I’m not much a Zoom enthusiast but the invitation to listen to Defra secretary of state George Eustice give a “major” speech on the environment, via Green Alliance, seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. So, having finally got zoom to work on my computer, I sat and listened to him talk for 15 […]
“The evil that is in the world nearly always comes from ignorance.” This is a central message of Albert Camus’ La Peste. It’s also, to my mind, the message most relevant to our struggles against coronavirus and Brexit. La Peste is the story of a (fictional) outbreak of plague in the (real) city of Oran, […]
Britain’s Vanguard submarines, each armed with eight US Trident ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, have been patrolling the seas since 1994. An issue bitterly contested in the 1980s has now, for most of us, sunk beneath our consciousness like…well, a submarine. But will it stay that way? In the 1980s, US ground-launched cruise missiles were […]
Anita moved from the Netherlands to Cornwall with her family in 2014. They were blissfully happy here. Then the referendum came and her husband was diagnosed with cancer… Young Matt: “I get so angry sometimes. People are so unthinking. They say ’We just don’t want any more newcomers, that’s all. People that are here can […]
Welcome to the first edition of West Country Voices, a new online paper for people in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. Run by volunteers and showcasing local writers, West Country Voices will be scrutinising and calling out those in power, challenging the narrative spun by the mainstream media, and giving a voice to those with […]
At long last, we can read the Russia Report prepared last year by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). Boris Johnson had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent this document ever seeing the light of day, and succeeded in blocking its release before the general election in December 2019. Arron Banks of Leave.EU had […]
Only a government as intellectually incoherent as this one could publish in the same week two important documents with absolutely no consistent philosophy underpinning the policy objectives behind them. Worse, the objectives themselves seem diametrically opposed. On Monday, we got the border operating model setting out all the new barriers to trade the government intends to […]