I’d like to imagine the whole implausible campaign for Blair as EU president as a carefully-generated storm, bouncing in Baroness Ashton as a consolation prize. But then I can’t see anything about Ashton that would justify such Machiavellian shenanigans*. So perhaps she just happened to be hanging around in Brussels at the right time?

* As far as I can see, her only vague connection with foreign affairs before last year is a brief involvement with CND. I truly don’t understand this habit of dumping politicians into policy areas they know nothing about.

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In a (month-old) interview with Gerry Adams, Johann Hari emphasises the similarity between Republican movements in Ireland and a cross-Atlantic counterpart:

.

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland – stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King – started to peacefully organise to demand equality…. “There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in,” he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.

Following this line, the divergent outcomes for the two movements become a case study of the snowball effect of political choices. Also of the distortions of hindsight, which tends to elide the violent parts of the US civil rights movement, and the peaceful ends of Irish republicanism.

Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius’s legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today.

— the Guardian

David Howarth is standing down at the next election?!

He’s one of the few really, really good MPs — and he vanishes after a single term? *sob*

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Prisoners in the UK are denied the vote, a fact I’m somewhat embarrassed not to have realised before this weekend. Obviously I should grit my teeth and read the [Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/sep/19/prisonsandprobation.civilliberties) and the [Independent](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/prisoners-should-be-given-the-vote-1601103.html) more often.

I

had

heard about it in the US, where it’s a bigger issue. There the numbers are larger, the rules are tighter (in some states ex-cons are also covered). And dubious implementation of the law — let alone the law itself — have been [claimed](http://www.gregpalast.com/the-great-florida-ex-con-gamernhow-the-felon-voter-purge-was-itself-felonious/) as deciding the 2000 presidential election. But in the UK, it just bubbles along a little way below the headlines.

Most of the pressure to change the situation comes from outside. Prisoners have been trying to use human rights legislation in order to vote, most recently [Peter Chester](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6408023/Child-murderers-voting-ban-infringes-his-human-rights.html). He is kept in jail not because of his original crime (he’s already served 20 years for that), but because he is considered a danger to the public.

Four years earlier another prisoner, [John Hirst](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4315348.stm), won a case in the European Court of Human Rights, demanding his right to vote.

I’m not sure of the legal implications of that ruling. The government certainly didn’t jump to change the law. There is now a [consultation](http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/prisoners-voting-rights.htm) in progress, which I suppose is the most time-consuming way of doing nothing.

Apart from the moral case, John Hirst puts the practical argument pretty nicely:

“When you’re a prisoner, the only thing you can do if you want to complain and no-one listens, is riot and lift the roof off”

I’ve just been reading an ancient JK Galbraith book. True to Galbraith’s reputtion, it’s packed with little facts and asides. I particularly love the British companies formed in the early 18th century, including one “

for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is

” [p.43]

Nicolas Sarkozy is developing a taste for nepotism. Having already helped his son Jean into political and other positions, he seems now to have abandoned all shame. He’s attempting to give the 23-year-old control of La Defense. Roughly equivalent to Canary Wharf (albeit with less of that entertaining halo of occult conspiracy theories), it’s worth many billions of dollars. The job of running it is no sinecure, and I can’t see much excuse for giving it to the Dauphin like htis.