Crawling out of LA in slow traffic and heading up the coast, there was a road sign to the Museum of Tolerance. We didn’t go because… the queues, the screaming, ice-cream kids and their pushy parents….intolerable. Tolerance is there to be tested – the very word implies how much stress can be, well, tolerated. We have already touched on the idea of this year as a potential arena for tangible change and the last week has brought one or two…
Splendid isolation was the splendidly-titled foreign policy that did so well for the dear old British Empire in the late 19th century – the high cost to other countries notwithstanding, of course. That separatist nerve is clearly still twitching in the British organism; it may be island mentality or post-imperial depression, but it also has global application. Protectionism, in whatever form, may have a practical, defensive function in the short-term but is ultimately insular and self-defeating. You might say that, as…