Things can only get better………?
Things can only get better, or so the song title goes by D:Ream in 1997 (a Northern Irish Band who subsequently broke up).The song was of course adopted by the Labour Party as their theme song and Tony Blair became Prime Minister in the General Election that year. I only mention it as it seems appropriate to the current situation. We have struggled through January – always the worst month of the year and stumbled into February – which is not much better! Unfortunately turning to the world at large is not that much more encouraging. That said I had the...
Letter from America
I have always wanted to write that as a headline having been a great admirer of the late Alistair Cooke who sent out his “Letter from America” on BBC Radio every week from 1946 to 2004 and most memorably was in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles and witnessed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. So that was all just by way of introducing the fact that I was in Washington last week, at the ARDA Fall Convention to make presentations, along with Declan Kenny, to the ARDA ROC and ARDA Boards. As explained at the RDO AGM in Marbella in September,...
“Oh what a tangled web we weave…”
Of course the quote "Oh what a tangled web we weave...
Brexit: “ The long-term ghastliness of the legal complications are unimaginable”
So said Sir David Edward KCMG, QC, PC, FRSE, Former Judge of the Court of Justice of the European Union, in giving evidence to the European Union Committee of the House of Lords. The Committee produced a little publicised report on Brexit on 4 May 2016 entitled “The process of withdrawing from the European Union”. (HL Paper 138) in which the Committee took evidence not only from Sir David Edward, but also from Professor Derrick Wyatt QC, Emeritus Professor of Law, Oxford University. I am surprised it has received so little publicity as it provides an insight into the enormity...
The UK referendum – ‘a week is a long time in politics…….’
This was said by Prime Minister Harold Wilson back in the 1960s /70s, but could not have been more applicable to the events of the last days here in the UK, when we woke up on Friday 24th June after the referendum to find out that the UK (or rather Wales and England, not Scotland nor Northern Ireland), had voted by 54% to 49% to come out of the EU. I make no apologies for concentrating on this event in this blog as let’s face it, all other events pale into insignificance compared with the domestic and dare I say - geo-political significance...
The UK’s EU referendum – are we In our Out?
With the UK's EU referendum bearing down fast on us here, I decided to use this blog to set out my own personal views on the upcoming decision. Aware of the fact that some weeks ago the Head of the Chambers of Commerce in the UK had to resign after coming out in favour of exit , I approached this decision with a degree of caution, nevertheless emboldened by the fact that RDO has already made it clear that it supports remaining and indeed we added our name to another 200 organisations supporting this position – published in the FT...