The Commission on Electoral Integrity meets in Copenhagen
26th June 2018The first meeting of The Commission on Electoral Integrity (TCEI) took place last week (Friday 22nd June) in Copenhagen. Nick, who is a TCEI Commissioner, travelled to the Copenhagen Democracy Summit, which provides a high-level strategic forum exclusively focused on the cause of democracy. Taking part in a panel discussion exploring how best to bring together an international alliance of democracies, Nick was joined by José María Aznar, former Prime Minister of Spain, Felipe Calderón, former President of Mexico, Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada, and Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former President of Estonia. You can watch a recording of the event…
We need to stand up and defend democracy in the era of Brexit and Putin
26th June 2018Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the United States secretly financed Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party. In 2013, the CIA finally admitted that it had helped to orchestrate the coup against Iran’s secular prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq, 60 years earlier. And in Latin America US meddling in domestic elections was, for a while, almost routine. Britain, too, has been no slouch when it comes to interference in other countries’ elections. In the US elections of 1940, for example, British intelligence officers waged a campaign of fake news and political manipulation in an attempt to marginalise candidates who were opposed to US intervention in…
Flying the Flag for Openness: why liberalism still matters
21st June 2018On 12 June 2018, at the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, Nick gave his inaugural lecture as a visiting professor in practice at the LSE’s School of Public Policy. The title of the lecture was “Flying the Flag for Openness: why liberalism still matters”. Battered, bruised and blamed for so many of the world’s problems, liberal values have found themselves under attack from left and right. But these values have multiple virtues and with many enduring strengths. Nick set out the case for liberal values at a time when stark social and generational divisions threaten to pull the country apart. If Open…
Tantalising glimpse of an EU compromise on freedom of movement
18th June 2018In April 2005, the mayor of Maubeuge, a town in northern France, sent a list of local plumbers to Frits Bolkestein, the straight-talking former Dutch EU commissioner. Mr Bolkestein was the author of a controversial EU directive that opened up local services — from hairdressing to ski lessons — to competition across the bloc. In a press conference, he had declared that he was looking forward to using the services of a “Polish plumber” because he couldn’t find a good local one for his holiday home near Maubeuge. His comments, unsurprisingly, caused outrage in France. A band of guerrilla electricians…
Episode 5: Global Soul… writer and campaigner Elif Shafak on art vs. anger
14th June 2018Can art defeat fascism? In the latest edition of ANGER MANAGEMENT, award-winning author, columnist and women’s rights activist Elif Shafak talks to Nick about the seductive dangers of sameness, how Western countries’ greatest weakness was our belief that we’d won all the big battles… and how we’ll never turn back the tide of anger until we understand where it comes from. “This is an age of emotions,” Elif tells Nick, “and emotions are guiding and misguiding politics. In an age of anger we need to increase our emotional intelligence.” Born in Strasbourg and raised in Ankara, Madrid, Amman and Istanbul, the self-declared “linguistic…
Pushkin Prize Winner 2018
11th June 2018Alexis Peri has been announced as the winner of the 2018 Pushkin Prize. The panel of judges was chaired by Nick, who helped to select the prize for the best non-fiction writing in English about Russia and the Russian-speaking world. Nick described Peri’s The War Within as “a remarkable book”, adding: “To have unearthed such searing, and hitherto unpublished, testimonies of the agony of the Leningrad siege is achievement enough. But the spotlight that Alexis Peri casts on the way in which families, individual identity and time itself are warped by such extreme suffering is both unflinching and disturbing. The…
The Thunderer: Pro-European MPs have a moral duty to resist Brexit
4th June 2018If you saw someone you love repeatedly punch themselves in the head would you: a) try to stop them; or b) sit back and wait until they’d punched themselves unconscious before doing something? Your answer will provide important guidance for pro-Europeans. Should we try to alter the course of Brexit, giving people a chance to think again, or should we sit back and watch the country we love be deeply damaged? Philip Collins (“Let’s drop the pretence Brexit can be stopped”, June 1) is the latest in a growing chorus of pro-European commentators who believe there is nothing to be…
Libération Interview
1st June 2018Libération have featured an interview with Nick, following his visit to Paris. He discussed how Brexit could be stopped, and the role that Parliament can play in that process. Nick told the newspaper that the Conservative Party continues to negotiate with itself, and not with the rest of the EU. Click here to read the interview (in French).
OECD Forum 2018: What Brings Us Together?
31st May 2018Nick spoke at the OECD Forum Network in Paris last week (May 29th). This year, the Forum focused on the core question: What Brings Us Together?, with Nick joining an expert panel for a discussion entitled Health: High Tech, High Touch. The OECD’s Better Life Index, which allows people to compare quality of life across 11 different dimensions, consistently indicates that health is top of people’s priorities for their well-being. The session looked at how health systems can best reformed to put people, and especially those with less opportunity, at the heart of decision-making. You can find out more about the…
Economist Pride and Prejudice Event
31st May 2018Nick spoke at the Economist Pride and Prejudice event in London on May 24th. The event, first launched in 2016, is a global LGBT conference and initiative which sparks fresh debate on the economic and human costs of discrimination against the LGBT community. Nick spoke at a session entitled “School of Hard Knocks.” You can read his interview on political anger and the importance of being a patriotic liberal here. And you can watch his interview on the need to keep campaigning for LGBT rights here.