Month: July 2014

Regular readers will know that I appear to be slightly obsessed with this small corner of English local government. Partly, I freely admit, is purely personal: last year its mayor, Lutfur Rahman, ably demonstrated his unfitness to hold public office by wasting the time of his local police in pursuing someone who disagreed with him (i.e.… Continue reading Tower Hamlets: the net tightens

“We touched nothing” – Donetsk press conference. Photo: RT How long did we in the West really think it would be before the Ukraine crisis actually affected our own countries and we had to take our heads out of the sand?  That moment definitively came last Thursday, with the crash of Malaysian Airlines’ flight MH17,… Continue reading Oh, Russia.

If you needed any justification for the argument that Alex Salmond is merely a clever populist, who is probably a couple of months away from seriously overreaching himself, you have only to look at his position on the Gaza, where the Israeli and Gazan forces are currently racking up casualties at an alarming rate.The abduction… Continue reading SNP and Gaza: why Salmond is not a statesman

After this morning, I think I can retire from Twitter. Oh yes. I now know what it is like to be a minor celebrity. Yes, after my most successful-ever tweet (below), I felt indecently pleased and smug, in the way that professional writers who have just coined a phrase or politicians who have minted a… Continue reading My Twitter zenith, or A Plague On Both Your Houses

It’s a rollercoaster ride, this one. On the one hand, we continue to have a recovering economy, a relentlessly-downward-trending poll lead and pretty horrific personal polling for the Labour leader. The head of the policy review says “interesting ideas and remedies are not going to emerge through Labour’s policy review”. A well-meant piece on LabourList… Continue reading 8 May, 2015: the day-after scenarios