Despite the striking political gains made in Northern Ireland since 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, its power-sharing government again verged on collapse in early February, due to a policing and justice dispute. In the end, marathon negotiations forged a deal to keep afloat the 12-member cabinet.
“I need a little space.”
When lovers utter these words, it’s usually a bad sign for the relationship. They feel suffocated. They’re reexamining their commitment. They’re checking out other options. But they don’t have the courage to make a clean break.
It used to be that prospective politicians chose law school as the first step in their career path. Future politicians may skip law school altogether and try out for the Saturday Night Live team instead.
It was, at first blush, an odd affair between curiously mismatched lovers: one of the world’s largest cities paired with one of the poorer ones. The seemingly unbalanced relationship between London and Caracas has been terminated. The instigator of the annulment was London’s new mayor, the previously deemed unelectable Boris Johnson. Some seven million British pounds will be returned to the Venezuelan government in due course.
Sir John Wolfenden is chiefly famous for chairing the British committee which produced the Report on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution in 1957. The report developed the principle that sexual activity conducted in private was “not the law’s business,” a principle which was implemented as a series of legislative changes over the next dozen years which became the basis of Britain’s “permissive society.” Relatively few people remember that no sooner was the ink dry on that document than Sir John set about another influential report, Sport and the Community, published in 1960. This recommended a much greater state involvement in sport and the establishment of public “councils for sport.” In short, Sir John was the man instrumental in reversing the Victorian orthodoxy: he got the British state out of sex and into sport.
R. Victoria Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is a graduate of Vassar College, Princeton University, and the George Washington University – where, respectively, she studied Romance languages and literatures, Middle Eastern culture and literature, and English literature and literary criticism. Today, she teaches in the English department at Howard University. Her most recent publication is World Poetry from 1900 to the Present (NY: Facts on File, 2007). Here she talks with FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller about new black literature in Britain and its take on empire.
Just over three weeks into the new regime of Gordon Brown, there is a new bounce and a sense of renewed optimism about these islands.
On the face of it, Tony Blair had an almost Clintonesque week as he walked away from two separate train wrecks seemingly unhurt. However, beneath the surface, there are deep internal injuries that have left him seriously weakened.