Martin Meenagh blog

I've been having a merry old time over on the Daily Telegraph comments section, as I often do, over the issue of whether it matters that Angela Merkel breaks German law in guaranteeing the eurozone. One of the exhilarating things about the comments sections of online news these days is that they are more interesting than the reportage above, and often, in amongst the trolls whom it is fun to kick about a bit, one finds genuinely interesting and opposing points of view. Like many in Europe, I'm not keen on the idea of a united Germany, though I think that the Germanies of 1848 and 1956-90 were near perfect states, and the present Federal Republic is a model in many ways to mankind. I think that the mixture of liberal nationalism's idea of a unitary state and the sheer size, position, and diversity of the German lands must always destabilise Europe. I am also not an automatic liberal nationalist; states claiming to be nations should not just present themselves and expect th...

In my local library in Putney, 'law' is above 'war' and behind 'politics' on the shelves, which I would like to think meant something other than some mentally ill need to identify a pattern on which to hang a blog post on my part. In the week after the International Criminal Court achieved its first conviction, Germany was encouraged to ignore the basic law, the United States proceeded with robot assassinations without trial, and Her Majesty's Government attempted to unilaterally destroy the constitution, I thought it might be worthwhile to put down my own thoughts on what law ought to be. I should declare my interest. I'm a barrister but, like the vast majority of English and Welsh barristers throughout the past thousand years, I do not have a law degree and I have little time for most, but not all, practitioners of 'jurisprudence'. It's good to have a hobby, I suppose, but dressing up law as a philosophy in itself isn't really for me;...

The picture is by Aivazovsky, whom I have just come across on the web, and is entitled 'A conversation on the shore at dusk', which seems appropriate, frankly. On the face of it, the question which graces the top of this post is easy to answer; it isn't. Blogging is one of the most open, democratic and easy things for anyone with access to a computer to do. It's open to all. My own prejudice is for people to identify themselves and to blog under their own name, but even where people have sensitive jobs, a quick glance at the sidebar will reveal that a pseudonym and a degree of inside knowledge will go a long way. My question, true to the foundational solipsism of this particular blog, is for myself; why is it that a few years ago, I could blog practically every day at least once, and now I find it difficult to do so once a week? There is, I think, a mixture of practical and general answers to the problem. One is facebook; a communicative medium which is much ...

Endowment policies, Personal equity plans Equity release schemes Private pensions Pensions windfall tax Gold sell-off Precipice bonds Absolute return funds Payment protection insurance Self certification 125% mortgages Unfair bank charges Unfair mortgage penalty charges Interest rate swaps LIBOR manipulation Arch Cru Equitable Life, Keydata, Farepak, Crown Currency, GP Noble Trustees, Tudor Capital Management, UK Expatriates fund, Rowanmoor, GFX Capital, Meteor Asset Management Defined Returns Ltd Nursing Home Fees Agency Once more, and with feeling; as with practically every other crisis we are experiencing, we are living through a failure of ethics and public morality. This failure, fuelled in part by drugs (such as the cocaine of the financial classes and the cannabis of the political one), and in part by an unsustainable individualist liberalism, is being supplemented with a failure of critical thought. Our society has cut itself off from its cultural roots and has a...