Brian Barder and I are deadly ideological rivals. He hews to a number of Old Labour-style positions which (for me) are like the sort of exhibits you find in the gloomier rooms of the Natural History Museum which no-one visits. More foreign aid! No to swingeing cuts in public services! […]
Let’s be honest. Honest British folk flee in panic when it comes to foreign names, even easy phonetic ones from former Yugoslavia. Which was why I winced during the Mass of Reparation yesterday in Great Missenden when The Archbishop Metropolitan of Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia) was introduced and mispronounced Lubyanka. […]
Update: see now also this Economist piece by Edward Lucas. * * * * * Yesterday I attended an ecumenical Mass of Reparation in Great Missenden, organised with the strong support of the British Slovene Society led by Keith Miles. The Mass was held to pay tribute to the thousands of […]
Lib Dem Ministers Complicit in Torture Scary, huh? I always thought they were prim, well-meaning political vegetarians, not raging carnivore fascistoid extremists. But Craig Murray knows different. (Warning: he displays a large picture of an Uzbek torture victim.) Behold Craig’s attempt at analysis of Sir John Sawers’ speech yesterday: These are […]
Disclosure note: John Sawers and I have known each other since we worked together in South Africa in the twlight years of apartheid. * * * * * Here on the SIS website is the full (and presumably authorised) text of Sir John Sawers’ speech this morning. The very fact […]
Sir John Sawers has become the first ever Chief of MI6 to make a public speech about the Secret Intelligence Service and what it does. Good extracts from what he said this morning here: Sir John added that it was essential for MI6 agents and other intelligence agencies to be […]
Is hosted by Pirate Party activist Amused Cynicism. It links to a completely zany piece by Natalie Bennett attacking the way the US runs its affairs: The “American model” of politics and society supports a small state and everything possible (and sometimes impossible) being left to the market. And the […]
More confused or at least confusing analysis of the EU Budget in the Daily Telegraph: The Prime Minister last week promised to fight plans to increase the European Commission’s budget by 5.9 per cent and said its 2011 budget should be frozen or cut. Last night, however, British sources conceded […]
Disaster has struck. We here have discovered Trainyard, a beautiful iPod/iPad game requiring you to configure tracks and allow different coloured trains to chug to their destinations without crashing. So simple. Beautiful to watch. Yet so tricky, requiring layer upon layer of raw logic and sequencing as the track junctions […]
Remember all those Eurozone anxieties? They still bubble away. Ambrose Evans Pritchard: Most investors seem to agree that the EU-IMF plan is unworkable, merely buying time for German and French banks to shift Greek liabilities on to EU taxpayers. A Barclays survey found that 82pc of clients expect the eurozone […]
