Cicero's Songs

In the few days, the discussion of Russia has acquired a new dimension. The announced withdrawal of Russian forces placed close to the Ukrainian border and a slight but significant easing on the previously blood-curdling rhetoric coming from Moscow has made some people think that the crisis, fomented and largely organised by the Kremlin, may now be beginning to ease. Certainly the imposition of sanctions although it has had relatively little direct effect, has indirectly caused the government of Vladimir Putin some real problems. Western companies involved in the Russian market have radically reconsidered the risks of doing business in Russia and almost all have curtailed their investment plans. Some such as Blackstone and Adobe have announced plans to leave the Russian market altogether. The market capitalisation of the Moscow stock exchange has plunged. Inflation, at 8%, is already climbing further. Russia has faced investment shortfalls for some time, but is now facing huge cap...

Britain is in a fractious, ill tempered mood. Discontent with the political class festers, and every mountebank, from Alex Salmond to Nigel Farage is being seized on as someone who can break the perceived corruption in Whitehall and Westminster. Politicians are held- especially in the media- in widespread contempt. That, of course is the problem. It is not that politics is necessarily more negative or even more corrupt than it used to be, but rather that we have grown used to a mocking chorus from journalists who are guilty of even more egregious corruption than the politicians they condemn so loudly. MPs are paid a fraction of the sums given over to the self important blow-hards whose oleaginous faces adorn the top of their columns of angry and often surprisingly badly informed copy. Those who happily take their living from such dubious newspaper owners as the sinister and bullying Barclay brothers, the tax-avoiding Rothermere family, a Russian oligarch, a pornographer and of ...