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 …
6 June 2021 It’s not Bretton Woods, but it’s a start. The decision by the finance ministers of the G7 countries to create a global minimum tax rate on corporate profits is a step in the right direction, if only a baby step. The tide was due to turn about now, according to one theory, …
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 …
12 April 2021 Twenty-three years of peace in Northern Ireland, after a sectarian war that lasted thirty years and killed 3,700 people, but nothing lasts forever. Every night for the past week there were violent mobs of youngsters in the streets of Belfast attacking each other, Protestant against Catholic. And it’s all Boris Johnson’s fault. …
24 February 2021 To those who obsessively followed the Covid websites over the past eleven months (including me, I must admit), one thing demanded an explanation above all: why were the worst death rates-per-million in the richest, most developed countries, and in the United States and the United Kingdom most of all? Bits of the …
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 …
4 January 2021 Triage is always crude and messy, and there are always mistakes, but the goal is to save as many lives as possible in an emergency where there are not enough medical resources to save everybody. That certainly applies to the Covid-19 pandemic, and there is certainly rough-and-ready triage going on right now …
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 …
19 October 2020 The British pantomime is a traditional Christmas entertainment in which stock characters face imaginary dangers and audience participation is encouraged (“He’s behind you!”), but the play never frightens the children and it always has a happy ending. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could be a pantomime character: he blusters and rages, he …
What do you do if you are in charge of dealing with the pandemic and the number of deaths is getting out of control? Simple. Stop publishing the number. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has been having a bad time with the pandemic. His default mode has been callous disinterest: when told in early May that …