Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

I try to ignore Brian Walker’s contributions to Slugger, really I do, and broadly, in this endeavour, I am successful. His dense swamps of prose are easy to identify by their lack of paragraphing, and they rarely contain enough content to snag an unwilling reader’s eye. Just occasionally, however, my Walkerdar lets me down and I am unfortunate enough to find myself knee deep in the muddled, muddy mulch which comprises Brian’s political analyses. Today, regrettably, I’ve been forced to extricate myself, one boot at a time, from such a sucking, fetid morass . It is a confusing experience, as one finds oneself surrounded by disconnected, swirling sentences, untethered to a coherent argument. In truth there is generally some type of emotional core identifiable, deep within a Walker post, although usually it is better to feel it instinctively, rather than attempt to understand it by following through its so called logic. Around it forms a dizzying and condescending miasma of woolly wo...

At the height of controversy surrounding the Litvinenko affair, former dissident and adviser to President Putin, Gleb Pavlosky, accused David Miliband of imbibing anti Russian sentiment ‘with his mother’s milk’ . He was indulging, undoubtedly, in a degree of hyperbole, and mining Miliband family history to impugn the current generation was an unfortunate mode of debate. However his comments reflected genuine anger at the British foreign secretary’s consistently hostile attitude to Russia and little has occurred, in the intervening two years, to reassure Russians as to Miliband’s good faith. Nevertheless, this weekend, Miliband will embark upon the first visit to Russia by a UK foreign secretary in five years, when he visits his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow. Notwithstanding his clumsy, carping, unnuanced interventions on behalf of Ukraine and Georgia, there is an appetite for partnership between the UK and Russia. RIA Novosti, the state news agency, reports Russian hopes t...

The Russian President recently set out a prospectus for modernisation in an article published on the democratic news-site, gazeta.ru. Perennially hostile observers chose to interpret the piece as an extension of a good cop / bad cop routine which they believe Medvedev is engaged in, in conjunction with Vladimir Putin. By their estimation, real power resides squarely with the Prime Minister and suggestions of liberalism, which occasionally emanate from the President’s office, form a convenient distraction, simply permitting Putin to exercise his personal authority with greater freedom and efficiency. Cynicism amongst commentators, however, is not universal. There are those who believe that Putin’s influence has merely postponed a project of reform for which Medvedev will seek a mandate in 2012. The article does not suggest that the President will willingly stand aside, should his predecessor seek an immediate return to the Kremlin, and there is plenty of evidence to corroborate th...

We’ve had Ian McCrea’s campaign to prevent the Pope visiting Northern Ireland, Iris Robinson’s hate-filled remarks about homosexuals, Sammy Wilson’s climate change denial , Edwin Poots et al with their five thousand year old Earth and Jim Wells versus wifi . But if anyone still harbours a suspicion that the DUP might be remotely connected, by even the flimsiest thread, to the mainstream of British politics, they should examine Gregory Campbell’s contribution to a Westminster Hall debate aimed at pressuring some of the more unpleasant regimes throughout the world to abandon the death penalty. Across party divides agreement was reached that abolition should be sought in countries including Iran, China and Belarus. A rare accord, which did not include the East Londonderry MP, who rejected ‘cosy consensus’, on the basis that a ‘small number of serial killers who treat the prospect of redemption with utter contempt’ could ‘commit another crime against an innocent person’. A scenario ...

When four Ulster Unionists signed a letter of protest, attacking their party leader’s decision to forge an electoral pact with David Cameron’s Conservatives, I welcomed the opportunity to bring dissent out into the open. Roy Garland was one figure whose name appeared on the letter, and its contents reflected closely the preoccupations which colour his weekly column in the Irish News. In common with two of his fellow dissidents, Garland is no longer a UUP representative. He exercises influence through his articles (with which this blog frequently disagrees). After enduring months of innuendo and sniping through that medium, Sir Reg Empey finally chose to respond to Garland’s criticism in the Irish News’ letter pages, last week. Their differences have now been made explicit. I believe that this type of internal debate should have been fought, and won, earlier, in order to let UCUNF make its case to voters with unity of purpose. However the maxim ‘better late than never’ is applica...

Wouldn’t it have been a rare privilege to be the man, or woman, who, along with morning coffee, delivered to Scotland’s ‘Il Duce’ the news that David Cameron considers him ‘irrelevant’ to the result of the next general election? One can only imagine the look of indignation which must have contorted Alex Salmond’s smug countenance. Cameron is of course correct to point out that the SNP leader does not even intend to contest the Westminster poll. Although, if he is not a candidate, such is the personality cult which envelops Salmond, there is little doubt that he will attempt to turn each and every battle for a Scottish seat into a personal plebiscite on his own popularity. However, in previous general elections, Scots have always rejected the SNP in favour of participating in a national contest. Mr Cameron’s remarks were in response to Salmond’s suggestion that a hung parliament could follow a general election, in which case his party might hold the balance of power, and Westminst...

Tom Gallagher is not by temperament or inclination a unionist. His book, ‘The Illusion of Freedom’ , questions the effectiveness of the SNP’s leadership of Scottish nationalism, but does not reject, explicitly, the legitimacy of the party’s aim of independence. The author is critical of the personality cult surrounding Alex Salmond, his party’s cronyism and clientelism, its confused economic policies, the Anglophobia associated with its chauvinist doctrines, but Gallagher treats as axiomatic the assumption that Scotland, as a nation, must enjoy a high degree of political self-expression in order to flourish. If he eventually rejects Salmond’s separatism, it is because he believes it leads to an inward looking, socially conservative, centralist state, not because he subscribes to integrationist unionism. ‘The Illusion of Freedom’ consists of two parts. The first charts a fairly brief history of Scotland, stretching from the Act of Union in 1707 until the Scottish Parliament’s reest...