Perhaps we’ll make up our minds one day. Our government intervenes militarily where the UN fears to tread/UN fails to carry out its obligations/UN fails to function due to the OIC voting block countries and their anti-western allies (delete as applicable) and the supposed righteous get out on the streets…
Politics
Three days ago, Bob Cole chose to end his life with dignity, with a smile on his face and listening to Beethoven’s Ode To Joy at Dignitas in Switzerland. Last year, he accompanied his wife to the same clinic to end her life. Every two weeks, another Brit has to…
It’s fairly obvious that those of us who oppose the EU (for political, not xenophobic reasons, before the tired old clichés are deployed) are likely to vote no in the upcoming EU referendum. But here’s why those who are passionate advocates of the EU should vote no too. Assuming those…
Clearly I’m missing something. I hear a lot of objection to the use of military drones and I don’t quite understand why. If people’s objections are based on incidents where civilians have been killed by drones, that is not an issue related to technology, but a moral objection. Civilians have…
Last night’s Question Time election special, which saw the leaders of the three main parliamentary parties face an extraordinarily intelligent audience (by Question Time standards) in Leeds gave Cameron the chance to pull out his prop, the note left in the Treasury by the outgoing Chief Secretary of the last…
The C4 docudrama UKIP: The First 100 Days, which aired this evening and dealt with the imagined first hundred days of a Ukip government was bizarre and muddled. It would be easy to point out that production of the programme was funded by the EU or to make reference to…
This is another blog entry written in the context of an article. This time, it’s in response to the comments of grinning, socialist comedian Mark Steel in the Independent. The original article is at http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/charlie-hebdo-how-exactly-would-we-like-muslims-to-condemn-these-attacks-9966176.html and my own thoughts are framed around several of his comments. “Charlie Hebdo: Norway’s Christians didn’t…
25 years ago, in late 1989, I was an 18 year old who had gone through some big events in my life. I had finished sixth form at school and left with A levels in German, French, computer science, and general studies. I had lost my mum that September to…
I’m treating this as a living document, which will be subject to additions and amendments, but I wanted to make a start at least, following several earlier aborted attempts. Following the vote on Scottish independence, it seems appropriate to start sketching out my own thoughts on the future of the…
Commercial channels are becoming increasingly keen to produce the kind of programmes designed to polarise viewers and provoke angry debate; shows with dialogue which is overtly designed to divide. We recently had Benefits Street, and the latest attempt designed to stir up trouble has aired over the last few days….