Brian Barder's website

Entries in March, 2010

[Internet connection down for a few days] PS Restored already!

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Update, a.m. Friday 26 March: We are back online earlier than expected.  It turned out that Virgin Media cable broadband (and cable television) had gone down throughout almost the whole of south London, so we didn’t have to wait until Monday for them to realise that something needed to be done about it. Business as [...]

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Some thoughts about March

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

This is another collection of thoughts about a few of the events and controversies of the last few weeks, seen from the perspective of a committed supporter of the Labour Party who is also an unhappy critic of some of the things our governments have done since the glad confident morning of 2 May, 1997, [...]

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Gordon Brown at the Iraq Inquiry: the unanswered killer question at last

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

The prime minister’s brave decision to give evidence at the Iraq Inquiry on 5 March provided the opportunity for the central question about the Iraq war to be put bluntly and persistently to the second most senior member of the Blair government that took us to war, enabling us all to judge the adequacy or [...]

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Famine relief aid to Ethiopia diverted? A misleading BBC allegation

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

A BBC programme broadcast today, and the advance publicity for it, give the impression that a huge proportion of the famine relief aid given by the international community to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted from starving people to buy arms and ammunition for use in the civil war then raging in the northern parts [...]

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Perils of a hung parliament — and of PR

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

With the opinion polls momentarily suggesting a narrow gap between the Conservatives and Labour, the chattering classes’ newspapers and current affairs programmes on television are full of pundits agonising about the dangerous implications of a hung parliament after the impending general election — i.e. a result in which no single party has an overall majority [...]

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