People who know me will have often heard my complaints about some of the annoyances of living in London. There’s a lot that seems tempting, for example, about what Jon has written about his recent move to Brussels.

But of course the flip side of this place is the amazing range of things happening here - and the trick is (unlike too many Londoners) to take advantage of them!

And at the end of last week I had the opportunity to enjoy two of its highlights.

One of them has been widely written about and recognised - and is the new production of Aida that is on at the ENO, designed by Zandra Rhodes. I must say when I first saw this advertised I wanted to go because I don’t know Aida very well and I wanted to hear the music and see the opera. I wasn’t that interested in who had designed it (and if I’m being honest although I had just about heard of Zandra Rhodes, I had only a vague idea that she designed clothes, a bit wacky I think, probably because her name begins with a Z!).

But from the moment the curtain rises the star of the show is very clearly the design on stage - both the set and the extraordinary costumes. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of heat and light generated over the last few hours over the contenders’ appearances today on The Politics Show and The World This Weekend - and it does indeed seem to have been less than our party’s finest hour. (Though in the midst of it I have been enjoying the grounding effect that the aggregator, Lib Dem Blogs, brings to it all, so that furious posts like Huhne - now he has really cooked his goose are also interspersed with ones of much more local interest with titles like Lib Dem appointed Camden Cycling Champion!).

But even leaving aside that little spat it’s been increasingly clear to me over the last few days that momentum is again increasingly behind the Clegg campaign. Now of course most readers will scarcely be surprised to hear that that’s my view, given I have been backing him from the start. But I hope you’ll hear me out before deciding whether to dismiss my view on those grounds.

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Well what other conclusion can you draw from the fact that his own campaign is putting out briefings which he himself is then disowning?

Apparently Hillary firmly put and Barack and John Edwards back in their place after some heated personal exchanges in their televised debate in Las Vegas last night.

But over on our side of the pond, the Lib Dem leadership Question Time special was much more civilised.

I keep reading that it was the pivotal moment for the contest, as most Lib Dem members would not receive much direct contact from the candidates so would use it to decide their vote when it arrives in next week’s post.

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I’ve already written a fair bit about the Chatham House conference I attended recently, but I did just want to add something about the excellent points made at it by William Wallace about the UK’s position in relation to the EU and the US.

For he did a very good job of highlighting some of the choices faced by the UK.

We are in many ways prisoners of the way in which the British public and media like to see some of these issues, which does lead us into some quite odd positions. This view, which he says in a phrase he ascribed to Timothy Garton-Ash, sees everything that Britain has done since 1945 as ”˜footnotes to Churchill’, makes us very worried about any encroachment by ”˜Europe’, but almost totally unconcerned by any such thing by the USA.

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I read a report in the Observer over the weekend that a new grouping called the Alcohol Health Alliance will launch this week, calling for a 10% rise in taxation on booze, and a ban on advertising it on TV before 9pm - and I see that they have today launched their campaign. The Observer went further, going on to quote a Professor Sir Michael Marmot from University College London, as saying that that doesn’t go nearly far enough, and that alcohol prices should be doubled, to discourage people from drinking - indeed this is highlighted in the article’s headline “Call for price of bring to double to cut bingeing”. Their piece generally runs through all the evils of drinking, and why the government is concerned about this.

Now, I don’t seek to dispute for a moment the medical and other evidence that alcohol is quite clearly bad for your health. This is particularly true in relation to young people, a focus for this article and these calls.

But what I find extraordinary is the Observer’s - and indeed even the BBC’s - apparently unquestioning acceptance that the government should obviously therefore be looking into further restricting access to it. While they do both briefly quote a spokesman from the British Beer and Pub Association pointing out that doing any of this would ‘further restrict personal freedoms’, it is quite clear that they are only really interested in the case for doing some of this. (I see here that the drinks industry has launched its own salvo in reply to this initiative, but a self-interested response from the industry with a direct financial interest hardly qualifies as a response on the principle).

This incredibly authoritarian and nanny-ish government does actually seem to have brainwashed us all that it is acceptable to prevent people taking decisions about their own lives. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s some quite heated debate going on about whether Huhne is attempting to ’smear’ Clegg by alleging that he is supporting unpopular policies which he is in fact not advocating.

So here’s the evidence, so you can decide for yourself if you think that’s what’s going on.

The facts are:
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One of the most interesting speakers at the recent Chatham House conference which I mentioned here, was a guy I hadn’t heard of before called Philip Wilkinson. Wilkinson had a long background in the army, including the commandos, paras, and special forces, before specialising particularly in counter-insurgency and supporting the development of peace in post-conflict situations, including in Afghanistan, advising the UN, and he is now an associate fellow at Chatham House itself.

He said a number of things of interest to me, but what really grabbed my attention was what was I think his central theme, that in the twenty-first century politics and the military have become too separate. He argued powerfully that because politicians and those engaged in the political dialogue generally rarely now have personal experience of the military, they have a wrong understanding, mostly an exaggerated one, of the sorts and scale of problems that military action can solve. They forget that while military action can certainly be useful, it needs to be fitted within a policy context, with defined political and strategic objectives. The obvious examples to demonstrate this are Afghanistan and Iraq: it’s all very well sending in the military to defeat the government already there, but there’s no point doing that - and indeed you will fail - unless you have some idea what it is you’re actually trying to achieve and what you’re going to do there once the guns have fallen silent.

Of course in general this point - as his adducing of Clausewitz’s familiar point that “War is the continuation of politics by other means” to support it showed - is not new.

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