Brian Barder's website

Examples of several eyebrow-raising items in yesterday’s ‘Observer’ newspaper, with commentary [More >>>]

The power of the whips to control the votes of their MPs by the threat of de-selection and the end of a political career is at the heart of the government’s almost total control of parliament. Three suggestions for breaking its grip and an invitation to suggest more — but please not PR! [More >>>]

Repeal of the blasphemy law will have little or no effect. The (unnecessary) law on incitement to religious hatred is confined to *threatening* words or behaviour *intended* to incite hatred, so literature and criticism of religion as such seem safe [More >>>]

The ‘viability test’ for determining when in a pregnancy abortion should be banned has been comprehensively discredited as fallacious and dangerous, but both Labour and Tory leaders, as well as the anti-abortion lobby for its own doctrinaire reasons, continue to support it [More >>>]

Another collection of linguistic barbarities from the media and the Web. The horror! The horror! [More >>>]

Tim Garton Ash urges us to demand that Russia observes standards of behaviour which we fail to observe ourselves, as my letter in today’s Guardian shows. Relations with post-Soviet Russia have been consistently bungled by the west [More >>>]