Can the UK afford to ignore what the EU is doing on Covid-19? Or will it gradually try to join in with its ambitious plans for the future? Opening pubs at 6am was another U-turn for the government. But it didn’t deflect attention from it casually letting drop that the UK would participate in EU […]
The message to those in similar positions of influence remains simple. Be the change you want to be. Use you influence, move the British Museum into the twenty-first century. By changing the dialogue and presenting British history from the viewpoint of the colonised as well as the colonisers, you could make it an even more interesting place to visit.
A reader’s story. In January, one of their vans got stuck in our lawn. Properly stuck. So stuck they had to wait several hrs until a truck arrived to winch them out … Knock-knock it off Amazon. Sort out your app.
Large donations to the Conservative Party and the delayed publication of the Russia report are harming our democracy. Politics costs money, lots of it. ‘Short money’ is the UK state’s attempt to fund our politics and ensure opposition to the government exists in our democratic system. The opposition political party receive £16k per seat and […]
A former vice-president of Cigna, an American health insurance company based in Bloomfield, Connecticut, has launched a stinging attack on the US private healthcare system, comparing its dire performance during the pandemic with that of Canada’s mainly publicly funded and universally available arrangements known as Medicare. Using Twitter, Wendell Potter has admitted that his company previously […]
On 7 May, a plaque to the victims of the Katyn massacres was removed from the wall of the former NKVD building (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in Tver, a city 110 miles northeast of Moscow. Victims’ families protested and the Polish community in the UK wrote to the Russian ambassador in London, but there […]
Let me begin by saying the United States is our friend and ally. The fact they elected a Trump as president in 2016 shouldn’t blind us to that fact. For all their faults the world would be a very different place if Russia or China had been the dominant post-war super power. We should be […]
I can dance, I can dance in my new lockdown pants! Are your pants giving you hot, sticky torture? Looking for that ice silk feel from a unique rhombus vent design? Me neither, but Facebook appears to think I need lots of pairs of elasticated shorts. I can barely find my bubble of benign bigotry […]
Last Friday Regan Russell, an activist who’s been campaigning for animal rights since 1977, died when she was hit by a lorry transporting pigs to slaughter. It was a searing hot day and, like countless times before, she’d been feeding the terrified animals water through the slats in the side of the lorry trailer as […]
Little Fires Everywhere 2020 Hulu exclusive now on Amazon Prime, is a crafted tale about the intersection of race and motherhood. The series was pioneered by the lovable Reese Witherspoon who stars as its joint lead alongside the formidable Kerry Washington. Quality wise, it is not as good as the critically acclaimed first season of […]
The European parliament is considering taking legal action against China in the United Nations’ highest court – the International Court of Justice. This is in response to China’s decision to impose a national security law in Hong Kong and its position that the Sino-British Joint Declaration is an invalid ‘historic document’. A draft resolution on […]
One of the more ludicrous aspects of the ongoing standoff between the government and the EU is the announcement by Michael Gove that, for reasons of “national sovereignty”, it will not countenance the EU having an office in Northern Ireland. Yet, the USA has a fully fledged consulate in Northern Ireland. So do China, India, Poland […]
“A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven; hands have no tears to flow.” (Dylan Thomas) Government buildings and police stations set ablaze, multinational businesses wrecked with bricks, enraged protesters on the streets being tear-gassed and shot at by police officers. Are these the symptoms of the 2020 pandemic? I’m not talking about the […]
Home Secretary Priti Patel, this week confirmed that almost all arrivals to the UK will be expected to isolate for 14 days. Three months into the lockdown, introducing a quarantine period now is too late. Back in March when the prospect of a UK lockdown still seemed the stuff of fiction, I was working in […]
The prime minister has stated that Britain will change its visa system to allow up to three million people “a route to citizenship” if China imposes its new security laws in Hong Kong. Boris Johnson says Britain will “have no choice” but to honour its commitments to the people of the territory. It remains to […]
Full disclosure. I am a white British woman benefiting white privilege. Ever heard of the term ‘racial tone policing’? I hadn’t until a few days ago, nose buried in Layla Saad’s fantastically eye-opening book Me and White Supremacy. Racial tone policing is the act of taking offence when a person of colour talks with emotion […]
A man died on the streets of a major American city whilst being restrained by police officers, pleading that he ‘couldn’t breathe’. Onlookers watched, horrified and powerless until he was motionless. That man was Eric Garner, a 43-year-old accused of selling cigarettes without a tax stamp. The video of his homicide at the hands of […]
A new challenge for the UK, an old problem for the USA. One week after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of Minneapolis Police, America is again at war with itself, with many cities resembling scenes last seen in history books recounting the civil liberties struggles of 1968. We are the […]
