Peter Risdon

When Fitzroy MacLean parachuted into Yugoslavia in 1943, little was known of Tito and the Partisans. Rumours suggested Tito was a woman, or a committee. MacLean found a communist.
During a subsequent meeting with Churchill, which he reported in his book Eastern Approaches (I can’t find my copy so can’t give the page reference), MacLean [...]

From this week’s Normblog Profile, of Vanessa Cabban. I’ve changed the sequence of these slightly:
What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > The male of the human species.
Who are your intellectual heroes? > George Orwell.
Who are your political heroes? > Nelson Mandela.
Who are your [...]

From a post at the LPUK blog:
However as is usual with our lefty friends they don’t actual [sic] present any solid arguments in support of the NHS.
The basis of their argument for the NHS is that if we didn’t have the NHS we wouldn’t have a health care system. And everyone would die. Which is [...]

Whether or not we should have lots of “shiny new polytechnics” isn’t the issue that struck me, reading this post from Tim Worstall. In the comments, someone said:
… its a moot point how many people actually use- or even remember- the majority of what they were taught in schools. Perhaps there’s a case for saying [...]

It’s brief, so in full. Glenn Reynolds:
SCENES FROM A NEW AMERICA: So I dropped the girls off at a movie, and — since the Insta-wife was lunching with her mom — stopped at a Sonny’s Barbecue for lunch. A man — late 40s, big, with a wife and a daughter — came in with an [...]

… while you’re making other plans.
I haven’t been blogging so much recently. That’s because I’ve had some opportunities I hadn’t expected and I’ve been trying to do two things at once, the day job with computers and some new things.
It seems the new things are winning out. I’m moving out of my computer work and [...]

Azarmehr writes today about a piece by Darius Guppy in The Independent a few days ago. I’d missed it.
Guppy’s theme is that Iranians look with horror at the decadent place the UK has become, with drunken chavs falling over each other and vomiting in the street. By contrast, Iranian culture is sophisticated, ancient and noble. [...]

This is strangely put:
France is home to Europe’s largest five million Muslim population.
There’s a smaller five million population somewhere?
The piece is about a ban in France on a woman wearing a small tent, a “burkini”, while swimming, because she is a Muslim. Interestingly, since the far left in the UK has tended to ally with [...]

Are you even making a proposal? Or just asking the cash trucks to form an orderly line in front of the state school black hole?
From the comments to a post at Harry’s Place advocating the introduction of vouchers for schools. The post is titled “Why progressives should support school vouchers”. That’s revealing in itself, containing [...]

Who do you think this might be?
Government funding comes in the form of Parliamentary Grants-in-aid which, over the last four years (most recent accounts 31st March 2008), has amounted to: £31.7m, £32.9m, £36.6m and £44.9m respectively. So from 2005 to 2008 the government’s contributions have increased by about 42%.
The next heading in the [...]