Poland claims to have the EU’s longest ‘external’ border. Hmm. Our coastline is an external EU border. It is over 12,000km long, far longer than Poland’s EU ‘external’ eastern borders with Russia/Belarus/Ukraine and its maritime border combined. But (with so many islands) Greece’s coastline borders are over 13,000km, and on […]
Talking of small government, here is a legendary example of the difference between Capitalism and State Socialism. The latter in this case ably represented by a Conservative Government in London. Back in 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated there were fears that millions of Russians would starve to death. We had […]
Hurrah. An African leader hits a corpulent target, calling for the FAO to be abolished. Meanwhile rich countries scatter yet more subsidised food aid here and there, to Do Something. When the Soviet Union collapsed there were fears that Russians would starve to death in ther millions. I sat in on Whitehall […]
A long self-promoting piece by David Edgar on how generations of ‘renegades’ have left the Left is worth a quick glance, if only to see how some privileged people can end up in a severe state of confusion. Edgar names many renegades. Thus: [C]ommentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew […]
Once, back in the days when UK/Russia relations were excellent and purposeful (ie 1994), I had to fly from Moscow to Murmansk to help set up a meeting there between British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd and Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev. Murmansk was chosen because it was Kozyrev’s Duma constituency – […]
While our leaders and Op-Ed writers argue the toss about the rights and wrongs of Ukraine’s possible eventual membership of NATO, let’s not forget that the EU is trying to work with Ukraine and Russia to ‘manage’ various vast processes in which we all have common interests. One – maybe […]
This Guardian piece by Professor Robert Service about NATO/Russia has been noted in Poland. One sentence caught my eye (highlighted): What is more, Russians, from their present and future Presidents downwards, can see no justification for the US to turn states on Russia’s borders into engines of American regional power. […]
The Russian Duma has passed a resolution rejecting claims that the mass starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s amounted to genocide. This AP report on the resolution has been picked up widely. It quotes the resolution thus: There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its […]
Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated. His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom. It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced. He depicts NATO as […]
The point of the Internet is that it is the World Wide Web, right? So that in principle everyone can get to see everything? Yes. That works because websites have common computer addresses within the single overall global ICANN system. But what if that stopped being the case, with rival regional Webs jostling […]
