What is this country coming to, Telegraph columnist Jeff Randall asks this morning, when we cannot even kick out al Qa’eda masterminds, Nigerian rapists, Romanian Big Issue sellers and those nice smiley Polish girls behind the counter at Pret, and set our indigenous chavs to work selling over-priced sarnies instead? Throw in repeated over-the-top use [...]
Posts under ‘International’
Austerity is not working
Jan 15th, 2012 by Gerry Adams.It seems like every time you turn on the news or open a newspaper there is a new crisis in the Eurozone. Last Friday’ decision by the credit rating agency Standard and Poor (an ironic name for such a body in the current context) downgraded France’s AAA credit rating. It also lowered that of 8 [...]
Why this demonising and continuing provocation of Iran?
Jan 12th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Another Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated yesterday by a magnetic bomb placed on his car, the fifth such incident in the last 2 years. This part of a covert war with Iran now under way including: (1) cyber warfare (the Stuxnet virus that shut down a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges); (2) the killing of [...]
Time to man the bulwark
Jan 4th, 2012 by Mark Drakeford.In its first full year of government, elements in the approach to the Welsh economy adopted by the coalition administration in Westminster have become much clearer. For the main part, Wales features only as an object of collateral damage in the wider pursuit of neo-conservative economic policy. This aspect gathered particular pace in the final [...]
North Korea: once and future Kim
Dec 19th, 2011 by David Osler.The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea certainly isn’t democratic. It doesn’t give a hang about the wellbeing of the bulk of its people, and it is a hereditary monarchy in all but name. Still, it is on the Korean peninsula, and by the standards of accuracy that prevail in the state media, one out of [...]
The end of the biggest military disaster since Vietnam
Dec 15th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.The final pull-out of US troops from Iraq marks the end, or perhaps just one stage of the end, of the biggest military disaster since Vietnam. Every US-UK goal behind the invasion has been lost, in some cases humiliatingly. Iran, the target for revenge after the sacking of the US embassy in 1979, emerges as [...]
Iraq and the Arab Spring: a thought experiment
Dec 15th, 2011 by David Osler.Very few things about the political state of Iraq can accurately be described as clear. But now that the flag has been cased and the last 4,000 US troops are on the way home, some sort of preliminary balance sheet is finally possible. As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort [...]
The EU: Getting Harder to Defend
Dec 15th, 2011 by Ben Mitchell.Defending the EU is unlikely to win you many votes nowadays, if it ever did. It’s a bit like immigration: even the most blinkered could probably force themselves to see its benefits, but it’s just a lot more convenient and safe to rail against both, whilst politically of course being a sure vote winner. David [...]
European Union: gamechanger for the left
Dec 12th, 2011 by David Osler.I’m sure Milton Friedman would have appreciated the irony. The neoclassical economic prescriptions developed by him and others in the name of competition and freedom of choice is about to be awarded a continent-wide ideological monopoly, by force of state decree. If Merkel and Sarkozy get the new treaty they need to save the euro, [...]
The EU summit is another failure for austerity
Dec 12th, 2011 by Michael Burke.The outcome of the EU summit has widely been hailed in the British media as a triumph for David Cameron. It is rare that a complete rupture and isolation in multi-party negotiations is regarded as a triumph – but this is a function of the dominant and still growing xenophobia of the British press. Bookmarks [...]
