After months of nasty wrangling, it looks like the UK will finally get a full ban on smoking in all public places. The government has decided that MPs will be give a free vote on any proposals that go further than the previous botched compromise proposals that had advocated allowing […]
He managed to beat Oona King in the East London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 election, standing for his ‘Respect’ party. There were plenty of strange stories of what his activists managed to get up to. But then he managed to win a massive libel case […]
Things have not really started well with blogging in 2006… First of all, I have been hit by all kinds of people trying to put Spam in my commenting system. Damn them. I am doing my best to sort it out – looks like WordPress can withstand the storm! Trackbacks […]
The row over cartoons of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten goes on and on. Arab Foreign Ministers yesterday condemned the Danish Government for not doing anything about the cartoons, so no surprise there then – article from the BBC here. Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen has stood firm throughout, […]
Barely a day goes past in London without hearing one: the wailing sound of a police siren. You hear the sirens so often that it becomes a bit like Peter crying ‘wolf’ – it is such a normal sound that people just tend to ignore it. This also applies to […]
I have just spent most of the morning in long queues at the consular section of the High Commission of South Africa in London – my sister is due to spend 8 months working on charity projects there from 4th January onwards. Now, it might not be as nasty there […]
Downing Street policy analysts reckon that the UK electorate is presently behaving like a grumpy teenager: wanting responsibility, but not ready to handle it. They tend to view any attempts by the state to cajole or force them to do things as unwelcome authority, with the newspapers further fostering the […]
I have just finished reading an extremely pleasant and gratifying book: T. R. Reid???s ???United States of Europe??? (buy it from Amazon here). Reid was the Washington Post???s correspondent in London from 1998 until 2002 and his book details how he sees the process of European integration. The book is […]
London can get somewhat frustrating, but take a trip out of the capital and into the wilds of the rest of the UK and the situation becomes to dire it’s horrid. I’m sat writing at my seat 42F of Coach C of the 20.15 departure from London Paddington to Swansea. […]
Christmas is fast approaching and – as usual – that means heading home to the town of my upbringing, Newport in South Wales. The place is famous as the hometown of Goldie Lookin’ Chain and has an interesting transporter bridge, one of very few examples in the world. Christmas in […]
There’s a really interesting quote buried away in Mark Mardell’s column on the BBC News website – read it here. Mardell asked Tony Blair whether an EU tax was a way out of nasty negotiations on the budget every few years. Blair’s reply was: “We’ve never been in favour of […]
All I seem to ever feel in the UK is that there are crackdowns on this and that in the name of security. So it is with some pride that I can today write an excellent and positive story about the UK: from today civil partnerships are legal in the […]
