A sad case. Victoria McClure was sentended to 18 months’ imprisonment for causing death by dangerous driving. She had been adjusting her satnav gizmo and lost her driving concentration, thereby knocking over a cyclist who tragically was killed: Judge Nicholas Wood, sentencing McClure at Reading Crown Court, said she should […]
A well turned piece from John O’Sullivan at National Review on Syria: As the debate on Syria ricochets along, I am struck by a contrast between the internal conservative debate on the crisis and the wider political, diplomatic, and media debates. By and large the conservative debate is both civil […]
My Commentator piece about the notable developments last night in Parliament, noting three reasons why all is not (yet) lost: First and foremost, we risked ending up helping President Obama wriggle off an embarrassing immediate hook (the Syria regime boldly stepping across his own half-hearted ‘red line’) but without really […]
Following my BBC Newsnight appearance last night re the prison sentence given to Bradley Manning, Riaz Ahmed has been in touch to make a strong point: Do you believe that the crew of crazy horse 18 (who murdered those people in Iraq – including two children – 7 year old […]
Two Tweets, one after the other: New Statesman @NewStatesman 2m Of course all men don’t hate women. But all men must know they benefit from sexism, writes @PennyRed https://ow.ly/nYVZg Telegraph News @TelegraphNews 2m Girls escape forced marriage by hiding spoons in their clothes to set off airport metal detectors and […]
Two more superb American articles about Egypt. One by Adam Garfinkle looms at the very big picture and has some mightily wise words to say on the logic of political change: We can see in past developments leading to liberal democracy the dialectical relationships among technological changes, social mobilization, economic […]
My new piece for The Commentator: The main reason why I think it’s almost better for Western governments to say as little as possible in these grim circumstances rather than make loud statements of condemnation is that words without action look ‘weak’. Any statements made are mainly for domestic and […]
Another day, another attempt to broker a deal betwen Israel and the Palestine Authority, this time with John Kerry leading the charge. Who knows, maybe this one will get somewhere. Perhaps the generalised shambles in Egypt and across the Middle East will create a sense that if there has to […]
The speech at the UN by young Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan is deservedly winning worldwide attention. Full text here. Malala of course would have been dead if Taliban lunatics had had their way: for them she is a “living symbol of the infidels and obscenity”. As it is she was […]
Michael Totten, an American writer who likes to follow the action very closely at first hand, comes clean on his many mistakes regarding the slow rise and fairly steep fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Look: the Muslim Brotherhood is not a mysterious new group that no one knows […]
