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I’ve got a short piece about organised crime on the Guardian’s blog Comment is Free. From the intro:
The annual report from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, published yesterday, is a mix of self-congratulation and spectacular underachievement. While the rhetoric from politicians has been to get tough on organised crime, the reality is more humbling: we [...]

Tomorrow the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) will publish its annual report/ threat assessment. It will make for uncomfortable reading at the Home Office and No.10. The Agency is not living up to the great expectations officials placed upon it in 2006. In the febrile political atmosphere of Westminster you can be sure the Conservative [...]

Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely [...]

Despite having practically invented modern counter-insurgency, today Britain is woefully ill-equipped for this kind of complex, mosaic-style warfare. The Times, echoing David’s post from a few days ago, has picked up on the problems Britain has in spending money in places like Afghanistan.
As readers will know, even though the Labour government sought to overcome the [...]

Sam Coates at The Times reports from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in DC last week (”where the President and Washington press corps show Hollywood what self-congratulation is all about”).  Along with “Ben Affleck, Colin Powell, Pamela Anderson, Henry Kissinger, Marcia Cross, Jenny McCarthy and other A-listers”, the guest list also included British Government Chief Whip Geoff Hoon and [...]

Would you rather be a member of the liberal left on the western or eastern side of the Atlantic right now?  Not easy.  Labour’s in free-fall.  The Democrats are devising innovative ways to lose an election that they should own.  But Jackie Ashley at the Guardian still sees cause for hope: Gordon might be the [...]

For English policy wonks walking along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, the experience is invariably bittersweet.  On one hand, they are (they must admit) slightly awed by the concentration of great engines of think tankery within a stone’s throw of where they stand: Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, SAIS, CFR and plenty more besides.
But then their [...]

Nice to see an integrated approach to UK operations in Afghanistan…
When I asked the men of 3 Para what their first tour had achieved, they all fell silent. “It was very frustrating,” said [Major Paul] Blair. He believes that his men could have achieved something in the town of Gereshk, where they were first [...]

A civil servant friend told me yesterday that the Cabinet Office has just issued guidance that all senior civil servants (that’s deputy directors and upwards) are now allowed to blog, publicly, in their own names, about the issues that they work on. 
Fascinating if so - but not surprising, given the approach being signalled by Tom [...]

PR week, the gossip-laden magazine for political apparatchiks and comms people will no doubt set tongues wagging with their latest installment of Brown baiting. According to the mag rag:
Hordes of senior Labour special advisers are said to be passing their CVs to headhunters and recruitment consultants amid concern that their stock is falling. With Gordon [...]

I had meant to write something wildly insightful about Gordon Brown’s visit to the U.S. and his rather good speech at the Kennedy Library on world order - a distinct improvement in terms of both intellectual clarity and phrasing on his previous outings on the subject in London and Delhi. But then Daniel Korski [...]

Brown’s in the US and is promising a new Atlantic relationship. Unlike his predecessors Brown has not yet launched into a new Anglo-American security or defence deal instead he wants (t)his relationship to be firmly based around skills, science and  innovation.
This new relationship is based on 6 proposals
1 Cooperation between UK and US universities.
2. [...]

Back in the middle of February I posted on the plight of the Iraqi people in Basra suggesting that while the the city was not in the media spotlight things were turning from bad to worse. I ended saying I think we are going to see a lot more about Basra in the headlines in [...]

Banned from discussing issues of national security with the media, officials and serving officers from the MoD have turned their attention to the internet. Civil servants have been busy editing Wikipedia. Some 5,614 changes to the website were made from Ministry of Defence computers, 1,500 from the Department of Health, 103 from the DCMS and [...]

Last week Gordon Brown announced the publication of the UK’s first national security strategy in a statement to the House of Commons. Most analysts and commentators in the media welcomed the strategy like an ungracious three year old receiving a complicated birthday present; instead of playing with the new toy opts for the relative simplicity [...]

Having read this morning’s press and their pretty feeble attempts to explain what the national security strategy is, I plan to wait until the dust settles (tomorrow pm) before I post on the subject.  However I couldn’t help notice (aside from the amusing photos of Dad’s Army, a useful if not a tad sarcastic commentary [...]

So which political adviser and/or Whitehall official(s) have been talking with the FT’s resident ‘Rita Skeeter‘? In her notebook today she despairs of the British Prime Minister’s handling of the national security strategy:
Oh Gord! The new national security strategy that Gordon Brown, the prime minister, is due to announce on Wednesday – it is all [...]

There have been numerous column inches in the papers about Gordon Brown’s announcement today on the UK’s first national security strategy.  While it seems likely that there will be something about creating a national security forum, it remains unclear about what this will actually be - and whether it will only focus on international terrorism. [...]

Red Box has found this in PR Week: an organogram of Downing Street’s comms operation.  The resolution’s not very good (big version here), but one thing is very clear: Stephen Carter is above everyone else.  As Red Box comments, “It would take a huge amount of insider knowledge to put such a thing together without [...]

This Wednesday the British Government will publish the UK’s  first ever National Security Strategy. This is a big moment for Gordon Brown and comes with great expectations.  Don’t be surprised if there is no Minister on the Today Programme discussing the strategy’s pros and cons on Wednesday morning - this will be Gordon Brown’s opportunity [...]

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