A reader picks up on my grumpy remarks below about Professor Lieven and asks: Seriously, Charles. What’s with the zero-sum thinking? Fair enough. One answer might be that modish moaning about Western Greed seems to me to miss the Point by several miles. Which Point is that we probably have […]
The idea is back that a wise thing to do is bring back state-sponsored ‘industrial policy’. See eg Lord Mandelson: "We need to focus on areas of policy like technology, skills, regulation and investment and export markets – and how we set the relevant conditions for business success in these areas," he […]
While perusing the FT‘s website I saw this exhortation to Mancunians to vote for a Congestion Charge. In a bewildering display of insolence towards the FT, Manchester has voted massively No: With a margin of almost four to one, a referendum in which more than 1m people participated rejected plans […]
On Monday I saw my old boss Pauline Neville-Jones (now a Conservative peer leading on Security) give a presentation about Conservative Party security policy. Some good ‘classic’ points (down with multi-culturalism, up with the border security and associated changes in Whitehall needed to defend a Free Society), but I was left […]
Networked activism – the overwhelming aim is to be networked and active. And supremely self-important: They seem to be laboring under the impression that their iconic future president doesn’t possess sufficient willpower to resist the poisonous mumblings of a man like Brennan, leading him from the True Path upon which […]
They warned at the last British elections that if we voted Conservative the poor would be brutalised by a mean, uncaring government. And they were right…
A reader kindly draws our attention to a further major demolition of Slavoj Zizek by Johann Hari at the New Statesman: So is Zizek a kind of philosophers’ Borat, taking ludicrous positions to see how far he can push them? His followers dismiss every depraved political statement as an ironic […]
Foreign readers: see the latest outlandish development here in the UK. A highly-placed civil servant is suspected of leaking government material to a senior Oppostion MP. So the police descend on the MP’s house and arrest him, while also arresting the leaker. This development – arresting a politician for receiving […]
A good friend of mine died on Tuesday, after a long life (not quite 100) and a fairly short final decline. I was there. She had been in hospital in London for some weeks, suffering from accumulating ailments brought about (I suppose) by sheer old age. I had tried to […]
Thus the Guardian leader this morning describes the political race now on in the UK following the financial debacle: Everything is possible now. An extraordinary, history-changing contest has been got underway. A sentence of pitiful illiteracy. Over in the Telegraph a snappy writer, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, asks a tragic question: is […]
