Monthly Archives: February 2018

‘If you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys’. Or, raising the bar a little, ‘in a competitive global employment market, you’ll only get good candidates if you offer them high salaries’. That’s the excuse for the obscene salaries – and bonuses, … Continue reading →

To me Brexit seems an obvious mistake, with all the makings of a national catastrophe, economically, politically, and with regard to Britain’s reputation in the world. (We really are a bad joke abroad.) For me personally it has been – … Continue reading →

The right-wing press – Telegraph, Mail, Express, Sun – is currently recycling the old accusation of ‘communist subversion’ against the Labour Party, and specifically against Jeremy Corbyn: the smear that served them so well during the Cold War. One leading … Continue reading →

OK, pretty sordid, exploitative in most cases, downright illegal in a few, and not at all good for Oxfam’s ‘holier than thou’ image. Much of the same, incidentally, went on in some of the old British colonies. Sexual temptation may … Continue reading →

I’ve been asked to contribute briefly to a volume – or it may be a website – of British European residents’ feelings about Brexit. Here’s my penn’orth. No-one has, or should feel, a single national identity. I was born British, … Continue reading →

I watched Boris’s speech this morning. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/14/boris-johnson-urges-remainers-recognise-benefits-leaving-eu.) It seemed to me – and to a friend of mine who has been insisting from the beginning that Brexit won’t go through – to indicate a certain weakening of confidence on … Continue reading →

I’m a member of a Facebook group consisting of UK nationals living – or in my case part-living – on the Continent. It’s presently trying to make out a legal case for our retaining European citizenship, on an individual basis, … Continue reading →

At my age birthdays can bring to mind only one thing – imminent death. I’m now seven years on from my biblically allotted ‘threescore years and ten’, so it’s bound to come soon. Have you noticed – from obituary columns … Continue reading →

I take back what I wrote about Madame Ny. She is the Swedish prosecutor who originally filed for Julian Assange’s extradition from Britain on a disputed and possibly trumped-up sex-crime charge four or five years ago, leading him to seek … Continue reading →

I’m sure the German Ambassador in London is right to upbraid us Brits, yet again, for our World War II obsessions. Peter Ammon sees this as one of the factors lying behind Brexit, reminding our nationalists of another period when … Continue reading →