Many southerners rarely come North, just as quite a few northerners have never ventured into the Republic. But a bargain is a bargain, and the northern city of Newry became a shopping mecca. Shoppers from as far away as Cork, at the other end of the island, arrived in Newry's malls. Weak sterling and lower VAT meant big savings were easy to make, while improved roads made for a quicker journey ? until, that is, they reached the 10-mile tailbacks outside the city. Hundreds of items were far cheaper ( Read more... )
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I understand that a lot of women might not see how this is a problem. But believe me, it just feels wrong. The female equivalent of waffling on about football is complaining about how boring the men are when they waffle on about football. Until mid-July, I'm going to be excluded. My husband will be in the kitchen instead of me, giggling away about the foolishness of the lads, while I'm left - as usual - trying to give out the frankly laughable impression that we're a normal, functioning family, ( Read more... )
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It happened to me while watching Séraphine, a film that arrives from France garlanded with Césars (the French Baftas), and which was given a pretty respectful reception here. And, to be fair to it, it is unimpeachable: an account of a celebrated naïve artist whose talent was discovered and promoted by the German art-lover for whom she did the cleaning. It is tasteful, emotionally sensitive, acted with compelling understatement ? and, I found, deeply and infuriatingly tedious. ( Read more... )
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Most Afghans live off less than $10 per month, have little or no education and will never leave their home area let alone their country. Yet we are told these poverty-stricken peasants represent a threat so great to us that we send our young men 4,000 miles to kill them, or be killed.

Having travelled in that Himalayan region, one quickly understands the remoteness and complete lack of economic development. People survive by having strong ties of kinship. They are fiercely loyal to these ( Read more... )
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That is the case with the use of powers under the Terrorism Act to stop people photographing buildings or scenes within areas designated as being likely targets of terrorist attack. Most people would agree that Britain is now vulnerable to attack and that the surest way to safeguard its citizenry is to keep an eagle eye on possible plots at an early stage.

On the other hand, anything that sniffs of officiousness or excessive exercise of powers grates against a very British antipathy to ( Read more... )
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In part the conflict is generational and belongs with other "modernity suits" the Tories have to face: the private lives of women candidates, all-female shortlists and, as of this week, global warming. But I don't think it's just a matter of generation, or not in the simple way that the Sixties can be seen as a watershed between social conservatism and liberalism.

I married relatively young and remain married, but when someone chooses another way, I am not messianic about my own. Yet I'm ( Read more... )
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If we bet that man is not having any effect on the climate and we are right, then we can save a lot of money and carry on with the party. If the bet is wrong, however, then we are in big big trouble and it will be too late to do anything about it.

On the other hand if we bet that man is having an effect and manage to cut emissions, avoiding the worst of the changes, then we won't be sure we have made the right decision as there will be no major problem. But in the meantime, by making this ( Read more... )
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There are now said to be between one third and one half of the cabinet who have hinted they may object to the killing of a thousand civilians. They can't dissent in public of course, but even so they're a beacon of inspiration. Hearing that Jack Straw and Margaret Beckett are "possibly concerned" is like reading the speeches of Braveheart. How much more powerful that film would have been, if instead of yelling about freedom as he was being executed, Braveheart had screamed: "There may be legitimate ( Read more... )
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It was about three days before Barack Obama's first visit to Britain and I was on a journalistic assignment in Regent's Park, taking pictures of where he would be staying. I had quite a lot of professional photography equipment with me yet I was stopped and questioned by police officers who wanted to know what I was doing and why I was there. When they had finished speaking with me they gave me a form with my details. I understand they were simply doing their job, but they were very much targeting ( Read more... )
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Anne Frank, he said, was "a child in revolt against fear, against intolerance, against a mad world, who escapes her Lebanese critics... Anne, under injustice, in a suffering transcended by art and writing, is nothing less than the sister of the Palestinian or Lebanese children in the novels of Elias Khoury or Ghassan Kanafani... of the British children in J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun and John Boorman's Hope and Glory."

