My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December. I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to […]
Not sure if I have linked here to my LSE book review about electronic voting, so here it is. Thus: The heart of the book is the authors’ emphasis on sensible risk analysis. Above all, they punch on the nose the odious “precautionary principle” – the superficially appealing but in fact […]
Here’s an astute point I heard at a top FCO meeting recently:”The world of states and the world of people are diverging…”Neatly put, and profoundly true. See also the Eurozone, passim.How does that apply to Russia? Russia is the sprawling space on earth which took to the highest, maddest level […]
Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair’s Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency: "… the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force" Almost anything said by the Western world’s […]
We mere taxpayers suspect in our dark hearts that a formidable industry has grown up around the ‘climate change’ issue, with all sorts of organisations big and small depending on state handouts to survive, and so frothing up the climate issue regardless of the facts to make sure that those handouts […]
Here is a handy one-stop-shop for most of my articles for DIPLOMAT magazine. It includes a link to my latest piece on Diplomatic Drafting and Wikileaks: When I was Ambassador in Poland, the FCO published a fat volume of diplomatic despatches from the 1950s and 1960s, so I could see […]
In case you haven’t seen it already, here is my latest DIPLOMAT article – this one on the flawed first principles underlying the EU’s current problems. It considers several basic principles of the way the EU works and notes that the current crisis is so painful because it is putting […]
Who’s not seen Japanese mayhem movie classic RoboGeisha? It’s all about young ladies who get captured by a wicked arms corporation which turns itself into a giant robot and tries to drop an H-bomb down Mt Fuji to make the Japanese people ‘rise up’. Quite why they would rise […]
Back from the 2011 UK Speechwriters’ Guild annual conference in Bournemouth. Thoughts. The conference was preceded by an interesting new initiative, the first UK Business Speaker of the Year competition. It was won in a canter by Phillip Khan-Panni, whose superb voice and timing demolished the other competitors. More importantly, insofar as […]
Is here. It looks at The Secret History of Democracy by Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). And finds it more tendentious than enlightening. Basically, straining to demonstrate that the ‘Western narrative'( sic) of democracy is seriously incomplete, the editors define democracy in a dumbed-down prim post-modern way which […]
