Trump’s troop withdrawal will put Syrian Kurds in danger October 9, 2019 Not many people would cite President Donald Trump as an example of reasoned and level-headed foreign policy making. With fingers permanently hovering over his Twitter interface, the leader of the free world has at times been closer to initiating global conflict through his incendiary language than pouring oil over troubled waters. Despite this – or [...]
Ignore the parades, China has no claim to any kind of greatness October 3, 2019 Seventy years ago this week, Chairman Mao Zedong inaugurated the People’s Republic of China after his decisive victory in the Chinese Civil War over the rival Kuomintang. With the defeated Chiang Kai-shek having fled to Taiwan, the new dictator set in motion his vision of what China should look like and aspire to. Much of [...]
Watch out for the unintended ripples of the Supreme Court verdict September 25, 2019 There are times in the life of a nation when a single decision made by an authority can have ramifications well beyond the narrowness of the issue at hand. When the US Supreme Court decided in Roe versus Wade in 1973 that a pregnant woman should have the freedom to choose to have an abortion [...]
The west can no longer afford to ignore Iranian aggression September 19, 2019 The most curious question about last weekend’s destruction of Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure was not who carried it out, or even how, but why it occurred at this particular juncture. Saudi Arabia and Iran – the almost-certain aggressor given both intent and ability to carry out such an attack – have been shadow boxing with each [...]
The anti-Boris establishment has learnt the wrong lesson from the rise of Nazism September 11, 2019 Never ones to shy away from controversy, Britain’s venerable BBC has recently decided to tantalise viewers of its new documentary, Rise of the Nazis, with the suggestion that something similarly awry might be occurring in the UK today. The BBC’s own media centre touts the contemporary relevance of the programme as being “a timely look [...]
MPs have only themselves to blame for the Brexit mess we’re in September 4, 2019 On 23 June 2016, the British people voted narrowly, but with a clear margin nonetheless, to leave the European Union. The precise form that this leaving would take – with a deal, and if so what type, or without – was not clarified at the time, but the intention was firmly stated and unequivocal. This [...]
The Brexit hysteria is misplaced – humans have always adapted and moved forwards August 21, 2019 There is a profound oddity about the whole of the Brexit process which rears its ugly head on a continual basis – namely the desire of certain commentators and politicians to talk down every development in this long-running national saga as being inevitably likely to lead to national ruin. And not just any common or [...]
The reality behind the benign China myth has been laid bare August 14, 2019 For some time now, the British people have been sold a lie. It is a whopper of epic proportions, and as significant a distortion of reality as was the mythology in the 1930s that Adolf Hitler’s territorial demands and desire to re-arm Germany were somehow normative, justifiable, and containable by the policy of Appeasement. This [...]
Maybe this will be the time that the US finally gets over its love affair with guns August 7, 2019 Even Donald Trump, for once, didn’t appear to believe what he was saying. “Mental illness and hate pull the trigger, not the gun,” opined the President in his prepared statement from the White House on Monday, in response to the latest mass shootings on US soil in El Paso and Dayton which have claimed 31 [...]
A box office approach to leadership could yet break the Brexit deadlock July 31, 2019 A week into Hurricane Boris, and the impact of its arrival shows no signs of abating, nor does its box office appeal. Godfather style, a trail of bodies litter the Conservative backbenches, victims of the “Night of the Blond Knives” as one newspaper called it. The ancien regime has been largely replaced by Vote Leave [...]
