BBC Radio 5 Live has just been poring over poverty in South African townships and today’s UK Budget. They interviewed some township shack-dwellers in Port Elizabeth where, you will remember, veteran collectivist ANC/Communist Govan Mbeki was all against local self-help. With the dismal results now apparent today, albeit not for his […]
Ok Ok. He has lots of vivid material to work with these days. But Mark Steyn continues to surpass himself. How about his advice to Hillary to dust off her election outfits? Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for […]
Will the EU exist in its current form in a million years’ time? No! In 100,000 years’ time? No! In 1000 years’ time? No, but there may be traces of its current form. In 100 years’ time? Maybe, but much changed. In a mere 10 years’ time? Probably, but perhaps […]
While we are thinking about Poland, check out the blog of Monica Ogrodowski, an American of Polish descent now over in Poland on a Fulbright award. She gives us a beautifully illustrated piece about the Tapestry Triennial exhibition in Lodz, once the ‘Manchester of the East’ – a huge C19 regional […]
The 2010 Presidential elections in Poland, brought forward following the Smolensk air disaster in which President Lech Kaczynski died, have been taking place today. The results indicate that as expected Bronislaw Komorowski of the Citizens Platform party has won a clear victory over Jaroslaw Kaczynski (Law and Justice) with Grzegorz […]
Back from my European wanderings, just in time to see the worst England football performance of all time. Really. The worst since the day when a bolt of lightning zapped the primordial ooze and somehow brought forth DNA. Here’s my question. Why, when the forwards are getting no service from an […]
Slowly but surely the language of lumpen totalitarianism creeps into democratic political life. Scarcely a day goes by with President Chavez of Venezuela ‘seizing’ some or other private company, usually with some banal bombastic menacing statements: A few days ago, during one of the rambling television and radio monologues for which […]
It comes round again. The bewildering inability of an England football team to field a midfield group of players able to tackle hard and/or trap and control and pass the ball with high accuracy/speed almost every time. This time with added goal-keeping cluelessness. The effect is ingeniously to organise the […]
Blogging will be light in the coming week (as it has been for the past couple of days) as I am travelling to Geneva/London/Warsaw and then after a weekend on to Brussels. Today I returned from Strasbourg, the beautiful city which hosts the outlandishly glassy-eyed European Parliament and the rather more sensibly […]
Craig Murray offers some thoughts on where significant cuts might be found in the UK diplomatic effort. It includes this: … our Embassies in EU countries remain among the biggest and grandest we possess, reflecting the days when our shifting bilateral relationships with European nations were literally matters of life […]
