The Yorkshire Ranter

Richard North has answered my question, stating that neither he or Helen Szamuely has been paid for their efforts with the Bruges Group. However, EU Referendum Blog still doesn’t carry any disclosure of their association with the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities (the European Parliament caucus that includes UKIP) or the Bruges…

Democracy is something we do. It’s not in the structures, but in the practice of democracy, that its benefits emerge. So, I’m kicking off a series of blog posts on how to be a democratic Europe. Or, if we want a more democratic EU, how we can do democracy in Europe. As a start, Nosemonkey…

In Vienna, they’ve started running freight over the tram system. The Wiener Linien, the public transport authority, runs perhaps the best system I’ve ever met (especially as they haven’t discovered the ticket barrier yet), including an intricate network of tramways carrying a variety of different trains that I’m not sick enough to detail. The plan,…

Richard Moderate, as opposed to Ken Moderate, has a brilliant post on liberalism and the Lib Dems. Needs reading.

Time for a little masturblogging, I think. I think it’s fair to say that the general election has been a real step forward in British blogging. It was the first time, really, that the UK blogosphere really functioned as such rather than as a collection of blogs orientated either towards Europe, or towards the US…

The “Matador of Tumbledown” post from last weekend got quite a bit of attention, which is all good, and at least none of it came from bemedalled veteran Jocks claiming I’d misrepresented them completely and in fact it was a barrel of laughs. I’m just going to do a small return to it, and apply…

Information received from the boys at the Army Rumour Service suggests that we have an answer to exactly when Tony Blair found time to visit the wounded returned from Iraq. Apparently, he has done, once. That was in March, 2004, in Birmingham. He’s not been back. Neither did he call on the joint services rehabilitation…

First, before doing anything else, go and read this Patrick Cockburn report for the Indy on Iraq. It’s the stuff all right – you may especially enjoy the account of the Americans who turned up to deal with a fight in a petrol queue, equipped with a 155mm self-propelled howitzer. Never bring a knife to…

Tony Blair has frequently been accused of lacking empathy with the families of the dead and wounded in Iraq, not least by Reg Keys. Among other things, like not knowing how many of them there are, he has also been criticised for not visiting the wounded returned to the UK. Now, earlier this week, Blair’s…

Back on Monday, the London Evening Standard ran a long and sensational story by Andrew Gilligan regarding none other than my alter-ego, Viktor Bout, who it seems has been working for the MoD even after many of his companies were blacklisted by the US. Now, I intended to blog about it in a free moment…