This week Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, is travelling to London for talks with William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary. The two sides are close on almost every aspect of where they would like progress to be made but have between them an impasse. The Russians see the post cold war West as meddling […]
The answer is both and neither, but of the two Vince cable has a much more coherent understanding of the problems facing the economy. Cameron is promoting a strategy which is in part succeeding, but also failing: Vince has analysed what might be going wrong and how best to deal with it. This blog was trenchant […]
There is something very serious happening in America. It is not just to do with money, although money is the catalyst. It is to do with democracy and government. It is not to do with government at every level. Democracy is the engine of almost every strata of public administration and leadership at State and local […]
Not because of ill health surely? Ill health and slowly dying more or less in public are an ancient feature of the papacy. This is perfectly natural in a religion primarily concerned with life after death, which preaches its availability to all, or to all who believe and behave in the ante-chamber of life on earth. Paedophilia, theft, […]
To fight a mid-term bye-election as a government party is difficult. To fight when the sitting MP resigned and is awaiting sentence for a crime is very difficult. To fight when, on top of all that, the headquarters of the party is engulfed in a sleazy scandal involving sex and the abuse of women, when […]
The Chancellor now has his back to the wall. Only bits of his policy are working. Growth is not, neither is the deficit reduction. This is because it was never quite as simple as that. There are two primary problems. One is that the government spends more than it receives. The other is that the […]
It is one thing to fight a bye-election in a seat vacated by the resignation of Chris Huhne, a former minister whose political career has collapsed following a guilty plea to a charge of perverting the course of justice. At best it is a difficult challenge to hold such a seat. To then discover that […]
This blog has consistently lent towards the pragmatic approach of the Russians and away from the Western enthusiastic support of unidentified rebel factions whose post Assad agenda is far from obvious and whose vision of a new Syria is far from clear. The point of contention has been principally whether talks should take place with […]
The news that Moody’s has downgraded the UK credit rating comes as a savage political blow to Osborne and Cameron, but the impact damage is political rather than actual. The markets expected it, government borrowing costs have been rising because of that, and both America and France have found business more or less as usual […]
Of all the news which has percolated through the media over the last week or so, by far the most important for the United Kingdom is the warning from Ofgem concerning the perilous state of our electricity supplies. There are few other issues which better illustrate political failure by successive governments of all parties, than the […]