Not subject to tax

  ‘It’s on in the morning, usually we have it on some of the time’. That was the answer, a couple of days ago, to the question: “Do you sit down to watch the queen’s Christmas broadcast, Mr Corbyn?’ For the uninitiated, the Christmas message to the monarch’s subjects has been a cornerstone of British…

Brexit Blarney

  A few years after the Good Friday Agreement, I found myself driving along the Irish border. Now, as a non-reconstructed Englishman would expect to find in Ireland, the road snaked drunkenly in and out of each of the United Kingdom and Republic of Eire (fortunately no other countries were involved, probably because there was…

Keep Calm and Carry On

The British have always been a supremely pragmatic people. It was thanks to a fickle king that they knocked religious hegemony on the head early on, and thanks to another misguided monarch that they got their revolution out of the way before the Rousseaus, Marxes and Engels of the world could fill the vacuum with…