Imagine you are the Foreign Office in London. A bit of a wildcat in your youth. Yet still squeaky keen to show Relevance and Cleverness. Egad! An idea dawns. Let London lead the praise for the sybaritic delights of latter-day Western personal freedom! British Embassies should all fly the LGBT […]
Julian Porter QC gave a terse summing up for the defendants in the Maclean’s/Steyn Human Rights Tribunal in British Colombia: Dr. Ayoub, calling on the American injunction, that you cannot cry fire in a crowded theatre. Oh yes you can, you must if in your considered view there is a […]
My Blogoir entry on the latest Serbian elections has been run by B92, a leading ‘pro-European’ media outlet in Belgrade. And the comments flow. Mainly negative, which is fair enough. How many Serbs want to hear the views of a former British Ambassador? See eg this one from John Bosnitch who (if it is […]
Serbia has voted again. Last time round in February Boris Tadic – the ‘pro-Europe’ candidate – handily beat the Radicals’ Tomislav Nikolic to stay on as Serbia’s President. This time round in new Parliamentary elections brought about by the political convulsions of the Kosovo independence decision the Tadic bloc of […]
More on EU Foreign Policy. What is a ‘foreign policy’? Let’s assume that, crudely speaking, it is something like this: What Country A (maybe in partnership with countries B, C etc) does to get another country to do things it otherwise might not do on its own, either because that outcome is in […]
This fierce piece by Sam Leith weighs into the British Government’s handling of the Al-Yamamah fraud enquiry: There was enough evidence of corruption in the Al-Yamamah deal to warrant an independent investigation. That investigation … was stopped after an explicit threat to withdraw a big arms contract, and an implicit threat […]
A good question. In fact really the only question in foreign affairs is this one: Does Bad Behaviour have Bad Consequences? Now we have one answer in the awesome ruling in the High Court yesterday that HM Government had been wrong in law in blocking corruption investigations under official pressure from […]
Now this is a real Balkanic Eruption. We British used to take fierce criticism in the Bosniac media for our part in the international policy equivocations of the early 1990s which helped allow so much death and destruction across Bosnia. Yet whenever President Izetbegovic tried to make this point in our private […]
Looking again at the twitterings of Mr Mahbubani, one comes away wondering why he is so patronising towards if not contemptuous of his fellow Asians. Let’s assume the world is complicated and that running any sort of government structure and pursuing numerous different policy objectives requires ever-higher levels of sophistication […]
The squall over Hillary Clinton’s skewed memory of her visit to Bosnia in 1996 recalls to my mind my own no doubt skewed memory of President Clinton’s set-piece speech in Sarajevo’s National Theatre during his subsequent visit with his wife in December 1997. During this visit much of that part of […]
