Magnus Linklater

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y Seguridad,

Our friend Billy came back from Afghanistan rather earlier than planned. A Scots Royal Marine, he was on patrol in Sangin province when his Jackal armoured car hit a roadside bomb and was blown apart. Both his legs have been badly broken, but he has been told he is not going to lose them. “I'm definitely going to enroll in the Paralympics,” he joked from Selly Oak, the military hospital in Birmingham where all our serious casualties go. The reality is that months of long and painful recuperation lie ahead of him. As to the long-term mental effect, that can only be guessed at.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

The shooting of Gayle Williams in Kabul - cruel, clinical and cowardly - reminds us why we are in Afghanistan, and should bolster our resolve to stay. It is one thing for the commander of the British Forces to say that this is an unwinnable war. It is quite another to claim that, as a consequence, the 2,000 or so aid workers like Ms Williams who risk their lives daily to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans should consider pulling out.

There are, of course, those who argue persuasively that, however well-intentioned their operations are, these people can do little to alter the course of Afghanistan's implacable history - that sooner or later, when Nato forces either give up the struggle or negotiate with the Taleban, or both, any landmarks left behind by Western agencies will be swept aside, and with them the projects that have been so expensively fostered and funded.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalTerrorismo InternacionalEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

Thirty years ago, two nervous Sunday Times reporters sat in a country inn outside Dublin waiting for an IRA contact to show up. Neither I nor my colleague David Blundy had ever met this shadowy figure before, and we knew nothing of his motives. But he had held out the promise of solving one of the darkest secrets of the Provisionals' terror campaign against the British - the truth about the murder of the undercover army intelligence officer, Captain Robert Nairac.

Even by IRA standards Captain Nairac's death was shocking. Taken from the Three Steps public house in South Armagh, where he had gone undercover to gather information about republican operations, he had been beaten, tortured and finally shot.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

I was just the kind of protester that Sir Tom Stoppard was railing at over the weekend. Posturing rebels, he called us. The generation that took to the streets in Grosvenor Square or the Boulevard St Michel 40 years ago filled him with revulsion.

“I was embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris... seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born - the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent,” he wrote.

How odd of Sir Tom, of all people, to have got it so wrong.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías

White bread for young minds, says university professor

There is more than an echo of that arch patrician, Lady Ludlow, in the scathing criticism being directed against the internet and its unlimited diet of free information. She it was, in the BBC's delectable serialisation of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford, who dismissed the notion that the lower classes should be given access to education. Teaching them to read, she said, would simply distract them from saying their prayers and serving the landed gentry.

Today it is the University of Google that stands accused of purveying the new socialism by offering equality of information to everyone.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

There is a very good reason why Gordon Brown will hesitate, and may finally balk, at calling a snap election. It’s the state of his own backyard.

The divided politics of Britain could not be more dramatically revealed than by the latest opinion poll in Scotland. It suggests that Labour is now 16 points behind the Scottish National Party; the single percentage point that separated them at the election in May has been swamped by a psephological tsunami; it renders almost meaningless the recent UK polls that give Labour a 12-point lead over the Tories, because in Scotland the party is struggling to keep its head above water.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoEuropaUnión Europea,

Changing co-ordinates on a map to show that your enemy has strayed into your own waters is not just an Iranian trick. Twenty-five years ago, in the midst of the Falklands war, the British did it fairly effectively as well. Indeed, the way that the Ministry of Defence manipulated the information it gave out in the course of the conflict was to become a model of its kind, to be developed and used later in the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. It was all done in a very British way, of course, justified and defended on the ground that it helped to deceive the enemy.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

There is nothing harder for the Western tourist in India than confronting the pain of abject poverty - and ignoring it. In a crowded market near the Red Fort in Delhi, an emaciated young girl, carrying her baby brother, plucks at your jacket and gestures towards her mouth.

You know that a five rupee coin — just a few pence — could buy her enough to feed her for a day. But you have been sternly warned that to give to one beggar is to invite mayhem from the rest, that you will be surrounded by a hundred others and that you will never satisfy the demand.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalIglesia CatólicaEuropaUnión Europea,

The dilemma that confronts Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly over the Roman Catholic Church and its stand on homosexuality has the making of grand tragedy. Conflicts of personal faith and public duty are the kind that appeal to French playwrights in particular — Corneille, Racine, or perhaps, more accurately, the ardent Catholic Paul Claudel. They would have warmed to the theme of a man and a woman, driven by deep convictions, confronting the harsh requirements of the State and its administration of the law. That they represent the State, and are indeed responsible for the law in question, makes the outcome of the final act a matter of high drama.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

A horseman galloping south across the Scottish Border, guarded by troopers, and carrying a small bundle of documents: that is how the Union between Scotland and England really began, 300 years ago last night. The rider was bringing to Westminster the signed articles of the Treaty of Union, which had been approved by the Scottish Parliament the day before. The final vote, on article eight — the duty to be paid on Scottish salt — had been a fractious but lacklustre affair. The opposition had begun to lose heart. They knew the result was a foregone conclusion, and many of the country members simply failed to turn up.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

Anyone who is against Tony Blair’s decision on Trident should move briskly north to Scotland, where they can appreciate the incoherence of an anti-nuclear stand. The Scottish National Party, which is leading in the opinion polls, is against giving harbour space to nuclear submarines, and would refuse to allow them to anchor at Faslane on the Clyde. They would, therefore, have to move south to Barrow-in-Furness, depriving Scotland of 11,000 jobs.

It’s an odd manifesto pledge: “We guarantee to lose the country 11,000 jobs.” But there is an even odder one to come. Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, mumbles about having diesel-powered submarines instead.…  Seguir leyendo »