I have previously written here about the FCO’s approach to ‘consular’ work (ie helping British nationals overseas). See eg here: The media love to pounce on allegations of FCO staff being unkind or inefficient when they find British citizens overseas who have hit trouble. For every hundred people who write in to you […]
How has the FCO managed the Libya and other emergency situations? The only true test of how well the FCO has done is, of course, the absence or otherwise of shrill and ignorant moaning from the Daily Mail. So the FCO clearly passed the Tunisia and Egypt hurdles quite well. What, […]
The Government have made a deft, swift and successful power-play to send in armed aircraft and special forces personnel to rescue Britons from the more remote parts of Libya. The planning that will have gone into pulling off this one must have been first-class. Well done MOD/FCO and everyone involved. […]
I previously offered some operational ideas for Doing Something about Libya. One of them was this: expert support for opening of all Libyan regime secret police and other archives asap – let the dirty chips lie where they fall (mainly in Moscow?) The more I think about it, the more […]
I appeared on Press TV today in a pre-recorded Agenda programme due to go out on Saturday/Sunday. The subject was Libya, so everything we said probably will be well out of date by then. Press TV, for those unfamiliar with it, is Iran’s official international TV station and so steeped […]
A two-party system gets much easier to run when one party runs away. Good stuff gets done quickly.
Most people seem to think that Gaddafi’s long ‘speech’ last night set a new record for oratorical appallingness: "I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents … I will die as a martyr at the end," he said. "Muammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution, I am not a president […]
Here is an eloquent look at Gaddafi’s wretched legacy across Africa from the Woyingi Blog: You can compare Libya’s Gaddafi to Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak but for those of you who are “anti-imperialists” there is a particularly disturbing lesson here because Gaddafi was supposed to be “one of the good […]
(Apologies to Iain Dale’s readers and other readers – an earlier version got garbled) Ed West at the Telegraph puts the issue with commendable boldness: No Arab country has ever produced a democracy, or at least a lasting democracy; none of the 22 member states of the Arab League are classified […]
On the one hand, we have one-man band Dr Gene Sharp (my emphasis): His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble. For decades now, […]
