Like the great majority of European public opinion, I hope Vice-President Biden wins next month, and wins big. Though the decision is American voters’ alone, the presidency of Donald Trump has had catastrophic effects for us Europeans too. The oddity is that the diplomatic damage that the Trump administration has inflicted on America’s allies demonstrates […]
In August 1990, the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, a member-state of the United Nations. The efforts of a US-led coalition to militarily reverse this flagrant aggression a few months later had the backing of the United Nations and the authorisation of a Security Council resolution. But one organisation in […]
Among the merits of Keir Starmer’s Labour conference speech on Tuesday is that it wasn’t Delphic. It could scarcely have been a clearer repudiation of the record of his predecessor. Whereas after Labour’s catastrophic defeat in December Jeremy Corbyn claimed to have won the argument, Starmer said: “When you lose an election in a democracy, […]
It’s almost exactly 20 years since the worst ruler in Europe since 1945, Slobodan Milosevic, bowed to popular pressure and resigned the presidency of Serbia. The issue that had prompted huge demonstrations against him was not his genocidal campaigns that had laid waste to much of the former Yugoslavia, but his penchant for ballot-rigging. He […]
An autocracy faces an existential crisis the moment that its subjects perceive they are not alone in their discontent. For Nicolae Ceaușescu, the kleptocratic thug who tyrannised Romania for more than two decades, it came one day in December 1989. Herded unwillingly into Revolution Square in Bucharest to listen to the dictator’s hollow slogans, crowds […]
There is a voluminous literature of ideological converts travelling from left to right (and of a few people going in the other direction). Some of it is outstanding. Witness by Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy, is a memoir of honesty and even beauty, whether or not you share the conservative politics and Christian faith he came […]
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has embraced autocrats and insulted allies. His decision to withdraw almost 12,000 US troops from Germany makes a perverse sort of sense only in that light, for it doesn’t have even a passing strategic rationale. President Trump’s purported justification is Germany’s failure to meet Nato targets for defence spending. “We […]
Many years ago I did a panel debate with Jeremy Corbyn on Iran’s nuclear programme, to which there is no easy answer (though the joint comprehensive plan of action has done what it was supposed to do). The moderator read out a series of bloodcurdling anti-Semitic statements from President Ahmadinejad, then in office, to get […]
Vladimir Putin’s regime has altered the boundaries of Europe by force, murdered a former Russian spy in London with polonium, and deployed nerve agent in a British city in an attempt to murder another along with his daughter. It is hardly beyond the bounds of the possible that it has also meddled in this country’s […]
Statues cause controversy. In Banja Luka, the second-largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, preparations are underway for creating and erecting one to Peter Handke, the 2019 Nobel laureate for literature. The motivation is not aesthetic but xenophobic. Banja Luka is the main city of the Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority political entity that has been carved […]
If you travel in sub-Saharan Africa, and talk especially to policymakers and NGOs, it won’t take long to get a sense of how greatly admired in the region is a former US president. I’m not talking about Barack Obama, despite his Kenyan heritage, or even JFK, for backing decolonisation. I mean George W Bush. In […]
It’s exactly 31 years since Chinese military forces crushed a peaceful weeks-long protest in Tiananmen Square. Certainly hundreds and possibly several thousands of students and others were killed in this infamous massacre. The anniversary would have been marked today, with especial poignancy, by protesters in Hong Kong, but for the coronavirus. While the murderous gerontocracy […]
The coronavirus crisis is a conspiracy. It’s the latest scheme concocted by Big Pharma in alliance with the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organisation to make money. This “circular cabal” are pushing vaccines on consumers, which damage health by weakening their immune systems. So far from shielding you, wearing a face mask “literally activates […]
All changed, changed utterly. Such is the state of public debate regarding health, welfare and the economy after a few weeks of lockdown. The global pandemic may also alter for good the debate on mental health, and it’s vital we get it right. Writing for the World Economic Forum, Dr Elke Van Hoof, a Belgian […]
Bill Dod, an anchor for the RT UK News channel, recently posted on Twitter a clip of himself and his colleagues clapping for carers. Dod’s career experience includes stints as a quiz show host on the Carlton Food Network and a location reporter on the Travel Channel, and he may not have quite grasped the […]
Ruth David died of Covid-19 at Leicester Royal Infirmary on Monday. You won’t know her name but she was a witness to the defining event of our age. She was born Ruth Oppenheimer in Germany in 1929 and was among the Jewish children who escaped Nazi persecution to Britain on the Kindertransport. She never saw […]
“Inflation,” wrote Harold Wilson in his account of his government of 1974-6, “is father to unemployment.” To those too young to recall the 1970s (a strange era matchlessly described by Francis Wheen in his cultural history Strange Days Indeed), it may seem curious that political debate of the time was so focused on inflation. After all, […]
The digital age has shortened the distance between voters, politicians and journalists. Opinions will differ but I doubt this is healthy for civic life. As James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers in 1787, a “pure democracy [we’d say direct democracy] … can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction”, and provides inadequate protection for […]
The first task of policy in a public health crisis is to save lives. The second is to try and mitigate the economic damage. The coordinated monetary and fiscal stimulus announced this week by, respectively, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor is the right course. But there will be side-effects, and […]
Government bureaucracies have no inherent tendency to allocate resources efficiently. The exchange of goods and services between one country and another generally raises real incomes in both. These propositions are not exactly startling insights. They are so obviously demonstrated by the history of, respectively, modern command economies and the international trading system as to be […]
