Daniel Hannan MEP berates the fact that UK contributions to the EU Budget are rising steeply at a time when all Government Departments in the UK are being forced to look for deep cuts. (Note: a terse video clip showing Mr Hannan orating in the European Parliament, a melodrama not improved by an […]
I was back stalking in the long corridors of the Foreign Office today, to give a talk on behalf of ADRg Ambassadors. I put in a word for Mediation as an example of the hard-edged soft power tool the UK now needed to be ffective at a time of growing global uncertainty […]
The Crawfs are moving house soon. A valuer came round today to look at out furniture, too much of it for the new place. Over many years we have spent, say, £20,000 on these pieces of different shapes and sizes. How to get anything back now? If they go to auction […]
A delicious insight into the way EU leaders squabble with each other when we can’t watch what they are up to is given to us by Le Monde, as borrowed by Open Europe. The top-level ghastly personal row breaks out over the French moves to deport Roma people. The various […]
A powerful essay by Angelo Codevilla looking closely at the dominant ruling class in the USA: Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at […]
Great piece here about the way the Tea Party in the USA is now a formidable voting tendency, based on mass decentralised networked commitment: Radically decentralized networks — everything from illicit music-sharing systems to Wikipedia — can direct resources and adapt ("mutate") far faster than corporations can. "The absence of […]
While the boring Koran non-burning story was running, over on Radio 5 Live someone used the metaphor that "you’re not allowed to shout ‘Fire’ in a theatre" as the basis for circumscribing free speech. And here is a grander person, namely US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, saying the same […]
The Independent today runs the story of deaf diplomat Jane Cordell’s claim that the FCO unlawfully discriminated against her in refusing to post her to Astana (Kazakhstan) as the cost of the ‘reasonable adjustments’ needed to allow her to work there would not (said the FCO) have been reasonable. And […]
An interesting piece by James Kwak about how his economics students tackled a problem supposedly about fairness in business practice: Today in class, the professor posed the first question from the paper: “A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store […]
The important Employment Tribunal hearing into a disability discrimination claim made by an FCO employee against the FCO raises all sorts of intriguing dilemmas for public and private sector employers. Such as this one. Suppose an employer (Frank) has a good, motivated and ambitious employee (Sasha) who is disabled (in […]
