David Cameron
“….some senior Conservatives are privately starting to wonder…”
Tweet In case you missed it over the weekend, James Kirkup has done some digging into the workings of No 10 and finds that one of Cameron’s failings is that he’s just not political enough (for his many critics): Because Mr Cameron’s team is not regularly involved (meddling, some would say) in the daily work [...] more »
“I am delighted to hear that the people of Northern Ireland are the happiest in the United Kingdom”
Tweet Some good news! [Peter Robinson will be pleased - Ed] Possibly… According to the Office of National Statistics’ analysis of experimental subjective well-being data from the Annual Population Survey, April to September 2011, the people of Northern Ireland are the happiest in the United Kingdom. In fact the, admittedly subjective, data reveals that the [...] more »
Unionist forces begin to muster
Tweet So it’s game on for the early rounds of the referendum campaign. The Westminster government says Alex Salmond can have a binding referendum provided he sticks to a Yes, No question on independence. No fudging over devo max. The UK parties are uniting to save the Union, although the others would like Cameron and the [...] more »
David Cameron boardroom pay and putdowns
Tweet The coverage of David Cameron’s views on any Scottish independence referendum have been analysed in detail. Those comments did rather eclipse the coverage of his interview with the Sunday Telegraph. The Telegraph is obviously the most pro Tory of the broadsheets but they do seem to be even more sympathetic than usual in their [...] more »
Cameron’s battle with the European beast makes EU less unpopular?
Tweet Much has been made of the veto bounce for David Cameron. You find it most dramatically in the ICM poll which filters rigourously for likelihood to vote (and already had the Tories in the lead). In fact the detail in some of the polls suggest that the Tory bounce has been in part a [...] more »
Cameron needs to review and politicise his government’s negotiating effort…
Tweet It’s an odd twist of fate whereby we face a situation in which most of Ireland ought to be putting some store on David Cameron’s (albeit abortive) attempt to renegotiate a better and more fitting solution to the solvency problems of the currency that no lender of last resort it seems can be made [...] more »
The problem of communicating DC to DC?
Tweet Matthew d’Ancona, a friend and admirer of the late Christopher Hitchens, reaches for one of the few times he had ever spoken on the subject of David Cameron: “He seems content-free to me. Never had a job, except in PR, and it shows. People ask, ‘What do you think of him?’ My answer is: [...] more »
Lib Dems firmly locked into an executive they have no control of…
Tweet I see Mike Smithson’s taking advantage of the Tories’ two per cent poll lead over Labour to call into question the future of Ed Milliband. However, that question has always been there. He’s simply not rated as a political operator, even by own his party’s footsoldiers at Westminster. If anything the mystery has been [...] more »
Euro crisis: “Anyone who claims to know what is about to happen to Europe is a fool.”
Tweet In the Guardian, Simon Jenkins identifies a key point missing from most analysis of the aftermath of the EU crisis summit. From the Guardian article Anyone who claims to know what is about to happen to Europe is a fool. An unprecedented collapse in world credit has hit against years of reckless state borrowing [...] more »
Is Britain’s ‘Gentleman’ Prime Minister now set up for a fall by Euro ‘Players’?
Tweet Will Hutton tricks out a nasty diplomatic undertow to his walkout. If things go belly up with the Euro, not only will the UK suffer economically, it may get the blame for it not working: Worse, we have made it significantly harder for the 17 members of the eurozone rapidly to put in place [...] more »
Scotland Referendum – Cameron starts his play…
Tweet I’ve been expecting something for a while but perhaps not exactly this (from the Indie): David Cameron is considering a UK-led referendum on Scottish independence to prevent the Scottish Nationalists from setting the terms, question and timing to suit themselves, British government ministers admitted yesterday. That might be a bit of a red herring [...] more »
Cameron’s decision on Finucane case insults family, betrays us all
Tweet When a lawyer is murdered in any country, it should be a matter of great public concern, seen rightly as an attack on the entire legal system. When there is clear evidence pointing towards the collusion of a range of agents of the State in that murder, then the mood should become one of [...] more »
Those English riots and the ideological conclusions that followed…
Tweet Hands up, I’ve no idea what caused the English riots of a few weeks ago. Partly because I was in North Wales, intentionally as far from t’Internet as I could bearably go. But also, there was nothing evidently causal you could point to, as you could in the early eighties, when union versus government [...] more »
Cameron: “politics here will need to move beyond the peace process…”
Tweet After yesterday’s Joint Ministerial Committee meeting in Downing Street, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, was in Northern Ireland today. The Belfast Telegraph has an article on NI by the Conservative Party leader. And his address to the NI Assembly is here. Some sections worth highlighting – for the benefit of certain members of the [...] more »
Nick Clegg: little to show for selling a political soul
Tweet Below I looked at the AV referendum. Although that was the single largest mass slaughtering by the public of a Liberal Democrat Sacred Cow, the electorate seemed determined to cause the Liberal Democrats as much electoral pain as possible. They lost seats in English local elections; were practically annihilated as the governing party in [...] more »
Of Royal Weddings and Social Mobility
Tweet The excitement of the Royal wedding did not last even as long as the long Bank Holiday, displaced as it has been by Mr. Bin Laden’s death. There was little in the way of politics to the wedding: omitting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from the guest list hardly counted as a constitutional crisis. [...] more »
Cameron’s foreign policy and Chaos Theory
Tweet As the frontlines in Libya have swayed back and forth, just as they did almost seventy years ago, so the advisability of David Cameron’s foreign policy adventure has ebbed and flowed. Before Cameron became Prime Minister, the Conservative Party was markedly cautious about an interventionalist foreign policy and said that their foreign policy would: [...] more »
“it’s something that certainly never happened under the stewardship of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.”
Tweet The visit by the British Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, to Stormont today may have come as a surprise to the press [and the NI Labour Party... - Ed], but the Northern Ireland First and deputy First Ministers were ready with their latest whinge. Apparently the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, isn’t prepared to meet them just [...] more »
Conservatives and Unionists abandoned on the road to nowhere
Tweet Let’s start with the good news for the Ulster Unionists. Membership is up. And up by quite a bit for a party that’s not exactly been making all the best kind of headlines. Some estimates put it at about 2k. Which (if they are paying their dues) is not bad at all. The bad [...] more »
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Books
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Ex- Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: Book Review
Tweet It’s probably safe to assume that most people in Northern Ireland would not associate religion either with ‘peace’, or with ‘ex-combatants.’ But a new book by John Brewer, David Mitchell and Gerard Leavey, Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: The Role of Religion in Transitional Justice (Palgrave, 2013) fruitfully brings the three together [...] read our review » -
“I loathe Ireland and the Irish.”
Tweet In the Irish Times, Brian Cosgrove takes up temporary residence in An Irishman’s Diary in the hope that, with the lifting of European copyright restrictions on James Joyce’s major works, a greater familiarity with Joyce’s ”sometimes ruthless realism” may change the nature of the “annual Edwardian charade” that is Bloomsday. From the Irish Times The devastating cultural [...] read our review » -
Against the use and promotion of ‘hate speech’…
Tweet Of all the reasons to write a book this one’s got to the most incongruous: i.e. the receipt of an email saying “YOU ARE A TOTALITARIAN ASSHOLE”. Nice piece from John Paul Stevens in the New York Review of Books, in which he reviews Jeffery Waldron’s theses that freedom of speech should be tempered [...] read our review »
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