When you tell people about the British tax system they don’t think it’s fair. Of course that’s true with respect to multi-nationals like Google, using legal loopholes to pay tiny taxes on their profits. But it’s also true when it comes to the balance of tax between rich, middling and poor families. Continue reading “Argue with an Academic: Andrew Harrop on the Abolition of Inheritance Tax”
In our increasingly globalised world, health is no longer an internal issue; it needs to be examined through a host of different lenses. Governments invest a lot of money in health, ranging from richer countries such as Canada with universal healthcare provision, to India with state-provided public health to the opposite end of the spectrum in places like Angola, where there is effectively no state healthcare provision. Add to this the effect of health outcomes in countries near and far, and the issue escalates from local to global pretty quickly. Today, departments of defence, labour, and even tourism have a stake in the global health profile. Continue reading “Health Diplomacy: A Path to a Better Model”
A few weeks ago, in our first blog of the academic year, Steven Male compellingly argued for a more ethical foreign policy, and posited several suggestions as to how this may be achieved under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Within this piece however, there was one aspect that I found myself fundamentally disagreeing with – the idea that membership, and unquestioning support, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), was absolutely key to any ethical foreign policy. I felt this played into the common, and flawed, assertion that Putin’s Russia is an expansionist, imperialist power bent on world domination, and that only NATO’s expansion could stop it. I, and in fact many pre-eminent scholars on Russia, including McCgwire, Rynning, and Karabeshkin, disagree with this, both on the idea that Russia is indulging in unprovoked expansion, and that NATO is either a protector of European security or an ethical body. This author believes that if NATO is to perform as an ethical body in foreign policy, or represent a genuine protector of European security, it must undergo a process of self-examination of its actual effectiveness, and a reappraisal of its behaviour. Continue reading “NATO and an Ethical Foreign Policy: A Reply”
