Blog
27 november 2015, fiddling while the rome connection burns
Saturday 28th November 2015
One of the uk’s easier demands of the eu is for economic governance arrangements that stop the eurozone ganging up on the “outs”. In reality this is about stopping london’s financial centre being disadvantaged (a longstanding desire of several within the eurosystem). The uk though are not really against (in many respects they are actually for) the eurozone, and indeed other “core” configurations, integrating further and faster. Schengen (see 23 september 2015, will schengen survive ? and the euro are only the most notable of the differentiated integration that already exists. Staying in orbit around the core would not be a bad position for the uk while its decade or two of adjacency funk lasts, although when the referendum comes…
17 november 2015, hot on the heels of cornwall...
Tuesday 17th November 2015
There was a crucial moment in negotiating manchester’s devolution status with the government, when news broke to lighten the mood in the form of liverpool, after some years trying to get their act together, again miserably failing to. The number one item facing that city region’s six (all labour-run) local authorities, was the combined authority’s new name. In a monty pythonesque twist to the concept of local empowerment, their utter disagreement led to them asking whitehall to decide the name for them, which is how they ended up with the snappily-titled halton, knowsley, liverpool, st helens, sefton and wirral combined authority (or hklsswca for short). A couple of months later they were at it again with four of the authority’s…
14 november 2015, paris to paris, a heavily-edited story of 2015
Saturday 14th November 2015
13 november, paris, france, 129 killed; 13 november, baghdad, 19 killed; 13 november, beirut, lebanon, 43 killed; 1 november, mogadishu, somalia, 13 killed; 31 october, sharm el sheikh, 224 killed; 23 october, jacobabad, pakistan, 22 killed; 14 october, maidugurie, nigeria, 42 killed; 10 october, n'djamena, chad, 38 killed; 10 october, ankara, turkey, 102 killed; 5 october, baghdad, iraq, 57 killed; By 1 october, usa, 994 killed (mass shootings only); 20 september, maidugurie, nigeria, 145 killed; 16 august, douma, syria, 82 killed; 13 august, baghdad, iraq, 76 killed; 10 august, diyala, iraq, 50 killed; 7 august, kabul, afghanstan, 51 killed; 13 july, monguno, nigeria, 43 killed; 29 june, leego, somalia, 70 killed; 26 june, soussa, tunisia, 38 killed; 26 june, kuwait…
4 november 2015, it was 20 years ago today
Tuesday 3rd November 2015
Rarely in history has a bullet found its target as well as that of yigal amir, yitzchaq rabin’s assassin. He was no saint: rabin it was who, as defence minister, tried to snuff out the first intifada (a year I spent in israel) with orders to break palestinian legs. Yet, after usurping his great rival shimon peres to become prime-minister, he came to understand and indeed define the position that only engagement and compromise could end the conflict. So came oslo, the greatest - and probably last - breakthrough in our lifetime. No other leader, right or left, has credibly taken most israelis on that journey. Oslo though was only a first step, postponing the most difficult issues of jerusalem,…
23 october 2015, china comes to manchester
Friday 23rd October 2015
Once several years ago, a small cog in the machine started shouting china, china china as the economic powerhouse we need to hook our economy up to (see 27 april 2013, china in my pocket). Today, after a few of the thousand flowers we planted bloomed, we were visited by the greatest of chinese heights, president xi jinping, as he toured around the town and the airport waving investment as he went and beaming brand manchester back home to a billion souls. If you look hard around 2 seconds into the film (sat down, second from left), you can see me straining to get a decent view, although the man on the stage is my boss, introducing el presidente. David…
17 october 2015, death, death, death spiral
Sunday 18th October 2015
“We are all human beings” was the protest of a jew stabbed by another jew who thought he was an arab in haifa. Sadly though more than ever in israel today there are no human beings, just jews and arabs. The centre of the violence is jerusalem, where a new physical dividing line looks to be emerging as an end result of this latest wave. Israel has long resisted admitting that jerusalem is not, after all, one indivisible city. However, whilst not, yet, the berlin wall, throwing up checkpoints and controlling movement across a line is simply following the logic of the rest of the west bank barrier, a peace line that literally separates two peoples. Pre-wall, when I travelled…
8 october 2015, the great game returns
Thursday 8th October 2015
Most things happen in degrees, and so it is with russia’s reassertion of its former anti-western soviet stance: we are the other, we are a global counterbalance to you, of equal weight. While today that rings totally hollow, driven primarily by a regrettable domestic need to shore up a shoddy regime, its nuisance value is high, as are the risks of more serious outcomes. Huntington’s “unipolar moment” of us hegemony (see “how we made the fatal mistake...”) has long past and the world can act effectively in concert or not at all. Even without russian bloody-mindedness, syria was an utter failure for the west. Now it is worse, the latest theatre in a new great game, as russia pursues its…
23 september 2015, will schengen survive ?
