Category Archives: Uncategorized

I applied for Swedish citizenship just after the Brexit vote. It’s taken them nearly two years to get round to me. I’m told it’s because there were so many applications from Brits dispossessed of their European identity by that vote, … Continue reading →

I’m working on my latest book – another collection of old articles, mainly, but hopefully corralled into some kind of order. I’ve come almost to the end, and a new ‘Concluding’ chapter; at which point I thought I should look … Continue reading →

Paul Mason is my favourite left-wing commentator. I met him at an ‘alternative’ conference to mark the anniversary of Magna Carta a couple of years ago. This – if you can get it up – is v.g.

I’ve argued before that one way of tackling not only ‘fake news’, but also the other sorts of blatantly nonsensical thinking one finds in popular political discourse today, is to teach critical thinking, explicitly, in schools: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/10/23/logic-lessons/. Now Kajsa tells … Continue reading →

Here’s an interesting take on Brexit that I found on a ‘Brexpats’ thread on Facebook, by Hugh Croft. It has occurred to me, too, in the light of the current British government’s seemingly clueless Brexit negotiations over the past few … Continue reading →

‘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 →