The Middle East protests expose Blair’s hollow doctrine
Imagine if you had a quid each time you hear the dwindling band of blind supporters of the Iraq war reciting that sorry little line as the best justification for Britain’s biggest foreign policy atrocity of the last forty years.
“At least we removed a sanguinary dictator” is a sentence that oozes hypocrisy from each and every pore, a phrase rendered even more vomitous and hollow when you look at the hateful game of “this dictator good, that dictator bad” that Tony Blair played so well during his reign.
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Berlusconi opens his government to fascists
His conduct in government and a series of unfortunate remarks may have suggested otherwise but, until yesterday, Italian PM Berlusconi was at least able to reject accusations of flirting with fascism on the grounds that his allies were either former or reformed fascists who more or less turned their back on Mussolini
Well, not anymore.
With his never ending scandals denting his popular support and the Italian right looking increasingly divided, Berlusconi is desperate for any vote he can grab.
This is why he announced on Saturday that the unashamedly far-right party La Destra (The Right) have now joined his coalition and that one of their top dogs will soon be offered a ministerial post.
La Destra is Italy’s direct equivalent of the BNP, except even more fascist. Though no doubt a very small party, tallying just over 680,000 votes (2,2%) at the 2009 European Parliament election, the group are the country’s most outspoken apologists for the country’s fascist past.
And indeed theirs is vintage stuff: from their fascist-era typeface adorning their literature to their continuous references to christianity, “action” and “traditional values”, all the way to their überfascist official slogan of “Dio, Patria e Famiglia” (“God, Nation and Family“), one thing you can’t accuse La Destra of is lack of coherence.
However, how the “god” and “family” bits are going to sit next to a Prime Minister known for his penchant for orgies, libertine parties and underage prostitutes, no-one has yet managed to explain.
How Germany is reaping the rewards of bailing out its workers than banks
When the biggest global recession in decades kicked in, Germany was able to weather the storm and recover much quicker and better than Britain, the US, or any other major Western economy.
Between 2000 and 2007, unemployment in Britain was never any higher than 5.5% (see this) while, in the same period, the German figures were regularly double that rate – between 8 and 10 per cent (see this).
But over the last two years UK unemployment has overtaken Germany’s at a hair-raising pace. While our jobless rate is now tickling 8%, in Germany it decreased to 7.3% at the start of 2010 and then further lowered to 6.7% in October – again, its best figures since reunification.
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Apparently, celebrities should ‘stay stupid’
Nothing seems to irk the country’s hacks more than a celebrity expressing a political opinion.
We binge on hundreds of celebrities, some more worthless than others, while we laugh at their imperfections, dimpled thighs and sweaty armpits as sported by Heat, the Sun or the Daily Mail.
We love to remark on how thick, shallow and uneducated they are. We sneered at Jade Goody’s “pig ignorance“, laughed at Paris Hilton’s dumb quotes and we frowned at how detached from the real world the superrich and the superfamous are.
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Is it the end for Silvio Berlusconi?
Despite a massive majority, the Italian Prime Minister is days away from bowing out. His third election victory in April 2008 was saluted as “historic“: nobody in Italy’s democratic history had ever won such a huge majority.
Yet in two and a half years, all the Italian government managed to knock out was a number of controversial immunity bills (which critics slammed as “tailor-made” to protect the scandal-ridden PM from prosecution) and a series of anti-immigration measures dictated by Berlusconi’s openly xenophobic coalition partners the Northern League.
Otherwise, the Berlusconi ship started treading water pretty much from the off.
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Does education need cost so much? A comparison with Western Europe
Sending a kid to university abroad has never been cheaper.
With tuition fees in the UK set to reach £9000 a year, the cost of Higher Education (already high by EU standards) is going to be the most prohibitive in Western Europe.
Let’s take a look.
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Why shouldn’t we call out LibDems for their ‘betrayal’?
Is the Left’s job that of opposing measures that we deem unfair, or do we simply find ways of not disagreeing too much with the Coalition lest “we push the LibDems further towards the Tories”?
Stuck between the obvious ideological clashes between those who think such “brave” and tough measures are the “inevitable” legacy of the Labour years, and those who instead call the Budget “reckless” and “dangerous for the recovery“, there appears to be a third category of people.
Yes, you guessed it: LibDem MPs. We don’t really know where the Lib Dems stand, do we?
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I didn’t vote Libdems for this
Axing hospitals, jobs, help for the unemployed, manufacturing projects and front line services: this cull is coming straight from the most ideological right-wing hymnsheet
Commenting on cuts and “difficult budget decisions”, Deputy PM Nick Clegg said recently that his government would “not” do it “the way we did it in the 80s”. “We’re going to do this differently.”
The acute observer, however, may have learnt the bitter way that, whatever the Lib Dem leader says, the exact opposite is true. In fact, his public declarations read in reverse should be coveted as the best way of predicting government policy.
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Who would you blame for Cumbria shootings?
With Britain waking up to the worst firearms tragedy since Dunblane, the predictable finger-pointing begins.
And yet the police are still trying to piece the story together. It was unclear what exactly tipped 52-year-old Derrick Bird, the killer, over the edge. Was he having financial problems? Did he have a row with his fellow taxi drivers over queue-jumping and touting?
Did he fall out with his relatives over a will?
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The ‘siege mentality’ of English nationalism
Like clockwork, with each World Cup or Euro Championship comes the urban myth based on some grand anti-English design or some hollow conspiracy theory whipped up by tabloids for the populace to consume.
The fact is, an alarming number of Brits are happy to be treated like imbeciles the moment there’s a whiff of international football in the air.
The rumours appear to have been kickstarted by (make a wild guess) the Sun when they published an article under the header “Bid to ban England tops in World Cup pubs“.
Anyone with more than a brain cell would have detected that the headline had nothing to do with the facts.
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» Why Quantitative Easing doesn’t make common sense
» Barclays was also bailed out – Diamond doesn’t deserve a bonus
» Ten myths about private rented housing
» Even on the left, morality has its limits
» The NHS bill could be a Waterloo moment for the govt
» Ken Livingstone and gay rights – it just isn’t an issue
» Abu Qatada deportation: what about our principles?
» New study shows a Robinhood tax would boost growth
» In defence of Sky News’ re-Tweeting ban
» Another reason to continue banker bashing
» An attack on the wind industry is an attack on UK jobs
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