UK Politics

Is it any wonder Spain and the UK are in the state they’re in right now economically? Zapatero, in Spain, and Brown, in the UK – two socialist prime ministers in the middle of a recession – have been accused by their political colleagues of making things up as they go along.

Two Labour party members of Parliament – former defence secretary Geoff Hoon and former health secretary Patricia Hewitt – have challenged Gordon Brown’s leadership as Prime Minsiter.

Several Spanish newspapers ran stories yesterday about Gordon Brown ordering a review of airport security and announcing a special Yemen Terrorism Day alongside the What To Do With Afghanistan Day on January 28.

So the Royal Navy shot up a buoy which was or wasn’t flying a red and yellow Spanish flag five miles off the coast of Gibraltar a couple of weeks ago. Who cares?

The leader of the Scottish government has decided to try and hold a referendum on Scottish independence in November 2010 but he will probably not receive much political or public support.

On Saturday I had a bit of a desperate but perhaps hopeful conversation with two Iraqi interpreters currently exiled in Damscus, Syria. The UNHCR estimates there are around 220,000 Iraqi refugees currently living in that country.

The rescue of a British New York Times journalist and the deaths in the same action of his Afghan interpreter, a British special forces soldier and three or four other unnamed Afghans poses some important questions.

The killing and dying continue in Afghanistan as in all wars but Europe and the US have neither any clear idea of what they are doing there nor a successful strategy for executing their plan and they won’t accept the implications a proper moral commitment would require.

A!er eight years fighting in Afghanistan, and with US General Stanley McCrystal about to te” President Obama that the current strategy isn’t working, what is the UK doing in the graveyard of empires?

This is a thought on Afghanistan brought on this morning whilst reading a post written by Charonqc, a law professor in the UK, on his blog, following an especially bad week for the British in which eight soldiers were killed in just one day.