Possession of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in the South Atlantic is again being disputed. The United Kingdom’s 180-year control over the islands and the will of its English-speaking inhabitants as well as the sacrifice of British blood and treasure that reversed the 1982 Argentine aggression give the UK clear possession of the islands. Nonetheless, Argentina rejects what it calls “a colonial enclave.” Last year, it laid claim to vast amount of the South American continental shelf. The current bone of contention involves oil. Exploration begun by British firms this month will …
Although the feckless spending of successive Labour Governments has resulted in massive decline for Britain, there is one thing that Gordon Brown got right on the economics front: he denied Tony Blair’s plans to take Britain into the single European currency. Launched in 1999, the Euro has been the bedrock of European elites’ dream for a United States of Europe. And there’s the rub: founding a major economic program on the basis of a supranational political dream meant there was surely trouble ahead. Nowhere is this more visible than in …
Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan came to Heritage today to remind Americans why and how to avoid Europe’s mistakes. On March 24, 2009, Daniel Hannan became an overnight internet sensation when a YouTube recording of his three-minute speech responding to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s remarks before the European Parliament went viral. As the most viewed video for two days running and with over 2.4 million views to date, Dan Hannan’s speech opposing higher public spending, tax increases and record borrowing in the current economic crisis sparked international …
Not so quietly, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in Britain: defense spending must be cut. Last month, the Economist, in writing about “the end of the New Labour orthodoxy on public spending” – the orthodoxy being that the public sector “should consume an ever-increasing share of national wealth” – stated in passing that only the Liberal Democrats had grasped the need to axe major programs, like Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent. This month, David Halpern, former Chief Analyst in Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit, writes in Prospect magazine that, instead …
First, we should thank all of the members of the Heritage Foundation, and our readers, followers and friends at The Foundry, Twitter and Facebook for the tremendous response to our contest. Clearly, America is not happy giving Her Majesty, the Queen of England, an iPod. We had over 500 entries in less than 36 hours, and most submissions were either really funny, or really thoughtful. So we had to pick two winners, to represent both types of responses. Each winner will receive a copy of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution …
The media and pundits alike have skewered the Clinton State Department for giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a prop “reset button” when Secretary Clinton met with him in Geneva earlier in the month. Obviously it is a bad idea to reset relations with Russia only weeks into a new presidential term, especially given the number of outstanding sensitive issues that the United States should maintain some level of leadership on, rather than ceding all ground to Russia. But this episode also demonstrated a clear lack of leadership at the …
Can you imagine? It’s movie night at 10 Downing Street, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain has the popcorn popped and is ready to break into that set of DVDs that President Obama so graciously gave him on his recent visit to Washington. Then he sees the display say ‘error’. It turns out that the DVDs that the White House deemed fit as a symbolic gift of our relationship with Great Britain were not coded for the DVD players in Europe. Does the White House have a DVD player that …
There’s not been a lot of good news for, or about, the British armed forces recently. When the Economist asked, in its Jan. 29, 2009 issue, if the Army was losing its way, the story’s lead summed up their answer: “The British army suffers from lack of soldiers, lack of money and lack of conviction.” And that was putting an optimistic spin on things: in reality, the situation was a good deal worse than the Economist allowed. There’s no reason to be happy about the recession. But you know what …
