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.
After the photo opportunities, early morning swims and talk of famous blues musicians last week in Lough Erne, the temptation is to think it’s all over for the UK’s Presidency of the G8.
Has anyone else woken up this morning with a G8 hang-over? Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I drank too much of the Kool-aid but weren’t we expecting a bit better than this?
Older people should of course expect a decent standard of living in retirement. But should they really expect a standard of living which outpaces that of the average worker, especially when the cost of proving it is likely to mean further cuts elsewhere in the welfare budget down the line?
I am used to David Cameron shooting from the hip with knee jerk, ill thought out policies to respond to public opinion but I thought that Ed Balls would be cleverer than that.
Ed Balls is currently making a speech in which he will effectively renege on previous Labour Party statements that universality remained a “part of the bedrock” of the welfare state.
Much like the assertion that nobody can talk about immigration without being accused of being a racist (if anything immigration is talked about too much relative to its impact), the idea that public concern about immigration is related to the numbers of migrants settling in the UK appears also to be a myth.
A former Conservative Scottish secretary has called (£) moves by the party north of the border to increase the powers afforded to the Scottish Parliament a “suicide mission”.
According to the dictum attributed to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Yet evil will triumph even more easily if good men help the evil-doers. In the Syrian civil war, with more than 80,000 dead and no end in sight, that is what the European Union has been doing, by upholding an arms embargo on the supply of weapons to all sides.
In two weeks time the daughter of one of my friends will get married. This happy occasion will be marred by the fact that soon after the wedding her new husband may have to leave the UK. Despite his high earning potential, new rules about family migration, introduced in July 2012, will exclude him from obtaining a spouse’s visa.
