Last week, Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, a place that holds 1.8 million people and is geographically placed between all of the warring factions in the Middle East, was taken by a group called ISIS. The acronym breaks down as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and there’s one thing above all that you should […]
World Cup Review 1 – Wrong calls, the Dutch destroyers, and why I’m not sure I can stay up late to watch England
The story for me, so far in this very young World Cup, is the amount of officiating howlers we have had already. The Brazil penalty was bad enough. But in the first fifteen minutes of the Mexico v Cameroon match, two clear and fair goals were denied by erroneous officiating. What was worse is that […]
My cast iron, bet-your-house-on-it, World Cup 2014 prediction (please don’t actually bet your house)
There’s a great Simpsons sketch that brilliantly illustrates the American viewpoint on association football. We are presented with the concept of a “World Series of Soccer” in which Mexico and Portugal are pitted against each other for world supremacy. The Americans, of course, cannot fathom any sport in which they don’t come out as World […]
Casual Xenophobia – “you know the difference”. Or do you?
A few weeks ago, a person I hadn’t spoken to in a very long time came out of the woodwork. To tweet me. How 21st century. The tweet read: “That’s what we need to hear more from, Canadian Lib Dems”. Now, this person and I had never seen eye to eye politically, so him slagging […]
Major Force: Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rise to eminence in Cairo
The newly crowned president of Egypt recently took time out of his busy schedule posing in sunglasses to address the nation’s General Assembly. “In the long history that goes back thousands of years, our homeland did not witness democratic transfer of power. Now, for the first time, the President-elect shakes hands with the outgoing President, […]
Actually, Cameron has a point about The European Commission Presidency
I’ll start off by saying that I quite like Jean-Claude Juncker, the former longstanding prime minister of Luxembourg and current candidate to become president of the European Commission. He’s level headed, intelligent and like me, pro-European. But as a pro-European, I have to concede that now is not the time to have someone like Mr […]
The Turner Prize, the Queen’s speech, and football’s main event
Art is a hard thing to define. Technically, anything can be counted as art. Frank Zappa once said it was all about framing. If a guy is standing around drinking carrot juice, that’s not art. But if he announces his act of carrot drinking as a piece of art, and others proceed to buy into […]
It’s all about Margaret: why Thatcher remains an electoral millstone around the Tory neck
The cliché about Margaret Thatcher is that she is like marmite, and that Thatcherism is an intrinsically love it or hate it concept. I’m an odd one out on this one. There are things about Thatcher that I liked, admired even, but a great deal I intensely disliked about her policies and her style of […]
Should the Lib Dems remain in government until May 2015 – or pull out early?
In the wake of the recent Oakeshott inspired madness, an argument lays unresolved, both within the Liberal Democrats and in the wider body politic. Should the party remain in government until the end or retreat early, say six months before the election, in order to let the “differentiation strategy” breathe a little? I’ll examine both […]
Labour and Tories need to wake up to the nightmare that minority government would be
James Graham, the esteemed playwright, wrote a piece of drama that I’m sure everyone who is in any way interested in politics has at least heard of entitled “This House”. It follows the travails of the Labour Party under a razor thin majority in the mid-1970’s. Having said this, I wonder how many Labour and […]