Wednesday 23rd September 2015
As an eternal optimist, my answer will of course be yes, but it is also reasoned, as it was when the same question was so persistently asked of the euro. With the siren call from germany encouraging the swell and hungary’s advertised rush to create a razor-wire curtain across the eu’s border together conspiring to accelerate the movement as winter began to loom, germany, austria and then croatia rather retracted their open welcome, throwing up those internal schengen borders which are supposed to have dissapeared. It is not the first time: france and denmark both did it to impede migration from lampadusa in italy in 2011; just two notable examples of dozens of occasional suspensions. Today’s crisis is bigger: then…
6 september 2015, evian les no-brains
Sunday 6th September 2015
The migration/refugee crisis has hung heavy over the household these last weeks. With its media epicentre (keleti station) not a kilometre from our budapest base, we have followed every step as the border fence went up and succeeded only in drawing in the crowds, which eventually brought them to the station, where they were eventually stopped from getting on trains, through some combination of diligently applying european rules and stopping a muslim invasion at the gates of vienna. The tactic of allowing them on the train only to stop it and then forcing them into a refugee camp also failed, leading the hapless (and rather bruised and bitter) hungarians to give up and just bus them over the border to…
31 august 2015, a balmy bank holiday
Monday 31st August 2015
Dealings of the day with germany, hungary and america have made me conscious that whilst I’m home today with the family (catching up on “stuff”) most of the rest of the world is hard at work. I’m back at it tomorrow, having done a few days already after a week-plus-weekends break in hungary, at balaton of course, but also down in pecs, a first time, and a pleasant one. Leaving the family there for another week I got back last sunday, only to leave monday for chicago, also a first time, and also a good one. I got to see the whitesox which would have been extremely dull and incomprehensible had not the lively company in the box held back…
10 august 2015, still living in the nuclear shadow
Monday 10th August 2015
Savagery is sometimes in the eye of the beholder: a few beheadings make islamic state devils of barbarity while hundreds in saudi arabia don’t quite have the same effect. 70 years after hiroshima and nagasaki, it is worth reflecting that war makes many do rather strange things: each american bomb incinerated about 70, 000 people, killing hundreds of thousands more in the years after. Japan’s prime-minister thoughtfully called at the anniversary for nuclear disarmament, but once learned a thing cannot be unlearned and post-war history has shown the battle to be not for reduction but to slow proliferation. It is no co-incidence that the united nations’ “permanent 5” members who can veto anything are the world’s 5 nuclear states. Their…
2 august 2015, more, or more europe
Sunday 2nd August 2015
Now that greece has momentarily stopped hogging the agenda, the brits will try again to launch a “reform” agenda, with the headline aim of securing a “less europe” deal before a referendum on exiting altogether. If there is a european wave in the greek wake though, it is very much going in the other direction, at least for the eurozone. The uk may be successful in protecting the rights of non-euro countries, but for the core, another round of ever closer union over the next years is remorseless logic. France’s president is already talking about a more powerful europe, and, recognising that all may not be with him on the journey, of a new hard core with its own government,…