A Few Good Men – but this one?

Brett Kavanaugh, the current presidential nominee for the US Supreme Court, faces a series of allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to his youth. He denies them all. He denies them emphatically. But he denies them in a manner which raises questions about his suitability for senior judicial office, let alone the highest judicial office in the land.

Read more

Chaos – what did you expect Brexit to look like?

It is common parlance these days to describe the UK Government’s Brexit negotiations as chaotic. And that is certainly how they appear. But how would they look if they were going swimmingly?

Read more

Nothing new to see – unless you haven’t seen it already

Today, I am issuing a set of four collections of articles which have been published on this blog over the past eight years. Each collection is available here for download:

Read more

Reporters Sans Frontieres: not my idea of a knock out

I was disappointed to read recently that the UK has dropped to 40th place in the World Press Freedom Index. Among the 39 countries which are said to offer the press greater freedom than the UK are South Africa, Surinam and Namibia, according to the ranking body Reporters Sans Frontieres.  But then I noticed that the UK’s ranking was three places ahead of the USA which guarantees freedom of the press under its constitution. What’s going on here?

Read more

Marx out of ten for the attack on price caps?

When the Thatcher government privatised British Telecom in the 1980s, they created a regulator to cap prices. They did the same with the privatisation of water, electricity and gas. No one suggested then that Thatcher’s policy was Marxist or State intervention. So is there any justification for such accusations now that Theresa May is proposing that the energy regulator should reintroduce a cap?

Read more

Is that you, Bobby?

Like many people, I thought parts of 2016 had been something of a nightmare. It had been so unbelievable at times that, when I woke up on 1 January, a part of me even wondered whether I might find David Cameron back in Downing Street, Donald J Trump a rank outsider at the start of the Republican primaries and Bobby Ewing back in the shower. Could the whole year have all been just a dream?

Read more

A horse. A zebra. Or maybe it’s a fish?

Until a few days ago, I had never heard the expression: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras”. A visiting US professor used it in conversation with me. Then I heard it again, last night. This time spoken by Patterson, an FBI agent (sort of).

Read more