Politics

Nick Clegg’s announcement that if ID cards are introduced he will simply refuse to register is smart politics. First, it prevents Chris Huhne from gaining a monopoly on eye-catching, activist-pleasing ideas in the Lib Dem leadership contest. Second, it shows that Clegg is prepared to exploit the greater license that the leader of the third party has. However, stridently the Tories oppose ID cards it is hard to imagine David Cameron or David Davis indulging in civil disobedience. The key test for any Lib Dem leader is to get their party noticed. This is what Ming Campbell was incapable of doing and why he ultimately failed as leader. This pledge

Maybe the Lib Dems shouldn’t elect a new leader at all. In their current leaderless state, they have jumped 4 percent in the latest ICM poll to put them at a respectable 18 percent. The Tories are down three, but still at the psychologically important 40 percent mark. Labour are on 35 percent, a one percent drop. The Lib Dem spike is best explained by the amount of coverage they are currently getting thanks to their leadership race. Once the Lib Dems elect a leader they can expect to come under heavy fire, the Tories in particular will be keen to prevent a new Lib Dem leader from gaining any

If you want to see how real the danger of the West losing Turkey is, examine these poll numbers. The United States’s favourability rating is down to 9%- from 52% in 2000. The European Union’s favourability rating has fallen from 54% in 2004 to 27% today. Turks are now more hostile towards Westerners than either Egyptians or Pakistanis. In some ways, these numbers aren’t surprising: both the United States and the EU have shown little consideration of the Turks in recent years. But they should worry us. If Turkey becomes permanently alienated from the West, dealing with the problems of the Middle East will become even more difficult.  Hat tip:

David Cameron’s speech in Berlin today on foreign policy advocated a cautious, liberal conservative approach to foreign policy. It is very different, at least in tone, from the foreign policy vision that he set out when running for leader.  The sound bite from today’s speech is ‘national security first.’ Leaving aside the unpleasant historical associations that the phrase has, it is so intellectually outdated as to be meaningless. We can’t have national security—even in the very narrowest sense of the word—in this country, while foreign-funded religious institutions try to convert young British Muslims to a perverted form of faith that sees opposition to the British state as a religious duty and British