"The 'points system' applies to immigrants from outside the EU. The more skills you have, and the more those skills are in demand, the more likely you will be to be allowed to migrate to Britain. At the moment, politicians from the Home Office set the criteria for which skills are needed, and so who can come to the country. This leads to the possibility of politicians deciding our immigration rate based on partisan, media-driven concerns. It is similar to where we were in the mid-90s with interest rates: politicians could decide to keep rates low as a pre-election sweetener, even though it might not be right for the economy. In the same way this was solved by giving the Bank of England the power to set interest rates, the solution to the immigration conundrum is for the government to allow the Migration Advisory Committee to set the level of points needed. They should do so according to three criteria: the needs of the economy, the demand on public services and the desire to keep aggregate numbers below a politically decided maximum."

"...[C]ustomers like firms who share their values. In this way, CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] can help a company's brand as much as any snappy advertising campaign. According to this argument, the adoption of social targets over the last decade has been driven by a pragmatic recognition that the consumers are also citizens, and will make decisions according to their values in the supermarket as much as in the voting booth."

"[R]eal-terms cuts compromise our ability to combat unforeseen threats. Deciding defence funding based on only foreseeable threats is a dangerous mistake. The belief that spending on defence should be based only on foreseeable threats is the most dangerous kind of short-termism. Few of the wars Britain has ever engaged in, and none of the five wars since 1997, were foreseen.  Nobody in 1981 expected to be fighting the Falklands war in 1982, nobody in 1989 expected to be fighting the Iraq war in 1990, and before the Second World War, Britain's low defence budget was justified on the basis that so long as a major conflict could not be envisaged within ten years, defence spending could be kept low.  When the Second World War broke out, this short-sightedness nearly resulted in catastrophic defeat and caused Britain to need to borrow heavily from the United States, as defence spending shot up to 60% of GDP."

"Even politically, the insensitivity is shocking. After all the evidence over the last year that MPs set themselves apart from those they represent when deciding how much they should be allowed to charge to the taxpayer, one would have thought that your average MP would have been on the lookout for any practice which offered even a hint of insensitivity. And yet this badly sets them apart from those they are seeking to represent; it is an example of a particularly egregious and insensitive double standard. At least the expenses scandal was about greed. This is in many ways lower — it cheapens the lives of our armed forces."

"The actions of President Hamid Karzai are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a man set on undermining Afghanistan's democracy and institutions, and concentrating power in his own hands."

"...[W]e can only borrow because international lenders have the confidence to lend to us — the UK has a triple-A rating in international credit markets and that is important. But the more we drag our feet in paying back, the less confident the markets will be. If our rating as a country is downgraded, it would mean higher interest rates, which in turn will mean each of us will pay more each month for our mortgages and have less each month to spend. And that in turn will mean less money going into the economy to help Britain get back on its feet"

"Let us not forget the times when we needed US assistance and it was not forthcoming. Take the Americans' reluctance to impede IRA fundraising efforts in the US. A reluctance for thirty years, a period which saw the deaths of over eighteen hundred people, including 1100 members of the British Security Forces and 630 civilians. That is above and beyond the billions of pounds of damage their bombs did to UK mainland cities. Or the US invasion of Grenada, a former British colony and member of the Commonwealth after Reagan had assured Thatcher that no such incursion was planned. Or the US siding with Mexico, Peru and Brazil in trying to force the UK to the negotiating table when the Falkland Islands — sovereign British territory — had been invaded by Argentina. Or the subsequent refusal of US Secretary of State Alexander Haig to allow the UK to use an airfield on Ascension Island (UK territory) to refuel Vulcan bombers to bomb Argentinean runways in Port Stanley (UK territory)."

"...TV debates, far from encouraging a democratic choice, encourage us to judge the leaders in politics with the values of Hollywood. The danger is that in the minds of many viewers, cogent policies take second place to whiter teeth or a stronger jawline."

"...[R]esearchers who studied radicals saw one factor recur again and again: they tend to have minimal education in authentic Islam. Often they were just thuggish, petty criminals who had been recruited by terrorist Islamist groups, but who had had no exposure to genuine Islam at all."

"The Taliban's often brutal form of conservative justice shocks the liberal sensibilities of the western electorates paying for the war. Bringing them into the political process will mean conceding that where, for example, young brides wed older men, NATO troops are not the right means to change those customs and attitudes."