One of the whole points of Government always has been … to raise money for Government. Which, as the wonderful book Seeing Like a State explains, is why we have surnames and agreed weights and so on. To raise its money easily Government needs to measure, and it is much easier to measure things […]
Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers. Just to add that at the funeral of Zoran Djindjic Robin Cook represented the UK. He privately told some of the assembled foreign dignitaries how we was about to resign from the government two days later over Iraq, as indeed he did. Robin Cook did not resign […]
Guido on left-wing hypocrisy: Left-wing and Green bloggers have been banging on about how Iain Dale and other Tory bloggers don’t toe the official Conservative Party policy line on on the environment, as if they think the honest heterodoxy of the Tory blogosphere is a bug, not a feature. Except […]
Baffled and annoyed by all the scientific arguments to and fro about Climate Change? Want some help? Try Iowahawk‘s fine DIY guide to producing impressive climate statistics – and to presenting data in all sorts of different ways … As previously noted, it all boils down to showing why the Medieval […]
Let’s pull together some news about the UK Foreign Office in the word’s first blogged FCO Roundup. Or is the news that it has … gone AWOL? * * * * * What has the FCO to say about the elections in Honduras? Not much. HM Government do not have […]
I have been back on the mediation trail, this time leading a successful two-hour negotiation between two people who had fallen out over a private business deal. Flushed from that triumph I headed for the ADR Group conference in Oxford where many leading UK mediators gathered to mull over trends […]
Now we get Europol’s announcement that carousel fraud has cost EU taxpayers €5 billion: The European Union (EU) Emission Trading System (ETS) has been the victim of fraudulent traders in the past 18 months. This resulted in losses of approximately 5 billion euros for several national tax revenues. It is […]
The Climate Summit is in disarray wails the Guardian, all because of a leaked position paper which suggests an attempted rich country stitch-up, or something like that. Points to note: this is above all a Negotiation on a vast and therefore ultimately simple scale Poor countries say: Rich countries caused the problem, […]
Meanwhile over at the ICJ the USA and Russia (and Spain and Finland) have been giving their views. The USA arguments are smooth, somehow rather personal and elegant (including a nice oblique reference to Sherlock Holmes – the dog which did not bark, from Silver Blaze). The Russians are more formalistic […]
