Tag: UK Politics

  • A grim kind of hope

    Is it perverse to hope, as I do, that the Madrid attrocity is ETA and not Al-Qaeda? If it’s the former, we can expect electoral collapse for the separatists (the…

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  • Inquiring into war

    Here’s a thought. Why don’t we legislate for a statutory, independent inquiry after every war (except, perhaps, those started by others)? The inquiry should be given certain inviolable powers in…

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  • Blair’s political cojones

    Assuming that the top-up fees rebellion was ultimately put down (and pretty brutally put down, by the look of it) by forcing a wedge between the two distinct groups of…

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  • Londonistan

    Illuminating forensic examination of Britain’s increasingly shabby War On Terror from lawyer John Upton in old school liberal conscience, The LRB (I think you only get the first half of…

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  • George W Bush makes good decisions

    Listen, I don’t mean that they’re all good (or even that many of them are), I mean that he just made two big ones that practically gave me goose bumps…

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  • Borrowed beliefs

    So it turns out that Michael Howard’s ‘beliefs’ weren’t borrowed from a tea-towel or a greetings card motto or the dreadful ‘desiderata‘ at all, but from the grimly pompous words…

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  • Howard’s desiderata

    Michael Howard’s sixteen beliefs, published today, read like a National Trust tea-towel with an unsavoury, neo-liberal edge – Max Ehrmann’s syrupy, ubiquitous desiderata rewritten by Keith Joseph – the kind…

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  • It’ll all end in tiers

    Higher education in Britain is in a rut. The post war revolution in access has left behind an effective but dreary monoculture. The end result of 50 years of hopeful…

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  • Bush = Bartlet?

    Neo-con doctrine and tough liberalism collided in George Bush’s positively Bartlet-esque Banqueting House speech last week. Bush said: “we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression…

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  • Davis is wrong about the death penalty

    David Davis thinks he’s got his finger on the pulse. He thinks the opinion polls support his enthusiasm for the judicial execution of serial killers (how do you qualify, by…

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