The Rusty Wire Service

“ Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl.... ” The Clash,  Death or Glory It was another one of those ‘hand of history’ moments for the ‘Wee Pravince’ of Norn Iron. Former Derry Apprentice Butcher Boy Martin McGunless (excuse me, McGuinness) shook hands with an elderly Anglo German lady called Betty Windsor and her husband Phil the Bubble ( Translation for my non-cockney bredrin and those who've never seen a London gangster movie: rhyming slang; bubble and squeak: Greek ). Ordinarily, the meeting of a provincial politician (once famously described by Steve Coogan as looking like a clown without his make-up) and the putative and unelected head of state of a small third rate power on the far -flung European periphery would be an unremarkable event. This brief encounter however had the added frisson of the politician in question being a former commander in a notorious paramilitary organisation when it planned a...

The world is apparently going to hell in a handbasket. Global political breakdown beckons, the UK economy is lurching zombie-like towards terminal decline and venal bankers everywhere continue to escape either censure or retribution. Nothing like a bit of light holiday reading...Throw in a self-help book and you have a reading list that will make those poolside Mojitos positively fly by.   Certainly,  Ian Bremmer's  In Every Nation for Itself ,  paints a grim (often verging on apocalyptic) picture of the geopolitical status quo. What happens, he asks, when nobody’s running the world? The overarching premise of Bremmer’s treatise is that “for the first time in seven decades, we live in a world without global leadership”. “We have entered a period of transition from the world we know toward one we can’t yet map. Shifts of this scale never come without conflict,” he intones. Now prima facie, that might seem an overly doom-laden prognostication and one pe...