I don’t recall why I’m on the Cambridge University “Hands Off Venezuela” Society mailing list. Perhaps, if any of them read this post, I’ll get taken off it. But in the meantime I’m enjoying their collective apoplexy over an astonishing memorandum between a US embassy official and the CIA. The absence of any actual scans [...]
Filed under: democracy, foreignpolicy, jonathanbirch on November 30th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
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“So, making education for skilled work our first priority, we need to provide new incentives and new obligations to train; we need to transfer resources from welfare to education and move claimants from passive recipients of welfare benefit to active job and skill seekers; far-reaching reforms of our welfare state and education system to put [...]
Filed under: conservatives, gordonbrown, ideas, labour, mattclifford, tonyblair on November 28th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
One: 500 protesters have disrupted an Oxford Union debate because of the presence of two speakers invited for their controversial views: Nick Griffin and David Irving. This surprised me for two reasons. Firstly, it refutes my theory that all Oxbridge students really care about are absurdly expensive piss-ups. Secondly, it shows that the so-called-liberal ambivalence [...]
Filed under: freespeech, jonathanbirch on November 27th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I never cease to be amazed by the incredibly poor value offered by the TV Licence Fee. £135.50 is a lot of money for anyone. When you think of it as what it is - an almost-compulsory annual subscription to BBC television - it becomes a shockingly high price. People are always eager to point [...]
Filed under: bbc, jonathanbirch on November 26th, 2007 | 5 Comments »
Simple proposition. How on earth can we be comfortable with the government centralising information on all of us in a National Identity Database when it manages to lose the personal and financial details of 25 million people in the post?
Mistakes occur in any institution. Granted. But collating all the information on child benefit recipients onto [...]
Filed under: civilliberties, edballard, ukpolitics on November 25th, 2007 | No Comments »
On May 20th, 1987, Edward Earl Johnson, one of the overwhelmingly disproportionate number of African Americans awaiting execution on death row, was put to death in a gas chamber in Mississippi. He had been the subject of a BBC Documentary, Fourteen Days in May, which had intimately captured the final two weeks of his life, [...]
Filed under: andrewnoakes, crime, racism, uspolitics on November 20th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
It may seem surprising to citizens of a country which may receive as little as three weeks notice before an election, but across the pond no sooner had the Republicans been routed in the 2006 mid-terms the campaign to be the 44th occupant of the White House began. The fact that campaigns are increasingly dependent [...]
Filed under: barackobama, election2008, hillaryclinton, jameschettle, mikehuckabee, republican, uspolitics on November 18th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
David Howarth’s address to Clare Politics provoked an entertaining and animated Q&A session covering the future leadership of the Liberal Democrats and the perennial issue of electability.
As a brief preamble to the first question David characterized the Conservative Party as broadly a party of manoeuvre rather than ideological substance, and the Lib Dem party [...]
Filed under: chrishuhne, davidhowarth, libdems, nickclegg, video on November 16th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
As former govenor of Virginia, Doug Wilder was the first African American to be elected govenor of a U.S. State and remains the only African American to be elected govenor of a southern state. Doug Wilder currently serves as Mayor of Richmond, Virginia — a post to which he was elected by a landslide in [...]
Filed under: dougwilder, uspolitics, video on November 15th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
It is in the ‘national interest’, Mr. Brown thundered as he addressed the House of Commons over his decision not to hold a referendum on the new EU treaty. As the Conservatives waved their arms and cried high treason, Brown prudently shuffled out of the chamber and quietly headed back to Number Ten.
How could [...]
Filed under: andrewnoakes, democracy, directdemocracy, eu, europe, gordonbrown on November 15th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
