Global Political Insight

In 2003, Tony Blair gave a speech to the Fabian Society on the subject of public sector reform.  He argued that after years of Tory underfunding and privatisation, Labour had – and would continue – to reform public services to make them work for a modern society.  The speech was largely spin and guile (he […]

As rental prices hit an all time high, on average costing £800 per month and with ever inflating energy bills, has there ever been a worse time to be a tenant as we head towards autumn and winter? Landlords have particular legal responsibilities for duration of a tenancy agreement – they are legally required to […]

Following the unverified claims that chemical weapons were used in Syria, British Prime Minister David Cameron was ready to take military action against the Syrian state within days of the incident. The media and the public were certain that Britain was about to embark on another military campaign, to add to the recent tallies of […]

Over the past week, there has been major fracas over the issue of fracking in the UK. The little village of Balcombe in West Sussex became the stage of the latest showdown between environmentalists and the Caudrilla drilling company, with the police acting as umpire. Watching reels of footage from the protest, I was particularly […]

David Cameron’s expedition to India in February of this year seems to have been perfectly timed and potentially very lucrative. On his visit, the Prime Minister said: “I want Britain and India to have a special relationship… this is a relationship about the future, not [about] the past”. Beyond the delicate imperial history of the […]

In 1713, the small peninsula of Gibraltar was ceded from Spain to Great Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht after being captured in 1704 by mostly British and Dutch forces. Since then it has served as a trading outpost of the British Empire with the occasional Spanish siege, the last of which was in 1779. […]

Spain’s foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo’s recent threat to impose a €50 toll on vehicles crossing the Spain-Gibraltar border reflects nothing more than a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the countries failing economy. Unemployment in Spain is currently at 25% (second only to Greece in the Eurozone) and the IMF last Friday warned it […]

The opening years of the Conservative and Liberal Democrats coalition government provided few opportunities for the self-congratulation that comes so naturally to the present generation of Conservative politicians. The economy barely grew, the NHS was left in chaos by Andrew Lansley’s reforms and the coalition government’s promise of a new politics was tainted by repeated […]

Long gone are the days when America and Western Europe could credibly claim to set the international agenda and lead the way as leaders of the world. Since the financial market meltdown of 2008, it has become clear that nothing can be resolved without substantive support from China, India, Brazil, Russia and other emerging powers. […]

It is an irony of modern politics that the more the political class proclaims its commitment to social mobility, the more exclusive it seems to become. As is widely known and repeated, the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury were all educated at the same school, Eton (where the basic […]

The last few days have undoubtedly been dominated by the gruelling story of a political attack by a hardened radical on a British soldier. Now that some time has passed for everyone to think about what happened, it is time to start a debate about what the consequences of this event may be. Here I […]

From around 1970s onwards liberal democracy began spreading like wildfire from America. The principles of this type of democracy took over most of Western Europe and from 1990s it even started to implant itself on former Soviet Union nations. Since then, liberal democracy has been viewed as a prerequisite for a stable and thriving country […]