Politics

One of the unexpected pleasures of parenthood is reading Brussels propaganda to your children. The material is unintentionally hilarious, and will soon have your progeny shrieking with laughter. Little ones enjoy The Raspberry Ice Cream War, which tells the tale of a group of intrepid youngsters who travel back in time to a barbarous age where there are still sovereign states, and teach the inhabitants to scrap their borders.

Older ones prefer Troubled Waters, a Tintin-style cartoon strip, whose heroine is a foxy MEP. Among the lines of dialogue are: “You can laugh! Wait until you’ve seen my amendments to the Commission proposal!” and, “I seem to spend my whole life on the… Read More

The Labour candidate in the Putney byelection has said he “detests” Ken Livingstone’s “tasteless and absurd” remarks about Eddie Lister, Boris Johnson’s new chief of staff.

Livingstone twice called Lister, former leader of Wandsworth Council, “the Ratko Mladic of local government” earlier this week. Eddie Lister is a cost-cutting local politician. Ratko Mladic is an indicted war criminal charged with mass murder, genocide and crimes against humanity.

Ken, as predicted, refused to apologise for the smear, saying he was “standing up for parents who face charges for their children to use playgrounds in a borough where affordable housing has been disregarded.”

But Christian Klapp, Labour’s candidate in the 30 June byelection for Lister’s old seat on the council,… Read More

Gwyneth Paltrow with her daughter Apple (Photo: EPA)

Angelina Jolie is home-schooling her children because ordinary schools aren’t good enough for them. She has so many kids now that I suppose they can make up a class on their own. Meanwhile, Gwyneth Paltrow is offering just over £60,000 for a tutor who can teach Greek, Latin, French, possibly Japanese or Mandarin, and give sailing and tennis lessons. She doesn’t want much, does she?

Gwyneth is disillusioned with British education because it is too restrictive. Angelina believes exploring or feeling your way through life’s lessons will better serve her children. They are Hollywood stars who… Read More

The campaign video above captures pretty well why I won’t be wishing Amnesty International a happy 50th birthday. It features Amnesty’s Western supporters looking gobsmackingly smug as they imagine themselves waltzing into the chaotic Third World to free prisoners from filthy jails, or remove the blindfolds from the oppressed, or take the guns out of the hands of brain-warped, warlike children. It rather confirms the Messiah complex of Amnesty’s activists – We can make the blindfolded see! We can save the children! – and their view of the world as being neatly split between a caring West and a brutalised South. In this narcissistic notion that the Third World is packed either with brutes who must be condemned or innocent… Read More

The clothes of Srebrenica victims litter a road in 1995

Ratko Mladic has made his first appearance at The Hague today, where the tribunal indictment charged him with genocide, persecution, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts, terror, deportation and hostage-taking.

Still, put it in perspective – at least he didn’t try to cut local services. The Tories are the real criminals.

International trials such as these exist to show that no man, not even one with a peaked cap and an army behind him, can act with impunity. But they also offer lessons. The lesson of Nuremberg was that, without international security,… Read More

Eichmann and Mladic on trial: images of evil (Photo: Reuters)

In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel, after being captured by Mossad in Argentina. The “architect” of the Nazi Holocaust had organised the murder of millions of Jews. But he looked so ordinary. In another life, he might have been a bank clerk or a librarian or a schoolteacher. How could this pathetic little man, with his round glasses and clipped manner, be responsible for deporting the victims of the Holocaust to their deaths?

It was this question that troubled the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who was reporting on… Read More

The Camerons' 2008 Christmas Card - compassionate conservatism

Everyone in Britain has an opinion on Barack Obama. But how many Americans really care about what David Cameron thinks? Not many I’d expect, but that’s why it’s always interesting whenever one does pipe up with an opinion about British politics. In the case of David Brooks last week, it was a ludicrous one. Today, however, there’s a much more considered piece by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post.

According to Gerson, David Cameron is a “budget cutter with a conscience”. Were he an American, he would be an “unrivaled Tea Party darling”. But… Read More

The ICTY: One can't call it a kangaroo court, as it lacks the advantages of speed and economy

Ratko Mladić makes his first appearance in The Hague today having, to all intents and purposes, already been declared guilty by those who will judge him. John Laughland explains why:
In the conviction of General Krstic in 2001, both the fact of genocide and the requisite mens rea are affirmed.  It is regarded as proven that “Krstic’s superiors” intended to commit genocide – Krstic was Mladić’s lieutenant.  In Krstic’s appeal in 2004, where reference is made explicitly… Read More

The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh after the Queen's Coronation (Photo: PA)

Any serious analysis of why Britain has been relatively poorly governed since the end of the Second World War must concern itself with the cult of the short-term. There are structural reasons for this modern phenomenon: the ambition of politicians to leave an instant mark; the demands of the electoral cycle; the financial markets and their extraordinary ability to anticipate and then discount the future.

Meanwhile the news media, so expert at generating artificial “crises”, with the accompanying demand for their urgent resolution, has grown stealthily in importance…. Read More

What we remember from Obama's visit (Photo: PA)

Do you remember what David Cameron was doing last week? Playing table tennis with President Obama, doling out burgers with him at a barbecue, standing shoulder to shoulder at a string of events. What about Ed Miliband? He got married, and there were rather sweet pictures of Ed and Justine dressed up for the event. And what about Nick Clegg? To be honest, you don’t have a clue, do you? At a guess, you might hazard that there was yet another “signal” of just how tough he was going to be in taking the… Read More