The hypocrisy of the British media can still surprise. Look at the warmth with which they bade farewell to Michael Foot when he died last week, after they had vilified him while he was leader of the Labour Party between 1980 and 1983.
At one level, the Greek crisis is a familiar tale of market blackmail and bullying. Through giving up its own currency and joining the euro, Greece attached itself to one of the world’s major economies, Germany.
Remember the Third World debt crisis of the 1970s and 1980s? The First World debt crisis of the 2000s and 2010s may make it look like a tea party.
The future course of the British and the world economies are shrouded in obscurity. But figures released last week give us a proper measure of the magnitude of what has already happened.
The United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen last month proved to be a historic watershed. This isn’t because of what it achieved.
Is the Tobin Tax on international financial transfers an idea whose time has come? It has been endorsed by the United Nations, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Financial Services Authority chair Lord Turner, and now the European Union (EU).
The sneaking feeling of sympathy that I felt for Gordon Brown when he was ambushed and coshed by the Sun attack machine over Afghanistan didn’t survive the appalling speech he made about immigration on Thursday of last week.
If A contemporary Rip Van Winkle, awakening from three years’ sleep, took a walk down Wall Street last week, he might imagine that nothing had changed.
The media have been gloating about the plight of the left in the wake of the German federal elections a fortnight ago. "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of socialism’s slow collapse", announced the New York Times last week.
Probably the most important thing about the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last week was that it is the third time it has met in the past year. What was a relatively marginal international body seems to be morphing into a significant institution.
Is Barack Obama’s decision to cancel the deployment of missile defence in central and eastern Europe another sign of how the US has been weakened by the Iraq disaster? In a very obvious sense, yes.
A large chunk of the already ramshackle case for the Western military occupation of Afghanistan has now collapsed.
