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Written by Alexander Story
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In the good old days, before the world woke up to the dangers of fundamentalism, when the dot com bubble was still expanding, and when New Labour was still an interesting phenomenon, Wakefield, Yorkshire, was immutably Labour.
Wakefield returned a Labour MP every year since 1935. In 1997, David Hinchcliff, a popular local Labour man, was re-elected to Westminster with a vast 14,000 majority. The council, that same year, was practically all red. The ‘International’ still echoed in the council’s corridors. Fast-forward 11 years to the local election of May 2008 and ... |
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Written by Russell Lewis
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'As goes California so goes America’ or so they say. At first blush that might seem like a message of hope. The Golden State has long seemed to many the nearest thing to paradise on earth. It has mountains, beaches, sunshine almost every day and temperatures in the seventies and eighties. Some experts believe that there is more oil and natural gas offshore there than in Saudi Arabia. And in addition to these natural endowments there has been the stupendously successful high-tech Silicon Valley. In Hollywood, it boasts the world’s entertainment centre. And it has some top-notch universities like Stanford and Caltech. To cap it all, it is ruled by the popular film star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet the Golden state is in deep trouble. It is swimming in a Pacific Ocean of red ink as the economist Arthur Laffer put it, with half a trillion dollars of outstanding bonds, making it the most indebted state in the Union — and Moodys has already down rated those bonds twice. These are just pointers to something badly adrift. What has gone wrong? ... |
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The extraordinary scenes that attended the state funeral of Jade Goody last April (for what is a state funeral if it is not crowds lining the route since dawn, a flower strewn cortege, coverage on all TV channels, a eulogy by Max Clifford, and the public condolences of both Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition) remind us that this is the decade when western civilisation will fail. Coming a few days after the G20 conference in which the savings of millions of honest people were thrown to the inflationary winds, it and the passing of a woman idolised for being foul tongued, illiterate, having a robber and a drug addict for a father and a violent criminal for a husband, mark the triumph of the modern public lie. This example echoes even more strongly in the recent mock turtle regrets of our politicians over their misuse of taxpayers’ money. |
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Written by Oleg Gordievsky
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About ten years ago, as I was tuning in to various Russian radio stations, I first started hearing the name of a mysterious Vladimir Vladimirovich. Initially I thought the broadcasters must be referring to the poet Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930, but I quickly realized that they were talking unctuously about Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who was appointed pretty much out of nowhere in August 1999 by President Boris Yeltsin to be the prime minister. I was struck by the way the radio, television, newspapers... |
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Written by Christie Davies
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Estonia emerged in 1991 from the long night of socialism to become a free and democratic country with a modern economy. It deserves our support against its overwhelming Russian neighbour, who ruled Estonia before the Estonian war of independence 1918-20 and re-occupied it again in 1940-41 and 1944-91 with a brief interval 1941-44 when the invading German army displaced them. Yet there is much carping about Estonia from within the UN and the EU and from leftists and equality-mongers. Their whingeing focuses on the difficulties and alleged discrimination faced by Estonia’s large Russian minority, 350,000 strong, over a quarter of a population of only about 1,300,000. Another connected problem has been ...
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