Sunak’s doughnut strategy
It’s party conference season and last week it was the Tory party’s turn, and this is likely to be their last before the next general election. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, unveiled a sharp...
Category: Europe
Who really lost, and why?
By now it’s becoming obvious to most people that 13 years of Tory rule, with or without Lib Dem or DUP help, has been a disaster for almost everyone except the super-rich, and at...
Did Putin do Brexit to us?
In the years since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it has become fashionable among Remainers to blame the result on manipulation. While the racist and xenophobic motives were plain from some of their advertisements...
No excuse for racism
As soon as bombs began falling on Kyiv, the country’s capital, people began fleeing, mostly to the western borders with countries like Poland and Romania; more than a million refugees have fled the country. Among them are foreign students and others from African and Asian countries, and numerous stories have emerged of racist treatment they had received from border guards, the police, shopkeepers and others while attempting to leave the country.
We don’t need irrational old weights and measures back
Yesterday the government announced that merchants were to be allowed to sell food and other products solely using imperial weights and measures again, a practice that was banned some years ago when we were...
Relaxing drivers’ hours is a bad idea
Last week the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that the government were going to be temporarily relaxing the maximum daily driving hours for truck drivers in the UK by an hour. Normally the daily...
A politicians’ and grifters’ Brexit
So, the Tories finally negotiated a deal to take Britain out of the EU single market and customs union a little over a week before the transition period ended (the end of the year)...
The danger of a return to the death penalty
The same weekend the government signed a wretched trade deal with the European Union which preserved the zero-tariff regime on goods but sacrificed almost every other advantage we had from being an EU member...
Blaming ‘Remainers’ for hard Brexit
There is an article on the Guardian website by Owen Jones, probably due for publication in the print/daily edition tomorrow, blaming those he calls “hard Remainers” for the current threat of no-deal Brexit (and...
Corbyn, Brexit, and Labour’s civil war
I still follow a number of Labour ‘left’ accounts on Twitter and among these there is a common explanation for the 2019 election result, which is that Corbyn’s decision to adopt a second referendum...
Boris Johnson’s vision: tabloid mob rule
There is an article in this week’s New Statesman from Danny Kruger, newly-elected MP for Devizes (right) in Wiltshire, replying to two pieces from last week’s edition which called Boris Johnson’s government aimless in...
What “royalty loyalty”?
In an article posted yesterday on UnHerd, Paul Embery (a self-proclaimed “Blue Labour thinker” and fire-fighter) claims that a recent poll for the site by FocalData on support for the continuation of the monarchy...
It’s not all about Brexit
Last Friday the Guardian printed a letter from a number of famous people who informed us that because of ‘concerns’ about anti-Semitism, they would be ‘unable’ to vote Labour in the forthcoming (12th December)...
As election nears, the witch-hunt steps up
So, the week before last, the date for a forthcoming general election — 12th December — was finally announced and parliament was prorogued (dissolved) for real, after months of wrangling so as to stop...
Homesickness and nostalgia, and why they make bad politics
I’ve lived away from home for two prolonged periods in my childhood and young adulthood. The first was boarding school, near Ipswich. The second was university, in Aberystwyth. The first was two hours from...
Equality feels like oppression
There is a saying in social justice circles that when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Earlier this week I saw a thread on Twitter which demonstrates this experience very nicely....
Brexit and how ignorance has become a ‘virtue’
Over the weekend, we were reminded of how far Tory Brexiteers were willing to go to make sure we leave the EU, come what may: an article from the London Evening Standard from last...
Reality check for BBC’s Brexit reality check
Yesterday the BBC News website published a “reality check” feature on what might happen at Britain’s sea ports in the event of a no-deal Brexit this coming October (or any other time), which the...
Yes, it can be done (borders and Brexit)
Yesterday, I saw a video posted on Twitter by the Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib (for London region) in which he and a bunch of his colleagues stood on the Irish border and pointed...
It’s not self-doubt
So, last week the news many of us had been dreading for months finally arrived: Boris Johnson, the inveterate liar, bigot and money-waster who has a trail of diplomatic incidents behind him, became leader...