Several lessons for Labour need to be learned from Nick Robinson’s BBC programme Five Days that Changed Britain, broadcast on 29 July, about the five days in May between the election and the formation of the Tory-LibDem coalition government. The first and most important lesson was summed up towards the end of the programme by [...]
David Cameron’s visit to Washington this month (July 2010) collided with the resurrection by some American Senators of the controversy over the release in August 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government’s Justice Secretary of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Many, [...]
The Kabul conference and David Cameron’s pilgrimage to Washington have generated plenty of articles and interviews agonising about Afghanistan. Ministers are asked what would happen in that country if “we” withdrew “our” forces next week [approved answer: the Taliban take over the country again, invite al-Qaeda back, bombs explode all over London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and [...]
“Is this the end of the UK?” was the title of a characteristically provocative and elegant article in the London Review of Books [Vol. 32 No. 10 · 27 May 2010] by Dr David Runciman, who saw in the contradictory swings and nagging anomalies of British contemporary politics an unravelling of the constitution that might [...]
Ed Miliband, second favourite after his big brother for the Labour leadership, has written a piece on his campaign blog in which he argues for a graduate tax as a fairer alternative to tuition fees. Four of the five candidates now favour a graduate tax and the press reports that the coalition government is actively [...]
The reception for David Miliband’s Keir Hardie lecture on 10 July 2010 has been rapturous in some quarters — e.g. John Rentoul in an Independent newspaper blog, and, more surprisingly, by Jon Cruddas, standard-bearer of the left in the Labour party (“the most important speech by a Labour politician for many years”). This is an [...]
In a recent blog post (here) I recommended some daunting facts and figures on Indeterminate Sentences (IPPs) published earlier this month in a Prison Reform Trust ‘Bromley Briefing’. The text of the relevant section of the Factfile is here. The Prison Reform trust has now (8 July 2010) published a 74-page report, Unjust Deserts: imprisonment [...]
The other day in a blog post about Indederminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) I described the cruelty and injustice of the IPP régime, under which repeat offenders who have served the punishment part of their sentences are nevertheless kept in prison, sometimes for years, until they can satisfy a parole board that if released, [...]
