Global Political Insight

In the past week there have been increasing calls to ban the Greek far right party, known as Golden Dawn. Since the party has achieved national representation by winning 18 seats in the Greek Parliament, it has been making headlines in Greece, Europe and the World in general. This attention has come in the form […]

Six days ago was Catalonia’s ‘national’ independence day, dedicated to the memory of the fall of Barcelona to Philip V during the Spanish war of succession in 1714. The past two years have seen a particular vehement demonstration of Catalan nationalism with 100,000 protesters last year protesting vociferously in the Placa de Catalunya. This year […]

Barack Obama took office in 2008 as a moderate, an accomplished lawyer with enough grammatical tricks and a robust lexicon to weave his way through Congress and the rest of the political establishment. For many, if not all of us, Barack Obama became synonymous with fresh air. A much needed break from his conservative, trigger […]

In recent weeks, the Russian government has come under fire for a recent amendment to a law on child protection which prohibits the promotion of homosexuality to under 18’s in Russia. The punishment for breaching this law varies with the BBC saying an individual can risk a £78 fine while an organisation could be fined […]

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 […]

This article is intended to be a short update as a first-hand witness in India scrutinising the various views of investment here. As I write from the Pai family home in the centre of Mumbai, I notice just how much inflation has affected the retail market, which I like to observe so closely (having bought […]

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 […]

The Green Party of England and Wales is on a roll. They won their first seat in the House of Commons in 2010 in Brighton and took minority control of the city’s council in 2011.  They also have a good chance of a second seat in Norwich next time around. To this extent they are […]

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 […]

Since the military coup that ousted President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from power in July, the West has been forced into a difficult position regarding events in Egypt. Whenever the military feels the need to intervene through a coup something must be going wrong in the state in question. This also raises the prospect […]

By Hilary Stoten We can all thank Citizens United and SpeechNow.org, the two Supreme Court decisions in 2010 for reopening the doors to overwhelming amounts of unlimited corporate money in US elections. These seminal rulings led to the birth of a new political vehicle in the campaign finance world: super PACs. Super PACs are a fresh […]

Cooking a five-ounce burger is not the typical way to enter global headlines, but then again, the slightly charred beef served up to the world media on Monday, was no ordinary piece of meat. Assembled from tiny pieces of cow muscle, that have been cultured from stem cells and grown in a laboratory, Dr Mark […]

By Thomas Williamson US Secretary of State John Kerry is leading yet another attempt to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The harsh reality is that like so many more before him he will probably fail to broker a lasting peace, due to the thicket of issues that surround the conflict. The dispute […]

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. […]