Skip to main content

...much to be modest about

Sorry to be a cracked record, but I see that Mayor Ken Livingstone is claiming that his trip to Cuba and Venezuela was a very modest one.

It cost £36,000! (€54,000 or just under $70,000 for our international readers) for a trip that did not even bring about its stated aim of the dubious deal with mad cap dictator Hugo Chavez.

Next time Mr. Livingstone wishes to take a break in the axis of evil and its allies, I wonder if he might not try North Korea- on a one way ticket, please.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
what a load of old shite you talk about hugo chavez. in what sense is he a mad cap dictator? how many democratic elections does he have to win to stop being a dictator? or is it that you simply havent a clue about chavez and have swallowed the big business line put out by our liberal free press.
6:57 pm
Cicero said…
Oh Come on!

Hugo Chavez is the usual pointless Caudillo that gets thrown up by immature political systems. I do not defend those he overthrew, but the fact is that he remains a dead end for Venezuela and for all of Latin America.
12:05 am
Anonymous said…
but Chavez is left wing and anti-American. He /must/ be good!

On a more serious note:
When are the LibDems in the London Assembly going to start holding Ken to account rather than harping on about Christmas lights?
9:26 am
Anonymous said…
If Polly Toynbee, Tony Blair, George Galloway, Helen Watters and John Reid had their way, this country would end up just like North Korea
3:19 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cicero ReDux

By Special Request of Baroness Scott and Mark Valladares... Cicero's Songs returns: bigger, longer and uncut.
October 1st marked the half way point of the Estonian Presidency of the European Union.  Perhaps for many people such an anniversary is of passing interest at best.  Yet the conduct of the Estonian Presidency is reinforcing just how forward looking and innovative the most northerly of the Baltic States has become.
Estonia is a country that wants to live in the future, and with its openness and innovation, that future seems a lot closer than almost anywhere else in Europe
It is not that Estonia does not “do” the past: the picturesque cobbled streets of old Tallinn have tourist crowds a-plenty enjoying the mediaeval architecture in an Indian summer of sunshine and blue skies.  The real point is that Estonia refuses to be a prisoner of its past. Lennart Meri, Estonia’s President in the 1990s- who spent years of his childhood in Siberia- once told me that the country had to conc…
Post a Comment
Read more

The American National nightmare becomes a global nightmare

It is a basic contention of this blog that Donald J Trump is not fit for office.

A crooked real estate developer with a dubious past and highly questionable finances. he has systematically lied his way into financial or other advantage. His personal qualities include vulgarity, sexual assault allegations and fraudulent statements on almost every subject. 

He lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes.

He has, of course, been under criminal investigation practically since before he took the oath of office. The indictment of some of closest advisers is just the beginning. His track record suggests that in due course there is no action he will not take, whether illegal or unconstitutional in order to derail his own inevitable impeachment and the indictments that must surely follow the successful investigation of Robert Mueller into his connections with Russia.

However, all of that is a matter for the American people. 

It is also a matter for the American people that Trump is cheating…
Post a Comment
Read more

In praise of off-shore tax havens

The last few years has seen a spate of "scandals" about the use of off-shore tax havens. The hacking and subsequent leaking of data about who does and does not hold assets in off-shore jurisdictions has become an old perennial in the British press, rather like the "COLD weather happens in winter and QUITE HOT weather happens in summer", whose alarmist capital letter laced headlines are such a lazy part of contemporary "journalism". 

The increasing sophistication of the hackers, whether Russian-inspired or not, has resulted in a steady trickle of information becoming a torrent. After the relatively filleted release of data in the so-called "Panama Papers", the data release of the "Paradise Papers" is even larger.  Of course, just natural curiosity dictates that the off-shore ownership, or even just "ownership", of assets is of general public interest.  Celebrities, from the Royal family to the cast of Mrs Brown's Boys, are …
Post a Comment
Read more