A short post to note the latest UN refugee data (pdf), which shows a worldwide increase in 2007 of 3m – almost 10% -in the number of refugees forced from their home by conflict. It is a second successive increase after a period of decline. The UN describes the data as ‘unprecedented’, and says it [...]
Two unrelated events this month - David Davis’ resignation to fight a by-election on the issue of 42-day internment of suspects without trial, and the ‘no’ vote in the Irish referendum - seem to me to be connected. The connection is the conservative journalist Peter Oborne’s theory of the ‘political class’.
There was a moment in the recent Robert Plant and Alison Krauss concert when Krauss sang part of the traditional English song Matty Groves. The band, led by T-Bone Burnett, was from the American South, and it was a reminder of the connections between the English folk song and the musical traditions of the [...]
The decision by the British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to reclassify cannabis as a Category B drug, despite the opposing views of her expert advisers, has reminded me of the chaotic state of Britain’s drugs policy. It is an area where policy has remained completely immune to evidence - as one ‘killer chart’ demonstrates.
I posted a couple of weeks ago on a paper by a couple of economists which argued in brief, that globalisation - taking a historical view - tended to fail for political reasons: effectivedly, those who lose from it put the brakes on. Cross-posting this to Shaping Tomorrow’s Foresight Network prompted a long and considered [...]
I’ve written here from time to time on the evolution of Britain as a surveillance society, and the trends embedded in it. Now the journalist Henley Porter, in a submission to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, has produced a list of the ways in which surveillance has been increased in the UK since the [...]
New word of the month is ‘iWar’, conjured up by Johnny Ryan of Dublin’s Institute of European Affairs in an article in Open Democracy. It describes “attacks carried out over the internet that target the consumer internet infrastructure”.
The current scandals around surveillance in the UK reminds me that I meant to post about Privacy International’s most recent international league table. (Thanks to Our Kingdom for the prompt). England and Wales are in the bottom category - “endemic surveillance societies” - while Scotland, split out for the first time, is a little higher, [...]
The Guardian filled its G2 supplement on 2nd January by asking contributors to reflect on the decade so far, probably so its sub-editors could recover on New Year’s Day. Most of the comment was as you’d expect. But Martin Jacques’ brief comments on China’s burgeoning political influence caught something deeper - and suggested that the [...]
I meant in this post just to catch an amusing epigram quoted by the journalist Ian Jack last week:
What’s the difference between a dialect and language? Answer, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
But reading the article - on Scotland and the politics of Trident - made me realise there was [...]
