February 2015

Whenever I heard managers in the National Health Service speak in their peculiar Brezhnevian jargon, a mixture of moral exaltation and tedious bureaucratese, I used to wonder whether what they said actually corresponded to the thoughts that ran through their heads, or whether they had to translate them into langue de bois. A similar question came to my mind when … [Read on]

Lessons in politics and economics are never learned, at least not so that they never have to be learned again. But few countries are so impervious to experience as Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves in the world. This gift of God has been turned into a curse; for whenever the price of oil goes up, the government … [Read on]

The Guardian is to be commended for its report of the killing of the Jordanian Air Force pilot, Muadh al-Kasebeh by the so-called Islamic State. It called it murder, which is what it was; by contrast, it called the killing of terrorists in Jordan, executions, correctly, for the terrorists had been sentenced according to law, with at least an opportunity … [Read on]

I was not in the least surprised that the Equality and Human Rights Commission came to the conclusion that patients detained in psychiatric hospital have five times the risk of preventable death as psychiatrically ill people in prison. Having worked in both types of institution, I had long suspected as much. The prisoners in knew were in general far more … [Read on]

Political correctness is an increasing threat to the rule of law. First the immemorial rule that no man could be tried twice for the same crime was abrogated in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent, egregious Macpherson Report, a low point in the extensive history of British official moral cowardice. Now the Director of Public Prosecutions … [Read on]

Political correctness is an increasing threat to the rule of law. First the immemorial rule that no man could be tried twice for the same crime was abrogated in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent, egregious Macpherson Report, a low point in the extensive history of British official moral cowardice. Now the Director of Public Prosecutions … [Read on]

Last week I had my own little banking crisis. Having accepted the bank’s suggestion that I print my own statements direct from the internet, I discovered that the bank then set out to drive me mad. ‘To obtain your statement,’ said the webpage, ‘simply click on the link below.’ Unfortunately, there was no link below. I tried various methods to … [Read on]