Strasbourg:

Human Rights were very much at the forefront of my busy schedule as I attended the week long Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg last week. I will now sit on the Assembly’s Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons committee this session. The week was punctuated on the Wednesday with a visit from the UK Prime Minister David Cameron. The last British Prime Minister to address the Assembly was Winston Churchill, so he knew he had to be more statesman than Euro sceptic. The PM had jetted from his PMQ’s in the House of Commons which he ended …

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Council of Europe

I am writing this week from Strasbourg where I am attending the First part of the 2012 Session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The Prime Minister is coming out to address the Assembly on Wednesday as President of the Council of Ministers to the Assembly. The reception he receives from the 47 member countries has potential for a collective discord following his earlier demands put on him from his own backbenches to reform the European Convention of Human Rights or take the UK out of it.

KGB

Political allies/friends of the Prime Minister may be few …

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Referendum

David Cameron has nobody to blame but himself for the chaos that resulted from his final acknowledgement last week that the chicanery that has been evolving from Alex Salmond’s nationalist government in Hollyrood since their election victory last May, had to be confronted. He previously had foolishly chosen appeasement, soft peddling and backslapping to ingratiate himself with Salmond’s SNP government. We should not forget where the SNP government were going before his intervention. Alex Salmond intended to hold a multi questioned referendum, where like the each way bet at the bookies, he would claim victory if his Independence punt came …

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Fact Checker:

Trying to catch up on my reading during the Christmas recess I came across an article in the Washington Post about the pending 2012 US Presidential Election. The report prefaced the article with a quote from C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, 1921 where he wrote, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. The Washington Post is better known for its investigation into the 1972 Watergate scandal which resulted in the resignation of US President Richard Nixon in 1974. 

US Presidential Election:

For the 2012 Presidential election the Post has already setup what I would describe a “Pinocchio” checker of …

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Auld Year

As we see the auld 2011 year out and the new 2012 year in this weekend it is difficult to imagine that the next twelve months could be as bad as the last. But bad and worse is very much on the cards. This year we’ve had national disasters in Japan, New Zealand, Philippines etc; Revolutions in Africa and the Middle East in Tunisia, Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Syria; the global economy with America and Europe again looking over the abyss of another economic meltdown, which could go beyond the worse experiences of the 2008 global recession.

New …

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