David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables...
On the morning of 5 August 1840, a large pleasure boat chartered by a Frenchman was under steam at London Bridge. The owners of the Edinburgh Castle seem to have been remarkably incurious about...
Early in May, on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Colin Powell met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil society...
Given that it’s not so far been settled to everyone’s satisfaction exactly what the belligerents had in mind when they went to war in 1914, we shouldn’t perhaps get too...
In November last year, to the relief of the Government, Myra Hindley died. Hindley, who had served 36 years, was the most high-profile victim of a series of Administrations which, in pursuit of...
I gave the little girl a name. Rita. I doubt it’s a common name in Iraq but it seemed to fit her round face, brown eyes and straggle of blood-soaked hair. The military medics staunched the...
Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by...
The Four Seasons hotel, Houston, 20 January 2000. The investment managers and analysts packed into the ballroom are paying only partial attention to the presentation by the Enron Corporation. On...
Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk is an unlikely spiritual home for English socialism. Britain’s most easterly lock-up, its seaside location, stud-farm and dairy have earned it the nickname...
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’...
On 4 April, a news item on BBC World, introduced as ‘The Israeli Lesson’, dealt with suicide bombing as a potential problem for the Anglo-American axis in Iraq. We were shown footage...
Nineteenth-century empires were often led on from one war to another as a result of developments which imperial governments did not plan and domestic populations did not desire. In part this was...
On 1 April, the Guardian admonished the Prime Minister to remember the importance of living up to his good intentions: Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole...
but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy announces night & day ‘all poor little peoples that want to be free just trust in the u s a’ e.e. cummings, ‘Thanksgiving...
Full of contradictions, flat-out lies and groundless affirmations, the torrent of reporting and commentary on the ‘coalition’ war against Iraq has obscured the negligence of the...
One of the oddities about France’s permanent membership of the Security Council is that its instincts are those of an influential player in the General Assembly. This in turn has to do with...
Whether we agree with it or not, there was always a plausible argument for intervention in Iraq. The Prime Minister might, therefore, have fewer problems with public opinion in the future than he...
Thomas Hobbes, in one of the best known and most abused phrases in the English language, described the life of man in a state of nature as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’....