed a lot of people by warning that the Euro was likely to lead to dangerous new tensions in Europe and between the EU and USA. Here is a flavour of the argument: Since there is no major country […]
The latest round-up is here. Liberal England genially hosts. The Roundup feminist entries seem to my admittedly less than sympathethic eye unrelentingly cross and strangely limited in their cultural ‘reach’, as if only current Western female angst counted. See eg this agitated one by Me and My Army on body hair, […]
Does ‘bad’ money drive out ‘good’ money, as Sir Thomas Gresham claimed back in the mid-C16? This turns out to be Complicated. See Wikipedia on the subject, as well as this lively and elegant analysis. The issue arose because once upon a time the core standard of value was gold. […]
How to annoy people these days? Make the case that the arrest of Damian Green MP was, for different reasons, reasonable: Thus, what we have is a situation where a civil servant has been acting entirely in breach of the core principles of government administration, passing confidential information to a […]
The victory of England over Germany in the friendly football international this week brought back memories of this odious memory: the England team giving Nazi salutes when England played Germany in Berlin in May 1938. According to some versions it was Sir Nevile Henderson, HM Ambassador in Germany, who applied […]
This elegant analysis by Theodore Dalrymple on the horrible Baby P story – read it, overseas readers, and despair about modern British underclass life – looks hard at why many of our bureaucratic structures are dysunctional. Including this fierce passage: … [the] purpose of the British public service is to provide a […]
A reader offers this quote: "How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read" (Karl Kraus, Austrian journalist and satirist) Herr Kraus said lots of arch things before he moved on to the next world in 1936. But […]
Finally, the USA votes. As observed from the depths of Oxfordshire, England this campaign shows the strengths and weaknesses of US-style democracy in vast proportions. The strengths? A succession of epic battles – anyone remember Hillary? The leading candidates making it to this point have shown astonishing leadership, stamina and […]
