Reader Nigel Sedgwick reminds me of his long insightful comment here back in mid-2011 on the subject of where or not to draw the line when it comes to state eavesdropping. I reproduce the whole comment here. See especially his concluding thoughts (my emphasis) An understanding of the current issue […]
Dear All, Sorry to have dropped from the Blogosphere. Too much going on in the world and in the Crawf household, and not enough to say. I had an interesting few days giving a Negotiation Skills masterclass at the IAEA in Vienna, then a shorter one-day version of the same […]
It’s hard to work out what exactly Iran’s President Rouhani said in the USA about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions (or not) and/or the Holocaust. We Brits see these events through the filter of our media bias. Luckily we have Press TV to explain what is happening: Although the reports of […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT is out. It recalls in some detail my happy time in the Foreign Office dealing with the end of the USSR and then the Russian transition from communism: I was posted to Moscow as Political Councillor in 1993. We watched this giant country start to […]
I appeared on LBC radio this morning on the always interesting subject of abuses of diplomatic immunity by foreign diplomats in the UK. LBC has done some digging and found that the number of crimes committed or alleged to have been committed by foreign diplomats based in the UK has […]
My piece here on how far if at all one should feel sympathetic towards a motorist who gets distracted and causes the death of a cyclist has prompted several interesting comments: But “unlucky accident”? Sorry, no. I am a motorist and a bike rider. Several years ago, during an urban […]
A sad case. Victoria McClure was sentended to 18 months’ imprisonment for causing death by dangerous driving. She had been adjusting her satnav gizmo and lost her driving concentration, thereby knocking over a cyclist who tragically was killed: Judge Nicholas Wood, sentencing McClure at Reading Crown Court, said she should […]
A well turned piece from John O’Sullivan at National Review on Syria: As the debate on Syria ricochets along, I am struck by a contrast between the internal conservative debate on the crisis and the wider political, diplomatic, and media debates. By and large the conservative debate is both civil […]
Here’s my piece at PunditWire in honour of THAT speech. I thought I’d not say much about the speech as it speaks for itself, but instead look at the legal background to it. Notably Plessy v Ferguson, a case with far-reaching bad outcomes decided by the US Supreme Court in […]
Following my BBC Newsnight appearance last night re the prison sentence given to Bradley Manning, Riaz Ahmed has been in touch to make a strong point: Do you believe that the crew of crazy horse 18 (who murdered those people in Iraq – including two children – 7 year old […]
