Monthly Archives: December 2018

Corbyn’s getting a lot of stick just now – certainly on the anti-Brexit Facebook pages I subscribe to – for not clearly coming out in favour of a second referendum, and for ‘Remain’. The relatively left-wing Guardian is especially critical: but … Continue reading →

It’s hard to credit that two millennia of proud British history are about to end like this. (‘Proud’ in the sense that Brits have usually taken pride in  it; unjustifiably in many instances, I’ll grant.) Almost everyone in the wider … Continue reading →

Here’s Kajsa’s and my contribution to the London Review of Books  feature on the ways the Continental press has reacted to Brexit. It’s one of about a dozen, to be published (slightly edited) in the first January issue of the … Continue reading →

This is wonderful, one of the best personal arguments against Brexit that I’ve seen, and justifiably savage about Theresa. I only wish she could read it – highly unlikely, I grant you. Nonetheless, it deserves the widest circulation. http://markasftw.com/lithuanians-elected-me-because-im-british/

Now Theresa May is doing ‘the God thing’, just as Tony Blair used to:  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-reveals-how-her-faith-in-god-makes-her-certain-she-is-doing-the-right-thing-a7442616.html. I don’t need to comment on the seeming hypocrisy of this, in view of her shared responsibility for the policy of ‘Austerity’, contributing to the … Continue reading →

Putin’s support for Brexit makes a lot of sense, though I’m surprised to see him expressing it so openly. The same applies to his alleged backing of Trump in the USA, and all those cunning Russian subterfuges – ‘official’ or … Continue reading →

I travelled to Manchester to fly to Stockholm on Friday, thanking my good luck that I’d have missed the Gatwick chaos. It turned out that I didn’t, entirely. My flight was three hours late, having been held up by the … Continue reading →

Excellent letter in yesterday’s Washington Post: Letters to the Editor December 19 at 5:26 PM In his Dec. 16 Sunday Opinion essay, “Britain can’t thrive without Brexit,” Henry Olsen argued that the European Union “holds Britain in contempt.” Mr. Olsen’s … Continue reading →

Every so often in European history there comes a ‘Year of Revolutions’, when progressive insurrections break out in several nations at once. 1848 was one such; 1917 another; 1968 a third – although that one has, I think, been rather … Continue reading →

For those who remember the ‘Wilson Plot’ – that is, the anti-(Harold) Wilson plot of the 1960s and ’70s – or have read about the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ affair of 1924, the following, from the summer of 2017, may set their … Continue reading →