Closing the book on a dark chapter in Iraq’s history
Does the excitable publicity about the fact we just killed a guy worry anyone else?

Yesterday, Brendan Barber, the TUC leader, criticised the high pay levels of senior executives and questioned whether their remuneration was justified by their performance. The response from the CBI was predictable:
Complaining about executive pay might give the TUC brownie points with union members, but it ignores the reality of a global economy where there is a fierce battle [...]

There was an interesting item on the Today programme this morning, which was guest edited by Sir Clive Woodward, about boxing and the Olympics (scroll down for the listen again feature to 8.50 am). It has been suggested that investing in boxing, including encouraging boxing in schools, would be a good way to increase possible [...]

Santa dies at children’s party

Merrick wrote here yesterday in defence of the Citizen’s Basic Income. What I find interesting about the non-debate surrounding it is how a policy so close to the mainstream among polbloggers, could be so far from the shores of ordinary politics. Now, it’s easy to psychoanalyse the bloggers, to see what they see in the [...]

Work Secretary John Hutton promises a crackdown on the long-term unemployed. He says a ‘hardcore’ of benefit claimants are spending years on the dole and should be forced to take opportunities or have their benefits cut.
Whereas in fact we’d be better off just giving them their dole and leaving them alone.

Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, in his last briefing paper as Director of non-profit foreign policy analysts Chatham House, is suitably damning of our dear foreign policy obsessed PM - with a few nice little digs to boot:
“In Blair’s case, of course, the focus on foreign policy may have been accentuated by the difficulty of playing a [...]

Letter to David Robey of BBC London
About hostility-mongering on Feltz’s phone-in

Mulled whine
Further adventures in the conspiracy to claim there’s a conspiracy to ban Xmas

It’s gedankenexperiment time!
Suppose mafioso A pays hitman B to kill politician C. Is B any less a murderer than if he’d committed the crime off his own back? Obviously not: he’s 100% guilty. But does it follow that A is not responsible for the killing? Again, clearly not: it was his actions and his intentions [...]

The Limits of Empathy
War as sadism in the DRC

I’m no leader, but…
Italian politics update

Oaxaca Uprising Continues
… not to make the 10 o’clock news

Public sector more efficient than private enterprise, say the Tories