The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets; it is to protect officials.
-Jobs for the Boys, Yes Minister.
Tom Watson has been musing about civil service bloggers following the Civil Serf incident. He has come up with some thoughts but, before I list them, it’s worth repeating that these are thoughts, not a statement of [...]

Viktor Bout has finally been not only caught but arrested. There is plenty of background on Viktor Bout - probably the world’s leading arms trafficker - on the Yorkshire Ranter’s blog. According to the UN, he has illegally shipped arms to Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, DR Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Congo-Brazzaville, [...]

Ewan Watt asks me what I think about military uniforms being worn in public by service personnel and, more particularly, the instruction to troops of a RAF station commander not to wear uniform in town. Remarkably, this issue has affected me; at school, we weren’t allowed to wear CCF uniforms in the minibus if [...]

Iain Paisley is finally going. He will be remembered for saying ‘yes’ after a lifetime of saying ‘no’. Perhaps he knew his community and knew that, during the peace process, the time was not right. Maybe the people he represented politically and spiritually needed to spend more time during the then-ongoing peace process to prepare [...]

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 [...]

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Pascal’s wager was deeply flawed as it either assumed that you could choose to believe or conflated belief with action. However, it has a useful application to climate change.
The wager is probably best explained with a simple table:

Believe (1)
Don’t Believe (2)

God exists (1)
Heaven
Hell

God doesn’t [...]

EastEnders is one of the most profoundly dangerous programmes on television and probably does more to promote the Daily Express nightmare vision of a violent, broken society than that newspaper itself. My objection isn’t to soap operas per se - to a large extent, I agree with Jeremy Bentham about pushpin being as valid an [...]

So is Boris a racist?
New Nation carried a report on Boris Johnson being a racist; you can read it for free by clicking on the ‘demo’ section of its website.
Racism is a word, much like ‘nationalism’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ that has so many meanings attached to it that it has no generally accepted meaning at [...]

Erik Ringmar, a good friend of mine from the LSE, has written what, to my knowledge is a double first with his book, A Blogger’s Manifesto. It is the first academic study of blogs and it is the first book about blogging that isn’t about how public relations people should take advantage of blogging, how [...]

The Oxford Union is a private debating society; only members can attend its proceedings. Its appeal for speakers is in being able to influence some of the top minds in the UK and the world and, of course, being recognised as worthy of such an opportunity. It does not matter a hoot whether people outside [...]