…specifically to Mongolia, where the International Herald Tribune finds a modern tragedy of the commons and offers some clues to the intriguing questions: whose horde was it anyway? And exactly how right wing was Genghis Khan? Read More
Can’t really argue with that. This is the problem with this bloody constitution – there’s no vision behind it. There’s nothing to inspire interest, enthusiasm or loyalty – even among the faithful. For a project as ambtitious as the breaking down of barriers between the disparate, once war-ridden nations of an ancient continent, you’d think they’d have at least tried to have given it a shot or two of pizzazz.
The trouble with this “constitution” (even the eurosceptic Scotsman accepts that it’s really little more than “a 500-page pull-together of all previous EU Treaties”) is, as I’ve said elsewhere before, that it’s looking to sort out the present and the clutter of the past, not the future.
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Andrew at Hold that Thought, a new blog, has drawn my attention to a polemical piece by German social theorist Jurgen Habermas , arguing for a left-wing “yes” vote in the French referendum. Habermas’ major contention is that
What is vaunted today as the “European social model” can only be defended if European political strength grows alongside the markets. It is solely on the European level that a part of the political regulatory power that is bound to be lost on the national level can be won back. Today the EU member states are strengthening their cooperation in the areas of justice, criminal law and immigration. An active Left taking an enlightened stance toward European politics could have also pressed long ago for greater harmonisation in the areas of taxation and economic policy.
When is a war a ‘just war’? According to the classic definition, one of the key criteria is that war is not waged lightly: going to war has to be the ‘last resort’.
But it can be tricky to tell when you’ve reached the ‘last resort’, or the last of anything; you could easily jump too soon, or else wait too long and miss it altogether. Think of Father Ted Read More
So now we have the final proof. New Labour is the greatest political party in history. Not content with three historic election victories, bringing democracy to the Middle East and the elevation of a priapic blind man to one of the great offices of state, New Labour can create worlds of their own imagining from the raw firmament.
According to the New York Times, the Afghan government is dragging its feet in eradicating poppy cultivation:
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Britain has no written constitution.
This is one of the stock statements that pundits make on British political life. And, of course, like most stock statements, it isn’t really true. The vast majority of the British constitution is in fact written down, but in disparate documents, none of which are headed ‘warning: contains constitution’.
The Act of Settlement, the Parliament Acts, the Scotland Act, the Government of Wales Act, the Bill of Rights. These are all parts of the constitution, although none are explicitly headlined as such.
A small but consistent strand of modern British politics (which surfaces again in the comments on Eddie’s post below) has been the campaign to give the UK a unified written constitution. It has been becalmed for some time now, but with the tensions brought by such issues as devolution, Lords reform and European integration, the question is once again being posed.
In this post, I want to take a brief look at what the purpose of such a constitution would be, how the UK might go about adopting one, and then throw open the debate on what it might contain.
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But first, some zen propaganda:
US military commanders are planning to pull back their troops from Iraq’s towns and cities and redeploy them in four giant bases in a strategy they say is a prelude to eventual withdrawal.
Eventually, we all withdraw. In the light of the eventual heat death of the universe, nothing is permanent. There is only the way. That alone remains… Read More
As a nation, the past few years we Brits have become pretty adept at getting wound up by things that, in the grand scheme of things, are not really that important. The march against the Iraq War was one of the few instances in which the British people did get something right. But since then, we’ve hardly done anything, and a lot of people have been naive enough to believe Tony Blair that Iraq really is better now. Such people need to consult Today In Iraq.
But this post isn’t about Iraq. Iraq is the only exception to the thesis I am about to launch into. I believe that Britain has a problem. It’s not one that people will be prepared to admit to, and it appears to be something buried deep within the psyche of the nation. The symptom of this problem is responsible for some of the problems we see in society in terms of a small minority of people (not just children) who have no respect for the law. On top of that, we have people who like the law only when it is on their side. But underneath all this is one of the problems: Britain’s obsession with abuse; that violence solves all, and feeding a general culture of misguidance.
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Judging by the reaction to previous posts here at The Sharpener, you, dear readers, cannot get enough of this electoral reform stuff. So, in the greater service of interested humanity, I thought I would write on the subject (hereafter re-branded the Fair Vote) once more.
But this time I’ll try to answer a specific question: how would the political map of Britain look if we went ahead and introduced this foreign, European electoral muck?
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