Jews and Israelis may object to the parallel ? indeed, will object ( Read more... )
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There is a case for both approaches. RBS could be run, as the Liberal Democrats' Treasury spokesman Vince Cable seems to want, as a sort of National Social Investment Bank, obliged to lend freely for the general good of the economy as a whole, boosting credit and spending and avoiding the dreaded double dip recession. RBS banks, including NatWest, could market themselves, to revive an old slogan from a rival, as "The Bank That Likes to Say Yes ? Because the Treasury Tells Us To", a soft touch ( Read more... )
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This is a reasonable request. In the first place, the supplier of new capital has considerable latitude as to what conditions it can impose. The Government has a perfect right to ensure that the terms reflect its preoccupations with public opinion. Moreover, the expected size of the bonus pool ? £1.5bn ? is significant compared with the £5bn profits that are likely to be made by the investment arm of RBS, where most of the bonuses are paid.

The Government must also have ruefully reflected ( Read more... )
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There is a minor mystery as to why he has waited for so long. Brown was once an effective parliamentary performer and a witty one too. He was never as nimble-footed as Tony Blair and always prepared too diligently, but in the late 1980s when he stood in as shadow chancellor for John Smith, his performances against the formidably self-confident Nigel Lawson won him accolades across the political spectrum. Even as Chancellor, though far more buttoned-up, he saw off a succession of bright Tory politicians ( Read more... )
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Amid the hectic rough and tumble of modern life, someone on the radio was saying, it may have escaped your notice, that this is National Insect Week. If only. The pleasures to be had from a generous dollop of hectic rough and tumble are little more than nostalgic memories as far as I'm concerned, whereas every week in this crumbling eyrie we call home is National Insect Week.

We seem to be infested with bugs - clothes moths in the bedroom cupboards, food moths in the kitchen cupboards, ( Read more... )
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Weird then, that about half of our young people are leaving school virtually unemployable. How can they be passing exams, but not really be fit for anything useful that would justify a minimum-wage pay packet? The simple reason is the word "choice". The moment the government decided to make modern languages optional, kids stopped learning them - hence the disastrous decline in the number of people studying French, German and Spanish. Now teenagers learn rubbish like home economics, drama, business ( Read more... )
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But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun's rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you'd fail a geography GCSE).

Yet half our ( Read more... )
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Even then, entrepreneurial North Koreans were making money on the black market. But the local currency was little more than a coupon, allowing very limited kinds of exchange: food, housing, utilities, even basic clothing were free. The state maintained such a tight grip on the population that, other than the elite, anyone trying to spend large amounts of local currency would have likely felt the heavy hand of the state security apparatus. If savings ever seemed to get out of hand, the government ( Read more... )
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Just as in Iraq, we have failed in Afghanistan to marry political and social reconstruction to military presence. As in Iraq, American troops are having to be sent to the British area of operations to enable us to hold on to territory. And as in Iraq, we are having to play second fiddle to a US leadership that shows little indication of treating us as an equal partner.

The mere fact that the British Prime Minster deliberately made his announcement on British troop re-inforcements the day ( Read more... )
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I had unfortunately been caught in the media crossfire as one of six finalists, none of whom were "local" to the area. The ensuing story that unfolded labelled me as a raunchy tap dancer. The reality is more prosaic. I have built a (now large) business, teaching thousands of 16-80 year olds to dance. One can imagine how the grocer's daughter from Grantham would have reacted to the media's implication that small business owners were an insignificance to the nation.

I have spent the last 20 ( Read more... )
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Monsieur le President is not so delicate. Having comprehensively outplayed the British over the vitally important choice of a new Internal Market Commissioner (we got the non job of EU foreign minister instead) Monsieur Le President declared: "the British are the big losers".

Sarko asked the world: "Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the City of London?"

( Read more... )
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