While our leaders and Op-Ed writers argue the toss about the rights and wrongs of Ukraine’s possible eventual membership of NATO, let’s not forget that the EU is trying to work with Ukraine and Russia to ‘manage’ various vast processes in which we all have common interests. One – maybe […]
The Russian Duma has passed a resolution rejecting claims that the mass starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s amounted to genocide. This AP report on the resolution has been picked up widely. It quotes the resolution thus: There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its […]
Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated. His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom. It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced. He depicts NATO as […]
As I was saying, the 2005 British Presidency decided to help the EU emerge from the French/Dutch referenda debacles by pushing for a new EU Budget. Like everything which is amazingly complicated, this is in fact quite simple. All sides agreed that a bigger EU following the 2004 enlargement meant a […]
Perhaps my finest career moment came late on Sunday 24 September 2000. I was in my office at the FCO waiting for the first results to arrive in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s elections, where we hoped to see Milosevic fall. My computer showed a first result from a tiny […]
This article makes grim reading. The human cost of Mugabe-ism is soaring to nightmarish levels. Zimbabwe is a case-book study in the cost of Bad Leaders – leaders who for one reason or the other lose all sense of perspective and responsibility, and who then grab all the controls and […]
Some good news from Cuba. If the EU wants to do something useful in ‘foreign policy’ it should start strongly promoting this sort of latent networked democracy and so promote and prepare for Cuban Regime Change. That would have two results. It would help end the current misery there faster. And it woiuld […]
Every now and again one sees something which casts light on an unexpected area of human endeavour. Such as this one about Poles returning to Poland from the UK in a way which redefines the idea of ‘free movement of labour’ in the EU.
A lively debate unfolding on this subject at Samizdat. See plenty of comments on the original thoughtful post by Dale Amon, including now one from me too. This is the Great-Grandmother of Cause and Effect questions. My answer? Spread your bets…
(Transparency Note: I met Jonah on a cruise back in 2005 and enjoyed his ideas and company. But we were not lovers.) What to make of Jonah Goldberg’s remarkable (if long) new book Liberal Fascism? Plenty. His basic thesis boils down to three propositions: First, non-trivial parts of today’s Western Leftist/progressive style and […]
