Prince Harry (or Cornet-2/Lt Wales or possibly Widow-Six-Seven, depending on who you ask) has fulfilled his wish to fight for his grandmother and country. It would seem that this was a sop to him for not resign his commission because he hadn’t been allowed to fight in the manner he had been trained – commander [...]

I will be filling in for Garbo while he is on holiday for his ‘Politics Decoded‘ Column on the Wardman Wire. My first one is up today and it deals with Kosovo and Serbia.
xD.

The government is continuing to fail to live up to its responsibilities to Iraqis who worked for the UK in Iraq and, now they are being hunted down as collaborators, need our help. I hand over to Dan Hardie to tell the latest chapter in this story:
Iraqi Employees: Fine words, shabby deeds
Do you like [...]

Car manufacturer Porsche seems to have little respect for democracy. They have decided to pursue Ken Livingstone’s £25 charge on the most polluting cars in the courts. On the first of May, people will have a choice between Ken Livingstone, who supports the charge, and Boris Johnson who does not. Either way, the decision should [...]

Richard Branson has flown one of his aircraft on biofuels. Two interesting points come out of it.
Firstly, the green lobby has had to accept both that reducing carbon emissions can have economic consquences and that those consequences can be unacceptable. Specifically, various people have (rightly) pointed out that, at the moment, growing crops for biofuels [...]

Redemption Blues holds a particularly good Britblog Roundup, and comes up with one of the best one-liners I’ve seen: “the Sun + money + fear = the Daily Mail“.
xD.

Is, as Bob Piper suggests, the agency workers bill. Looking down the list of MPs, there are some people who might be considered pretty close to government; they are not the awkward squad. We have Frank Field, Peter Hain, Kate Hoey, Lindsay Hoyle, Geoffrey Robinson and John Spellar, for instance. Given how close Geoffrey Robinson [...]

The Financial Times reports on the government’s proposals to do ’something’ about illegal file sharing. That something is to make ISPs the law enforcer; they will be penalised if people use their networks to share files. There has been talk of a ‘three-strikes’ system whereby ISPs would be obliged to remove service from their customers [...]

I used to think that Mr Eugenides would have been pronounced ‘you-jen-uh-dees’. It turns out it’s ‘you-juh-neye-dees’. Either way, I recommend his blog and, via Matt Wardman, his contribution to a podcast on the best blogs of the past week.
xD.

Julian Le Grand, a professor at the LSE, recently proposed, in his capacity as chair of Health England (”a national reference group for health and wellbeing”) making people apply for a £10 license in order to be able to buy cigarettes and, one presumes, other forms of tobacco.
I have to ask whether Professor Le Grand [...]