Joanna Lumley (pictured below with the much-decorated Gurkha veteran and holder of the Victoria Cross, Tul Bahadur Pun VC) describes on the Gurkha Justice Campaign website the campaign for a decent deal for former Gurkhas who want to settle permanently in Britain with their families: Gurkhas are fighting for Justice. They want the same terms [...]
Some interconnected thoughts on the financial and economic crisis that have struck me in recent days: 1. The media pundits (including the lead story in the FT of 25-26 April) and opposition spokespersons have all been crowing triumphantly over the dreadful GDP figures for the first quarter of 2009, claiming that they demonstrate the absurd [...]
BBC’s Newsnight programme is appealing for viewers’ proposals on how best to cut public expenditure. Myself, I agree with the government that cutting public spending in the early stages of a massive recession would be insane (although HM Loyal Opposition doesn’t seem to grasp the reason for that view, the strongest reason currently on offer [...]
All the press loves a crisis: it sells papers. The Opposition loves a crisis: it attributes it to the government’s failure — sometimes correctly, sometimes not. The masochistic British in general are easily convinced by the right-wing tabloids and the rest of the Tory press, not to mention the CamerOsborne duo, that the UK is [...]
My good intention to leave the Kosovo issue alone for a while, lest I be accused of obsessing about it (which I am, and do), was torpedoed by David Clark’s stout defence of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 in his Guardian article of 16 April 2009 (“Kosovo was a just war, not an [...]
As yesterday’s statement by the Director of Public Prosecutions said with some emphasis, the decision not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative front-bench MP who for two years has been receiving official documents stolen and clandestinely supplied to him by a mole in the home secretary’s private office, doesn’t mean that no offence has been [...]
From the Sunday Times extract from Paddy Ashdown’s memoirs, published 12 April 09 (Lord Ashdown relates how news of a long-ago extra-marital affair was leaked to the News of the World in January 1992): All this made life for my family even more difficult and seriously undermined my self-confidence, too. That, it appears, was precisely [...]
There’s mercifully little to add to the Canadian forests of newsprint and gigabytes of bandwidth devoted to this foolish and shameful caper in which a political adviser at No. 10 Downing Street and a former Labour Party spin doctor, now active, with others, on a pro-Labour blog, exchanged juvenile e-mails about the idea of a [...]
From time to time books and articles appear announcing that aid to developing countries does more harm than good. These have proliferated recently, just at the time when the global recession and collapse of credit are beginning to do incalculable harm to the poorest people in the poorest countries. The recession is doing great damage [...]
