The BBC have been in touch asking if I would be interested in joining the panel on the next Big Questions programme, featuring lively debates on moral issues. One possible subject would be the ever-fascinating subject of Homosexuality in Africa – as looked at briefly by me here. And here. Check out this […]
Austin Bay mulls over the (as usual) limited options facing South Korea in responding to North Korea’s role in sinking a South Korean ship and killing 46 sailors. This seems a good scheme: Explicit naval tit-for-tat, which exposes and exploits North Korean strategic weakness before a global audience, has more political […]
David Cameron ready to veto treaty to shore up euro So says the Indy headline this evening. Hmm. What does the article say? Mrs Merkel has suggested that all European countries need to be willing to surrender more sovereignty to give the EU powers to prevent another Greek-style eurozone crisis. […]
The grim machinations unfolding in and around Westminster are merely what would happen every election if we had some sort of more ‘proportional’ voting system. In countries where coalition politics is the norm governments can take many weeks, sometimes even months, to form. This wastes time and demoralises the public. It […]
Do our political leaders think about the reality of the difficulties we face as they haggle over the results of the election? The policies of Gordon Brown as trumpeted by Blair/Mandelson/Miliband/Polly for more than a decade have been ruinous beyond any calculation. The very fact that senior Lib Dems are […]
Question What’s the only thing on any political party’s mind after winning an election? Answer The next election Why? What else do political parties think about? Having won an election because their policies and style had the most appeal, the winners think only about how best to […]
Even before any new coalition or understanding is set up here between Conservatives and Lib Dems and/or anyone else, the awful reality of European Union processes intrudes. The Guardian makes a crude lunge to create divisions right from the start: Tory-Lib Dem coalition threatened by secret hardline memo on Europe […]
Remember the Copenhagen Summit climate change debacle? The terrific Spiegel Online has fascinating material said to be extracted from tape-recordings of the key meeting between Merkel/Brown/Sarkozy/Obama and the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister, there because the Chinese Prime Minister did not deign to join the gathering: Now, for the first time, […]
Some random thoughts on latest dramatic developments in the UK, all the more random for lack of sleep. First the Really Good News. As for the feverish politics, note the following. It is not only that the new Parliament is ‘hung’, ie no party has an overall majority. It is […]
A reader in Malta sent me this interesting article from the Times of Malta about allegations that a Maltese diplomat based in Libya gave the British important secrets back in 1971. Thus: Ives de Barro – working at the Maltese Embassy in Libya in 1971 – was giving the British […]
