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At noon today at a meeting at the Trimdon Labour Club in his constituency, Tony Blair told a group of his friends and political supporters (link requires Real Player) that he has tendered his resignation as leader of the Labour Party and will be stepping down as Prime Minister on 27 June after ten years and eight weeks in the job. The much-trailed announcement is all-but-certain to result in a smooth handover of power to Chancellor Gordon Brown who will lead the Labour Party into the next General Election slated for 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

British campaigners against European Union plans to outlaw imperial measures like pounds and ounces have claimed victory, according to news reports today. The self-styled ‘metric martyrs’ say they have say they have won the battle to keep Britain imperial, after confirmation from the European Commission’s industry commissioner, Gunther Verheugen, that dual marking of goods in imperial and metric would “continue indefinitely”. Previously the Commission had set a 2009 deadline for the phasing out of imperial measures still widely used in British greengrocers, butchers and supermarkets. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday this week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will announce the date he will step down as premier, all but cementing a July handover to his long time political friend and rival Gordon Brown. As Chancellor Brown moves nextdoor into Number 10 Downing Street, he faces some big challenges on the economy and on reinvigorating the domestic policy agenda. But the only way he will be able to make the necessary break with the Blair era and restore the Labour Party’s electoral fortunes is to offer a full and unequivocal apology for the mistakes of the government’s policy towards Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

The past few days have seen new revelations about the cause of the current outbreak of bird flu at a Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Suffolk. It is being widely reported that the outbreak is most likely to have been caused by imports of part-processed turkey from Hungary, which has had several outbreaks of the same H5N1 strain of the disease. Had the government allowed us to exercise a Yuck Factor test on the food we buy, this outbreak, along with BSE and foot and mouth disease, might have been averted. Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend I came across a second-hand vinyl record of Senator Bobby Kennedy interviewed by David Frost. The interview was conducted during RFK’s 1968 Presidential bid which was to end in his assassination in Los Angeles - just hours after winning the California Democratic primary. The record is a fascinating document of a remarkable man at a remarkable moment in American history (audio links below). Read the rest of this entry »

The Financial Times has reported on new figures from the French government statistical service showing that French farmers are “getting steadily worse off compared with their fellow citizens and their European peers”. Such figures are grist to the mill of those calling for a strong defense of EU farm support from the internal pressure of the EU budget and the external pressure of the WTO’s Doha Round of multilateral trade liberalization negotiations. What such figures fail to show is the changing structure of farming in France as in other European countries and the likelihood that subsidies are actually accentuating inequalities. Read the rest of this entry »

It must be frustrating being the President of the European Commission: a whole lot of responsibility but very little power. When Jose Manuel Barroso meets George W Bush at the White House next week he may be able to offer some advice to a US President who has just lost control of Congress and is watching his Iraq strategy slip further into chaos.

On the agenda is climate change, international security and global trade. Bush is currently the world’s leading climate change denier and the chances of him recanting are as good as those of snowball in hell - or the polar ice caps, the way things are going. On international security, the EU lacks a standing army and even a foreign minister, so Barroso has very little to offer here. It is only trade policy that the two men can use this high level meeting to achieve something concrete: sealing a deal that has so far eluded their respective trade negotiators at the WTO in Geneva. Presidential ‘fast track’ Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) will expire in a matter of months, and so if there is to be a deal on Bush’s watch, it needs to be made now. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month I gave my last ever Powerpoint presentation. It was on the findings of a new public opinion survey commissioned by the German Marshall Fund, where I am currently a non-resident transatlantic fellow. You can view it or even listen to a recording:

I gave slight variations of this presentation in Brussels, at the WTO in Geneva and finally at the Houses of Parliament in London. The knowledge that this would be the last time I would ever have to run the most desperately woeful application of the Microsoft Office suite gave me an unexpectedly wholesome and satisfying feeling. Bad Powerpoint has done much to kill the art of communication. How many times have you sat comatose while a speaker reads through 20 slides, each featuring an almost identical bulleted list, as if the slides were the main act and the speaker is merely the prompt, standing hidden in the wings? Is this the power of rhetoric? Is this the way to communicate with fellow human beings? Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Cohen writes in The Observer about the unwillingness of the British government to do something about tax avoidance by the super-rich, which he sees as “debauching British society”. Meanwhile new figures from the TUC show that since 2000 the pay of company executives has increased 17 times faster than average pay. It is true that the overall effect of tax and benefit changes made by Labour since 1997 has been to redistribute money from the rich to the poor, but it has not been sufficient to prevent a widening of the gap nor to outlaw the worst excesses of boardroom greed. Read the rest of this entry »

Will twelve days be long enough to mourn the passing of James Brown, Soul Brother Number One, the original Funky President, the Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk, the Godfather of Soul, who left this world on Christmas Day? Read the rest of this entry »