View from where I am mediating today.
Posts by John de Waal KC
Coincidentally, I received a letter from HMRC last month with a demand for £91 underpaid in January, so hard agree.
Good morning from the south coast of Sri Lanka.
View from where I am mediating today
I wonder if on one of the Indian channels some middle-aged comedian is being sent around Britain, getting the Thameslink to St Albans, sampling pey wet in Wigan, poignantly observing that there are homeless folk on the streets even in Knightsbridge, and so forth bsky.app/profile/jack...
What they’re basically saying is that Starmer and the UK isn’t allowed to operate an even moderately independent foreign policy outside of the United States. That is both ahistoric, wrong and weird for people who constantly tell us how sovereignty is what matters most.
“We cannot say that the United States’ actions are against international law, but we condemn Iran’s retaliatory actions as against international law,” is neither a coherent nor a compelling position.
Best analysis I have read yet.
View from where I am mediating today.
Illegal migrant in small boat stopped from entering sovereign territory without a permit.
This piece by my Berlin colleague Alexandra Prokopenko is essential reading on Russia. The Russian economy is in a slow death spiral, bankrupting itself on fuelling the Ukraine war--and yet the leadership is not changing course, as it believes everyone else is also failing.
I’m on for it. Let’s *have* the debate. Let’s reason it out.
Jim Radcliffe pissed me off, so I wrote this about the inconvenient truth of migration.
tl:dr - no, just fucking read it. Some basic mathematics - you know, COUNTING THINGS - might make you reconsider, you stupid twats.
(I'm not trying to make friends)
open.substack.com/pub/russinch...
It makes you wonder whether the whole ‘war on woke’ over the last few years was waged just so that men like Ratcliffe could be disgustingly racist again without any accountability.
PM tells Sir Jim Ratcliffe to apologise for saying UK 'colonised by immigrants' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I visited this cemetery some years ago whilst working in Gaza. It was a place of peace in a troubled area. Sorry to read of this.
View from where I am mediating today.
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Have come across a Wulfric recently.
At this point if I was abducted by aliens 👽🛸I would consider it a rescue mission.
Found a breakdown truck thanks
Greetings from the hard shoulder of the M40 where I have hit debris in the carriageway, the car is undriveable and the RAC won’t help me because ‘it’s not a mechanical failure’.
View from where I am mediating today.
As I get older and analyse politics in more psychological terms, I see the far right for what it is: the preserve of older men who mourn and resent their loss of useful knowledge and status. They hate the people who've 'replaced' them - the young, women, people of colour - and seek revenge on them.
(Huddersfield) possibly not…
Not bad - though not as good as the IDRC which are the best. I’m in Yorkshire btw sure you will approve!
View from where I am mediating today.
It's not the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, it's the “Gone-Rogue Doctrine.”
My column today for @carnegieeurope.bsky.social on Trump's Greenland gambit as performative imperialism, why “sphere of influence” politics doesn’t work any more and Europe's choices. carnegieendowment.org/europe/strat...
Quentin on a Teams call this afternoon.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