9 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Four months ago Jonathan Powell warned that the ‘Good Friday’ agreement of 1998 that ended thirty years of killing in Northern Ireland was at risk. “What worries me is the casual political vandalism. They really don’t seem to care (about) the damage they are doing to the very fragile …
26 January 2022 Boris Johnson: The Long Goodbye By Gwynne Dyer The plot couldn’t be more familiar: criminal mastermind gets away with endless daring escapades, and is brought down in the end by some silly little mistake. That’s Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who slid effortlessly through endless scrapes and scandals that would have finished …
12 January 2022 Covid Fatigue By Gwynne Dyer Once they called it ‘combat fatigue’, and treated the soldiers who showed the symptoms with a mixture of pity and contempt. Then they renamed it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) and broadened the definition to cover similar responses to other stressful situations. And now we have Covid fatigue. …
3 January 2022 Nuclear Power: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle By Gwynne Dyer At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original seventeen) will shut down on 31 December of this year, and Germans will no longer have to live …
26 October 2021 “The world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7°C of heating,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. “There is a high risk of failure of COP26.” That’s the global climate summit that meets every five years (but was postponed last year because of the pandemic) to plot a course away from climate …
Looking for the Pain Threshold: Why COP26 Won’t Deliver Read More »
17 October 2021 International treaties are serious business. A lot of time and effort goes into negotiating them, and they become part of international law. It’s very rare for a politician to say, only a couple of years after negotiating a treaty, that his country always felt it was “a little bit provisional and open …
25 May 2021 Poland’s Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki condemned the “hijacking” of the Ryanair jet on the orders of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday, accusing him of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism.” Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, agreed, warning that “this outlandish act by Lukashenko will have serious implications.” And US Secretary …
9 May 21 Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland declared in 2014 that the referendum on Scotland’s independence that her Scottish National Party (SNP) demanded and lost later that year would be “once in a generation.” It has turned out to be a very short generation. As soon as the United Kingdom voted to leave …
1 February 2021 My wife and I had our first shots of a Covid-19 vaccine this weekend (Astra-Zeneca, since you ask), and none of our children are old enough to be particularly vulnerable. I therefore no longer have a dog in this fight, and can write with godlike impartiality about who else should get the …
28 December 2020 Blaming the victims is never a good look. As Britain finally leaves the European Union, 1,651 days after the Brexit referendum of 2016, we should try to remember that 48% of the turkeys didn’t vote for Christmas. Brexit was not exactly a national act of self-harm; it was really an attack by …