These are strange times in which we live. Not for a generation have governments had so many important political decisions pressed upon them by world events. Yet rarely has political discourse been so focused upon the personal behaviour of those in power. For the past few days, the serious issues surrounding Afghanistan – the fact [...]
I very rarely wear Remembrance poppies, but I don’t really have a very clear justification for this. It’s probably partly because of my degenerate liberal North London upbringing; the importance of Supporting Our Troops and Upholding British Traditions wasn’t drummed into me from an early age to quite the same degree as it was for [...]
The Government has a problem. It is obsessed with integration, yet seeks to deligitimise one of the greatest examples of genuine intregration of recent decades. I was reminded of this fact when I came across the above photo from the recent Troops Out demonstration in London. This picture shows a number of things, the least [...]
Walking through security at Portcullis House, the fabulously expensive building standing adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, is a bit like going through any airport anywhere in the world. But making your way through the spacious courtyard, past green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome towering overhead, you could be [...]
Yesterday’s Iraq war memorial service can’t have been much fun for Tony Blair. Not only did he get called a war criminal by the father of a soldier who was killed in the conflict, he also had to sit quietly through the Rowan Williams’ polite denouncing of those who ‘look for short cuts in the [...]
September 21st is the UN’s international day of ceasefire and non-violence and, in honour of the event, I am pleased to report The Third Estate has started no new wars today. Instead, I shall grace you with a very, very old poem I wrote many years ago on September 21st. PEACE ONE DAY From the [...]
“…how can you be so short-sighted to look never further than this week or next week, to have no impossible dream?” – Che Guevara in Evita September 11th. It’s a date that conjures up memories and few of them good. It was, after all, the historic day that Salvador Allende fell to the 1973 CIA [...]
Sunny Hundal, in a piece for The Guardian yesterday, made the case that we cannot give up on Afghanistan. It was, he says, unreasonable to expect the overthrow of the Taliban might come without British casualties or that we could secure positive social change in Afghanistan overnight. In and of themselves, these points are very [...]
