In 1955 G.A. Campbell wrote ‘[s]o long as officials obtained the whole or part of their income from fees, the total cost of the Service remained hidden. Parliament needed to provide no money at all for salaries in some departments, and where revenue did not balance expenditure it voted only for the difference. Under the new arrangements [after 1837] Parliament saw for the first time the wages bill of the public administration. The cost seemed to members of both Houses to be enormous. […]  There has never since been a time when Parliament has not thought the Civil Service to be too costly and sought, more or less urgently, for economies in administration.’ (The Civil Service in Britain, Penguin, p. …

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, recently posted a long statement explaining his opposition to same-sex marriage. Some of it appeared in the Guardian and on the Guardian’s CIF Belief blog. In it he referenced an interview he recently gave to the Daily Telegraph, which contains the following statement: We supported Civil Partnerships (the bishops in the House of Lords), because we believe that friendships are good for everybody. Like other religious opponents of same-sex marriage, he goes on to argue that civil partnership is “in every respect in ethical terms an honourable contract of a committed relationship”. Same-sex couples, he therefore says, should not press for marriage. But his factual claim is false. The main Lords debate on the …

Recognizing that tobacco consumption has become a leading cause for premature death worldwide, the international community, under the auspice of WHO, successfully developed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) with unanimous adoption by the 192 member states in May 2003. It is the first time that the Organization has used its constitutional right to develop an internationally legal instrument in global health governance. Therefore, it is a seminal event in global health. It also represents an unprecedented collective action to curb the global tobacco epidemic. The convention came into force in February 2005. With 174 party members covering 87% of the World’s population, the FCTC has been among the most widely and rapidly embraced international conventions devoted to health …

At the Alumni Weekend 2011, Dr Mark Philp, Professor Simon Caney and Dr Adam Swift discussed the issue of intergenerational justice and asked questions about how we should allocate resources inter-generationally across areas such as welfare, pensions, higher education and the environment. By means of introduction, Dr Mark Philp, Fellow and Tutor in Politics of Oriel College and a Lecturer in Politics in the University since 1983 as well as a former Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations, set out some necessary assumptions for a worthwhile discussion of intergenerational justice: a non-deterministic world in which our choices actually matter, and an absence of either huge optimism or pessimism about the future (either of which would make worrying …

The first week of November 2011 has been a tipping point; the moment when it belatedly dawned on pundits and politicians alike that the euro crisis at heart is political – and that if it’s politics versus the markets, then politics is losing hands down for now. From outgoing Greek Prime Minister Papandreou’s torpedoing of the G20 by his ‘bolt from the blue’ referendum call, swiftly withdrawn under outraged pressure from the Merkel-Sarkozy tandem, to Italy’s Berlusconi teetering on the edge, then announcing he will resign and abandon his attempts to cling to power, to Sarkozy  himself introducing larger than expected ‘austerity’ cuts despite the upcoming presidential election in 2012 – politics is back. But normal EU politics this is …

  Big vs. small government, Blue vs. Red states, the Union vs. the Confederacy: each of these pairings represents different iterations on a recurring theme in the history of American politics. Now, more than ever in recent memory, these competing ideologies are emerging as polar opposites that threaten to drive the US political establishment into a stalemate. For progressives, there is the warranted fear that this deadlock is quickly devolving into a zero-sum game, in which the extreme conservatism of the Right has already won. As I watched the Tea Party-sponsored Republican debate, I was disturbed by the lack of compassion for the disadvantaged touted by several of the candidates, Ron Paul in particular. Bolstered by applause from the audience, …

Though Western media systems are going through a rapid and often painful transformation today with the rise of the internet and mobile platforms, the decline of paid print newspaper circulation, and the erosion of the largest free-to-air broadcast audiences, the ways in which governments provide direct and indirect support for the media have remained largely unchanged for decades. The bulk of the often quite considerable direct and indirect subsidies provided continue to go to industry incumbents coming out of broadcast and print, while innovative efforts and new entrants primarily based on new media receive little or no support. In central ways, public support for the media remains stuck in the twentieth century, and some parts of these support systems are …

Tel Aviv has known many hot summers in its history. But 2011 will probably be remembered as an exceptionally burning summer, one in which the city was flooded by tents occupied by young middle class residents, protesting against the rise in the cost of living.  As Or Rosenboim argues, these protests were characterised by the claim to “go beyond the political”, to ask for social justice, referring to the colloquial distinction between issues relating to security and defence, and particularly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, regarded as “the political”, and “the social”. I wish to argue that  these protests are closely interlinked to questions of foreign policy even though they put in much time and effort to avoid them. In a video …