Alice Miles

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InternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

They have been convicted by everybody except a jury. The men on trial for their involvement in an airline bomb plot, four of whom the jury felt unable to convict of murder conspiracy this week, had been condemned as soon as they were arrested two summers ago.

Then, the Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson told us publicly that there had been a plot to bomb airliners that “was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. A “security source” told the Daily Mirror: “Make no mistake - if this plot had succeeded it would have been bigger than 9/11 in terms of body count.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalTerrorismo InternacionalEuropaUnión Europea,

Of all the detail about the bomb plots over the weekend, the fact that the perpetrators seem to be linked by their medical training has caused the most consternation. How can a doctor want to kill, and an NHS doctor at that? How can anyone working in the National Health Service, that quintessentially British institution, not only not feel British, but actually hate Britain?

Even to ask the questions is to misunderstand to a degree what the National Health Service is: not, in fact, the essence of Britishness but to a large extent foreign. Nearly four in ten doctors registered to work in the UK (they are not necessarily all working here) qualified overseas, in 150 countries from as far afield as Ecuador and Ethiopia, Somalia and Singapore.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

I find myself a bit jealous of the Scots and the French. Admittedly I enjoy elections full stop, however and wherever, but these neighbours of ours appear to be having what I think of as real elections: old-fashioned slugging bouts with ideology and political parties who stand for instantly identifiable things. Differentiate between Labour and the SNP north of the Border? Easy. Scottish independence. Between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy? Of course: the Socialist and the rightwinger. And an 85 per cent turnout! We can only gasp in awe. Good for the French.

Of course there are caveats: does she really believe .…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y Seguridad,

Of all the evasive arguments over the replacement of Trident, I find the “we don’t need to take a decision now” position the most dishonest. That it is the official stance of the Liberal Democrats shows just how pathetic that party has become.

The first bit of sophistry is the argument that today’s vote isn’t really about “replacing Trident”, but is about replacing the submarines that fire them. As if the submarines are much use for anything else. Alongside that, I would put Tony Blair’s demand that Trident’s opponents “need to explain why disarmament by the UK would help our security”.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

I am passionate about this! cried Tessa Jowell as she gave evidence on the London Olympics to MPs yesterday. And I thought, oh no, give me politicians who are not passionate; give me politicians who can add up.

Like the Chancellor. I bet Gordon Brown is worried and furious about these Games. The extent to which the Treasury trusts the Olympic planners is clear from the fact that they have demanded a contingency fund of 60 per cent of the budget for cost-overruns, compared with a normal construction contract which would require just 20 per cent. London 2012 has, and always did have, the makings of an economic nightmare about it: a massive, unfunded infrastructure project on sites we didn’t yet own, built on land contaminated to a degree we hadn’t yet discovered, with uncertainties from transport to security to, well, everything, but with one unyielding and deadly certainty to it: we had to do it by the summer of 2012, a fixed and extremely brief timescale.…  Seguir leyendo »