August is traditionally a quiet month in the United Kingdom. The British go on their summer holidays, perversely leaving the country during the hottest month of the year to seek sunshine in foreign climes. Parliament goes into recess, and so no new laws are passed. Even the media take a break, the lack of newsworthy […]
The Triumph of the Political Class Peter Oborne Simon & Schuster, 2007; paperback: Pocket Books, 2008 Words and phrases often enter the political lexicon via the US media before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the UK, and one such recent migrant is the “uniparty”. The Americans have been using it for some time, and the […]
Pre-election Britain is currently going through a self-evaluation in such a way that, were it retail goods brought over a shop counter, there could be an action brought under the UK’s Trade Descriptions Act of 1968. This piece of legislation replaced the Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 with “fresh provisions prohibiting misdescriptions of goods, services, […]
Economics is tailor-made for technocrats. It revolves around systems, and systems are everything for our current hyper-managerial class of social engineers. Once a system is in place, whether it works or not takes second place to its complicated maintenance. The subsequent problem for the technocrat task force is how that system is presented to non-specialists, […]
When the Roman poet Juvenal first used the phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes in the sixth of his second-century Satires, he was referring playfully to critics of his relationship with his wife. The phrase’s passage to its current status as a political lock-and-guard mechanism came via its misattribution to Plato’s Republic. But the observation of […]
In December of last year, Gaza’s oldest mosque was largely destroyed by Israeli air-strikes. The Omari mosque dating back to the seventh century and named for Umar ibn al-Khattab, Islam’s second caliph, and so is much mourned. It is worth noting in passing that Islam does not separate religion and state as the West does, […]
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar William Collins, 2023 The controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past. Nigel Biggar The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. P. Hartley, The Go-Between. The White population of the USA are wearily used to […]
