The fringe issue of arms export criteria became headline news yesterday, with the Independent’s splash on an ‘arms for dictators’ scandal.
The European Commission is reportedly planning to harden its stance against member states who fail to adhere to democracy and the rule of the law.
Last week the eighteenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre passed, prompting a chorus of sombre statements from European leaders.
The argument for keeping the Trident nuclear deterrent boils down to the following: by getting rid of Trident Britain will lose its position as a leading world power; it will also leave the country open to attack by hostile powers.
According to James’s Joyce’s character Leopold Blum, reading your own obituary gives you a new lease of life. Proponents of the two-state solution should perhaps then be grateful to those declaring it dead. As I argue in a new paper for the Foreign Policy Centre, the two-state solution is not dead, and in fact remains both attainable and indispensable.
Every last thing about Gary Spedding’s argument in favour of boycotting Histadrut, Israel’s free and democratic Israeli trade union movement, is wrong. Speeding does not so much put a left foot forward as trip over his own feet.
When President Mubarak was forced from power in February 2011, many of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square thought that the future of Egypt looked bright for the kind of Western secular liberal values many of them had championed.
Recently we’ve seen the emergence of another kind of autocrat. Neither democrat nor dictator, this type of leader holds regular elections and in some cases even introduces ostensibly progressive policies.
The idea of nations and peoples cooperating instead of fixating on individual respective national interests is popular in trade union movements due to the strongly held principles of solidarity that come with trade unionism.
This weekend a coterie of British businessmen including the arms dealer Rolls-Royce were jetted around Kazakhstan on board the private plane of its dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled the large Asian republic for 23 years by filtering oil revenues into his private bank account and cracking down on dissent.