Michele Mele reviews Jupiter’s travels, by Ted Simon In the era of coronavirus, when lockdown and social distancing measures have changed our perception of time and space, the world appears even bigger and more scary. But many of us have rediscovered the desire and the pleasure of travelling from the comfort of our own homes: […]
The British government grudgingly published a command paper on the Northern Ireland protocol last week, in response to pressure from the EU to set out the detailed steps the UK is taking to implement the withdrawal agreement signed in January. The paper reveals just how much is still unresolved, with both sides relying on the […]
The city of Hong Kong is immersed in stifling tear gas once again as thousands take to the streets protesting in the midst of a global pandemic. And they have every right to do so, for now. Because what has made the people of Hong Kong risk their health is no trivial matter: the freedoms […]
“Build back better” is a phrase, and a hashtag, that’s being increasingly used in reference to an approach to societies learning to live with the threat of coronavirus for the foreseeable future. It’s a phrase that acknowledges that going back to the old ‘normal’ is not just impossible, but actively undesirable. Our societies were racked […]
While scrolling through the Twittersphere recently I came across this tweet from Benjamin Wittes, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. Ok, let's do a fun experiment using the new @BotSentinel bulk blocker/analysis tool. Here is a tweet from the President, retweeting a tweet from @MZHemingway—both of whom attract a lot of people who rank […]
It is a thin line between national pride and jingoism. If it was not clear already, the UK appears to be dangling its feet into the territory of the latter. But at what point did the line get crossed? Perhaps it was when the government refused, on two separate occasions, to participate in an EU-wide […]
The third round of talks on the future relationship closed yesterday with very little progress on the substantive issues but with the first real glimpse of the UK’s true negotiating stance. Our chief negotiator David Frost told reporters afterwards: “The major obstacle to this is the EU’s insistence on including a set of novel and […]
For many Brexiters striking, preferential deals under our own trade policy was the whole raison d’être for leaving the EU. Yet paradoxically they seem perfectly happy to trade from next January with what is easily our largest and closest market without any deal at all. It makes no sense does it? Free trade deals are […]
The world moved a step closer to a free-for-all in international trade as Robert Azevedo, World Trade Organisation (WTO) director general, announces he plans to quit with over a year to go on his four-year contract. It’s the latest in a series of crises to hit the organisation in the past year. Reuters describes the […]
Fear “America first”, not Covid-19. “Don’t ask me, ask China” retorted the US President Donald Trump in a press conference on Monday after being challenged by Weijia Jiang, the Asian-American White House correspondent of CBS News, who questioned his “America leads the world in testing” statement and competitive approach to fighting Covid-19. In times of […]
Stella Perrott considers the plight of refugees in the coronavirus outbreak and the need for an internationally agreed approach to the disease. During a crisis our concentric circles of attention and empathy shrink, first to family and friends, and then to our local communities as we struggle to make sense of what is happening and […]
There is a growing and increasingly tense row developing between the UK and EU over arrangements for implementing the Northern Ireland protocol in the withdrawal agreement, threatening plans for entry points into the province becoming a de facto EU border. Britain appears to be dragging its feet and going out of its way to be […]
It’s understandable that British farmers want to export their products to Europe, America and the rest of the world. Already, some 40% of our lamb is currently exported to Europe and the National Farmers’ Union has warned that 25% or more of UK farmers could go out of business in the first year of Brexit […]
The coronavirus lockdown has brought a strange tranquillity to much of Europe and now, out of the silence comes the sound of the Brexit ante bring upped. Talks on our future relationship, stalled for a few weeks, are getting underway again with the clock ticking ominously. A videoconference was held this week between the lead […]
Coronavirus has challenged healthcare systems around the world. The unique pressure of a global pandemic has overwhelmed many. The way in which different countries responded to the crisis has been thrown into sharp relief. The American private model, to which the NHS is often compared, has in large measure utterly failed. It’s true that our […]
Stella Perrott considers the impact coronavirus is already having on the UK and EU’s attempt to forge a Brexit deal and the implications for the future. David Frost the UK’s Brexit negotiator reassures us by tweet, almost on a daily basis, that the Brexit negotiations are progressing well. This is in spite of Michael Barnier […]
Why isn’t the COVID-19 crisis presided over by a committee of the wise, people experienced in international politics and crisis management? The easy answer is blinkered attachment to confrontational party politics and the associated dogma. The evidence from our closest European neighbours shows that collaborative, consensus-seeking politics works. The Dutch government called on a previous […]