Trumpism is dying but still dangerous
Whether or not Donald Trump, Secretary of State Pompeo or Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin really care about the risk of transmission to the communist regime in Beijing of personal data including facial recognition by ByteDance, the Chinese company that now owns the social media platform TikTok is unclear. The White House has leapt on the […]
Virtually nothing that Trump wouldn’t do to secure re-election
As the Covid-19 wave moves out of New England and into the south and west of the United States, the extent of infections is rising exponentially, especially in areas where Republican governors and state legislators responded to Donald Trump’s call to reopen early regardless of the consequences. States like Florida, which Trump had held up […]
EU might have disintigrated if it failed to agree post-Covid stimulus deal
There are three principal ways of looking at the EU project. Euro-sceptics reject the EU in its entirety. Euro-federalists imagine that it is inevitably developing into a federal, sovereign superstate – the s0-called “good empire” advocated by Guy Verhofstadt. Euro-realists see the EU remaining a partnership of individual member states with limited pooling of sovereignty […]
Storey funeral highlights fundamental problems with Sinn Féin
The controversy over the Provisional movement’s participation in the Bobby Storey funeral is entirely predictable. But it raises far more fundamental issues that adherence to social distancing, mask-wearing, and compliance with guidelines on funeral gatherings. Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Provisional movement, revealed itself (or unmasked itself) as the subordinate element of an […]
Sanitising Britain’s imperialist past would require collective amnesia
Many people will find themselves somewhat emotionally torn by the sight of statues being toppled and defaced by angry, if self-appointed, modern iconoclasts. On the one hand, George Floyd’s cruel murder has started a long-delayed and hugely needed confrontation by America with the reality of its shameful anti-black political, economic, penal and social discrimination and […]
No optimism that coalition will last four years
The draft programme for Government for Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Green coalition is historic in at least one sense. 98 years after the National Independence Movement broke apart in a bitter, and, I think, wholly unnecessary fratricidal bloodbath on a point of high principle and little consequence, the two political descendants of that rupture are […]