“Britons, never, never, never, shall be slaves.” UK National Anthem (to be replaced with ‘Do the Vernon Coaker’) A few posts back I wondered whether M15 and its master, the CIA, Twittered. Well, not for the time in the world of Thus, fact has rapidly overtaken fiction. The inept and authoritarian UK government is actually [...]
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Torture is naughty, barbaric and illegal – except when we do it
March 18, 2009 – 4:09 pm
This week, Britain’s foreign minister will present the Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights violations around the world. For anyone who cares about Britain and human rights, it will feel difficult to ask about anything except the British government’s own entanglement in a case of torture. By Timothy Garton Ash The evidence, so far [...]
An open letter to Gordon Brown, saviour of the world's banks, apart from Iceland, the UK and . . .
March 17, 2009 – 12:52 am
As Gordon and Alastair puff out their chests and iron their M+S Let’s Pretend We’re Businessmen suits (made in Indonesia) to host the G20 Global Summit on the global economy, a letter from Steven Katirai, whose Google search reveals him as a capital markets consultant based in the North East of England, has been doing the rounds [...]
The big money is at the end of the rainbow, same as it ever was
March 3, 2009 – 4:58 pm
Writing in Wilmott, Rudi Bogni argues that banker-bashing may be a convenient way to mask the inconvenient truth that the demands on our financial systems are unsustainable. Western productivity was not up to the task of generating sufficient wealth to fuel perpetual growth, nor is it likely to be. It required a collective suspension of [...]