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Sunday, November 29, 2015

Graham Hill : An unlikely racing hero

40 years ago tonight, the hugely charismatic F1 driver and dual world champion Graham Hill was tragically killed in a light aircraft crash. Here's my piece on this great sporting personality from today's Sunday Express.  

GRAHAM HILL was the most unlikely of Formula One heroes. Born in north London in 1929 he started his working life as an apprentice in a factory making alarm clocks and didn’t even learn to drive until he was 24.

You can read the whole piece here.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Neil Clark's Sporting Edge: Euros football championship review - and more



My new Sports Column for RT.com

24 teams will be lining up in next summer‘s European football championships in France. When it was announced that the Euros were to be increased from 16 to 24 teams in 2012 I thought that it was poor move as it would make for a more boring tournament...
 But now, I’m not so sure.
The qualifying, which many predicted would be dull, has been full of surprises. Who could have foreseen that the Netherlands - the third placed team in last year’s World Cup would fail to even make the playoffs, or that Greece, the 2004 winners, and who made it through to the last 16 in the World Cup in 2014, would finish bottom of Group F?

You can read the whole article here.

Monday, November 16, 2015

A ‘warning shot’ -The crazy logic of UK’s Philip Hammond and what lies behind it

My latest RT OpEdge

Just imagine if the Russian Foreign Minister had said after the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 that the act of terrorism was a 'warning shot' for the UK and that he hoped it would make the UK's foreign policy more flexible.
There would I’m sure, be a massive outcry. The Russians were shamefully condoning terrorism, we'd have been told. How sick of them to call the bombs a 'warning shot' and hope that they changed UK policy! One can only imagine what the headline of the Sun would have been (“NO WAY, SERGEYI!”) would be my bet). Yet this is what British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in the aftermath of the Russian plane tragedy in the Sinai - and very few people- certainly in Western leading circles seemed outraged.
This glaring double standard is not the only thing which is noteworthy about Hammond’s comments. Let’s look at the logic behind what the Foreign Secretary is saying....

You can read the whole piece here.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Death by moonlight: 75 years on from the devastating Luftwaffe blitz of Coventry



This piece of mine appears in today's Daily Express.

IT WAS the bombing raid that led to the coining of a new verb “Koventrieren”, or in English, to Coventrate.
“The word embodied the idea of the physical and psychological destruction of an entire city,” explains historian Angus Calder.
The Luftwaffe’s attack on Coventry, which took place exactly 75 years ago today, marked a new departure in the Blitz. 

You can read the whole piece here.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Meet the 'unpeople'- Whose views don't matter to the west's faux-democrats




My new piece for RT.com OpEdge


Who are the unpeople? Human beings whose views don't matter a jot to self-styled 'democrats' in the West, even though in some cases - in fact, in most cases, they constitute the majority.
What do these groups of people have in common? 

* The millions of Syrians - perhaps a majority - who support their government, or at least regard it as preferable to the alternatives.

* Iranians who voted for Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Presidential election.

* Belarusians who support President Lukashenko.

* Libyans who did not support the violent NATO-backed ‘revolution’ against Muammar Gaddafi.

* People who lived in communist countries in Eastern Europe and who thought there were positive aspects of life under communism.

* Ukrainian citizens who did not support 'EuroMaidan'.
* Venezuelans who voted for Chavez and Maduro.

* Russians who support United Russia or the Communist Party.

* Labour party members and registered supporters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election.

The answer is that all of the above are examples of 'unpeople’ - human beings whose views don't matter to Western Democrats.
A belief in democracy should mean respecting the idea that all peoples’ views are equal. However, that's not the way it works in today's so-called 'democracy.' Today, those who have the wrong views (i.e. views which don’t align with the interests of Western elites) are treated as if they don’t exist.


You can read the whole article here


Monday, November 09, 2015

The Festival of Remembrance: It's time to save it from the warmongers



My latest piece for RT.com OpEdge.

The Great Silence.” That’s how the London Times newspaper (back then Britain’s newspaper of record and not a crude neo-con propaganda sheet), described Britain’s first Armistice/Remembrance Day, which took place on November 11, 1919.
“Everywhere there was mourning, sorrow, and thanksgiving… For some minutes before the maroons ushered in the period of prayer, a strange self-consciousness had fallen upon the people,” The Times reported.
The feelings were easy to understand. During WW1, over 700,000 British soldiers and servicemen were killed in a conflict that claimed the lives of around 17 million people worldwide. No wonder the talk was of a “Lost Generation.”

You can read the whole piece here.