The European Union has asked Britain to give them a couple of billion Euros by December 1st on the basis that the UK economy has recovered to a reasonable state of health. On a side note, France is getting what amounts to a £790 million rebate as part of the same package, a reward for […]
Banning e-cigarettes indoors would be the nanny state at its worst
Just in case you were wondering, I am not a smoker. Nor have I ever been. I do have a rather annoying habit of pretending to smoke random, phallic symbol objects like pens and pencil, which I won’t go into the Freudian implications of here and now, but I have never really had any desire […]
As the Commonwealth Games begin, here’s five things worth considering about the Commonwealth
The Commonwealth Games kick off today in Glasgow, and in celebration I thought it might be worthwhile looking at what this group of nations, held together by the fact that they were all once British colonies and in many cases not much else, and uncovering some little discussed facts about the whole thing. We often […]
London’s Russian oligarchs and the rest of Europe
There is currently a live Franco-British spat going on around Russia. But not on the topic most of those ignorant to the details might think. No, not the specifics of a Malaysian Airlines flight which saw 298 people killed. It is based around whether France supplying Russia with a very large warship under the circumstances is really […]
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 […]
Is UKIP a far right party?
I wrote an article yesterday about the Farage-Le Pen spat. I got some interesting comments back on the piece – one person pointed out, validly, that UKIP are in the EFD in the European Parliament and are not amongst the Non-Inscrits as I had said. All right, bad me, but can you blame me really? […]
The Farage-Le Pen spat is a great example of the fundamental weakness of the far right
For a brief moment, it looked like UKIP could be wooed by Marine Le Pen into joining the National Front in a new, explicitly anti-EU far right grouping in the European Parliament. Currently, both UKIP and the National Front sit in the Non-Inscrits “group”. I put that in quotations as it is not a grouping […]
The Geneva Agreement on Ukraine is falling apart already
What is it about Geneva and international discussions that don’t go anywhere? In January of this year, I wrote an article for the New Statesman about the Geneva II talks on the Syrian crisis. That summit didn’t end in an agreement at all, which cannot be said of this week’s roundtable to try and defuse […]
I Don’t Believe Vladimir Putin Really Cares About the Russian People
The reason given by Putin for his stationing of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine is his deep, abiding concern for the Russian people, in whatever nation they live in. At least according to him. This ethos has even been given a name, the very obvious “Putin doctrine”. One of Putin’s spokespeople, Dmitri Peskov, […]
What’s happening in Eastern Ukraine is farce – and the joke is on us
Over the weekend, several towns in eastern Ukraine were taken over by “pro-Russian militias”, including Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Druzhkovka. I put the militias bit in quotations due to there being a lot of scepticism on the ground about just how grassroots these uprisings were. Many of the fighters for the pro-Russian cause were sporting fairly […]