That’s politics for you: Ahead of an election political parties and politicians make outlandish promises often, I suspect, with very little thought whether their plans ultimately can be implemented or not. Examples are the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York and his pledge of city run grocery stores and free buses […]
Tag: democracy
Divided We Stand: Navigating Political Polarisation
As elections in Britain and the United States are upon us (and all of a sudden also in France), it is time to look at the political landscape and how it has evolved. Once upon a time in the United Kingdom there used to be the Conservatives and the Labour Party – and to a […]
Presidential Past, Criminal Present
The announcement on 30 May was not quite unexpected I suppose: a New York jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records. So the former and aspiring POTUS is now a convicted felon. This means, should he get re-elected in November, that the most powerful democracy in the […]
Autocracy on the advance
What have Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Venezuela in common? They all repress democratic expression by their populations, be it in general or as part of recent or upcoming elections. In Russia Vladimir Putin’s reelection at 87% of the population’s vote following the death of Alexei Navalny in an arctic penal colony in February is […]
The Problem With Freedom of Speech
This is a conundrum that could well define what the British press are going to report in the future and how: A well known television presenter was accused by Britain’s leading tabloid newspaper of having paid a rather substantial amount of money to a young person for sexually explicit photos. The story was obviously immediately […]
Autocracies vs democracies – A question of personal choice
The war in Ukraine is showing once more, how interconnected the global economies are and hence to what extent our lifestyle depends on what in democratic terms are unfriendly governments. Russia provides a substantial share of oil, gas and coal burnt in Europe, and hence the ‘special military operation’ against pro-western Ukraine poses a dilemma. […]
Shackled democracy – social media
After the events of January 6 in Washington and President Trump‘s half-hearted disavowal of the violence it was only a question of time until Twitter, Facebook and all the other social media sites would take action. And rightly so, although I will miss Ex-President Trump‘s tweets, not for their insightful nature but for their entertainment […]
The shackled democracy
It is amazing how things on the COVID-19 have changed.we all got used to social distancing and wearing face masks, meeting only in small groups add working from home. But some of the more recent restrictions imposed by western European governments could be quite worrying, weren’t it for the necessity of preventing do virus from […]
The grumpy older man 