Two days ago I wrote a piece whose message was summed up in its title: “There will be no Grexit.” At that time international economists were demonstrating, calculators in hand, that it was economically impossible for Greece to stay in the Eurozone definitely, and in the EU probably. And AngieRead More

Today’s vote in Parliament in favour of allowing three parent children makes the UK the first country to cross internationally respected bioethical red lines. It does so first by allowing the creation of human beings using DNA from three human beings and secondly, by opening the door to germ-line geneRead More

We have the best healthcare in the world, so we are told, free at the point of use. So why would there be any dangers facing the disabled in hospitals as they enter for healthcare? Well, perhaps British healthcare was once the best in the world but it most certainlyRead More

Here, some 100 miles south of Paris, things are peacefully quiet. In Paris itself there is no peace and there is no quiet. Yet another lot of innocent blood has been spilled by Muslim terrorism; yet another well of typographic paint has been uncapped. I can’t really add much toRead More

Amsterdam is lovely this time of the year, partly because it’s half empty. The Dutch, flying yet again, have all gone away on holiday, to be replaced by tourists from all over the world. Some of them are from Britain, and it’s mainly for their benefit that the few DutchRead More

‘Liberalism’ is not a term that admits of straightforward definition. To quote Nietzsche, ‘only something which has no history can be defined’ (On the Genealogy of Morality II.13), and liberalism has a complex and to some degree incoherent history. The liberalism of John Stuart Mill, for instance, is differently contouredRead More

Once upon a time — say, before the 1980s or 1990s — in quite a number of countries, people led normal lives: cases were argued, judicial decisions issued, laws enacted and conflicts solved without resort to reasoning of specifically or allegedly Kantian, or indeed Enlightenment/Kantian, types. Kant’s importance was foundRead More

Generally speaking, a watershed between the right and the left in politics is formed by the Enlightenment.

People I’d describe as real conservatives detest it, while those on the left feel exactly the opposite.

Sir John, who, I don’t mind admitting, is my political, moral and intellectual idol, hit the nail on the head the other day, with Ukip being the nail and Nigel Farage the head.

Ukip, explained my idol, “is peddling sheer nastiness” that is “profoundly un-British in every way”.

Arithmetic and statistics are useful tools for liars. A little massaging here, a little bending there, and suddenly a lie sounds plausible. When it comes to liars in our government, they don’t have to distort their sums to make a false point. All it takes is applying arithmetic to issuesRead More