I have joined the team of commenters and MPs and others over at Dale & Co, Iain Dale’s new current affairs mega blog, providing some of the best political, media, social and sports commentary on the net. Here’s my first contribution, about (what else?) the Eurozone: The point, of course, is that […]
Another sharp piece by Tim Worstall, this time over at Forbes: For labour and product market protectionism, decent public sector wages and benefits, are the “European Model”. And what’s being said here is that you can either have the European Model or you can have the European Currency. His article […]
A handy round up of some of my wise and prescient thoughts from the past year on the state of the European Union. 1 18 October 2010 … Which prompts me to post this extract from my Krakow presentation, a slide entitled Will EU Diplomacy Survive? Indeed, such are the […]
Julian Borger at the Guardian has written a long and well-sourced piece about the hunt for Bosnian war crimes suspects. It even quotes me a couple of times (no great surprises for diligent readers of this site). The key policy dilemma point is here, tucked away in the middle of the […]
One for Whitehall, Washington and Brussels to mull over as they lie on the beach: Political forces cannot redistribute the wealth that the economic system does not produce
Polly Toynbee at the Guardian is the latest victim of an appalling new medical condition, USTPDS (US Tea Party Derangement Syndrome). I mean, listen to this: Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where […]
As I peck at the keyboard there is plenty of scrambling in Washington to try to get together the votes needed to pass the ‘compromise’ package agreed by President Obama and Republican/Democrat leaders. Hardcore Democrats bewail the ‘cuts’. Hardcore Republicans/Teapartyers bewail the fact that the cuts don’t go far enough […]
I have joined the book review team of the LSE Politics blog. Here is one of my efforts on Blind Spots, a book which looks in quite an interesting way about how supposedly ethical judgements are made (or not) and shows how different subtle biases can creep in. However, it […]
Remember the Smolensk air-crash which killed President Lech Kaczynski and so many other senior Poles? Disagreement has rumbled on about how far mistakes or misjudgements made by the Polish aircrew and/or Russian control tower were responsible, but a major Polish report has now accepted that a good slice of the […]
Many of my loyal readers will not follow cricket. Nor do I, tuning into it fleetingly every few years when England manage to do something better than hopeless. But now, armed with Sky HD TV, a fiery England side and nothing else to do, I am enthralled by this England v […]
