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Mary Dejevsky: You don't need an MP's pay to live in SW1

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Of all the arguments advanced by disgruntled MPs against Sir Christopher Kelly's proposed curbs on their expenses, there is one that I find particularly, outrageously, dishonest. It is the one that says they will produce a Parliament of the super-rich. The same ardent defenders of the status quo tend also to have a uniquely disingenuous line about how the new rules will particularly deter women. Really? Even more than the misogynistic colleagues in the Chamber? More than the "Neanderthal" selection boards? More than any other job that requires half of a couple to work away from home? Come off it; any aspiring female MP will be made of sterner stuff.

Mary Dejevsky: Remember the Berlin Wall – and not only how it fell

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

This time next week Berlin will be suffering a hangover second only to the one that followed the collapse of the Wall 20 years ago. Even though a whole generation has now grown up across Europe with no first-hand memory of the dismembered city and the divided country that surrounded it, the scenes from 9 November, 1989, are lived and relived as the defining images of the end of the Cold War.

Mary Dejevsky: A fiasco that shows British diplomacy is clapped out

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

If, as it appears, yesterday's EU summit spelled the end of Tony Blair's undeclared ambition to be the first President of Europe, you have to ask whether he really wanted the job at all. So clumsy and ill-prepared was the campaign that, with hindsight, it almost looks like a manoeuvre to exclude him – and clear the way for David Miliband to bid for the post of High Representative.

Mary Dejevsky: Why is useful information still so elusive?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

In the tech world they are called "early adopters", and I am definitely not one of them – save in three respects. As a foreign correspondent through the late 1980s and 1990s, I and my tribe were at the leading edge of telecoms, as we advanced from tape-punching telexes to laptops with modems, then to wireless. Back then, you had to make the stuff work, even if it meant taking a screwdriver to the hotel phone socket. If you couldn't transmit your story, you might as well not have been there at all.

Mary Dejevsky: Britain, Europe and a history of lamentable mis-timing

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

A week or so ago, I sat metaphorically open-mouthed at a London think-tank, as a series of speakers systematically demolished all the arguments commonly advanced in support of the British-US "special relationship". What was said, in summary, was this.

Mary Dejevsky: Keep your hands off my health records

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

To judge by the personal information individuals cheerfully make public about themselves on Facebook and the rest, perhaps all information will eventually be deemed public unless expressly designated private. For the time being, though, the hawking of personal, especially medical, information still has the capacity to shock, and a report on ITV's Tonight programme this week will only have stoked people's worst fears.

Mary Dejevsky: Could Europe's new order be the old one in disguise?

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Twenty years ago the democratic revolutions in East and Central Europe prompted the first great-power retreat in the continent since the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops, supported by generous German funding, decamped for home, to be followed by many more after the Soviet Union itself collapsed. And while imperial nostalgia lingers still, the Kremlin has had to accommodate itself to the new reality. The tentative and ragged sphere of influence that remains is a shadow of what once was.

Mary Dejevsky: Into the frozen heart of Asia's cold war

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

South Korea's capital offers peculiar mismatches. The city centre, ravaged by war half a century ago, is now a forest of high-rises divided by broad boulevards, with a labyrinth of metro lines and shopping malls underneath. But enter the grounds of any one of five palaces scattered around the city, and you find yourself in a haven of parkland and pagodas, with the high-rises still visible all around.

Mary Dejevsky: The postman doesn't ring even once

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

There was a time when it was simple, or it seemed so. There was the Post Office (with real, working Post Offices across the land) and there was the Royal Mail which had its coat of arms on the pillar boxes. And they seemed for all practical purposes to be part of the same thing.

Mary Dejevsky: He might look right, but he's the wrong President for Europe

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

France, Germany, and perhaps Italy – when Silvio Berlusconi takes his mind off impending prosecution – apparently want Tony Blair to be the European Union's first president. And until the Benelux countries mounted a late rearguard action, the deal seemed practically to have been done. Why should a widespread British response have been, at its mildest, "Oh dear"?

Mary Dejevsky: Rail chaos puts the brakes on Berliners

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

It's a good thing for Berliners that the mid-autumn weather has been mostly clement. Cyclists and walkers have taken to the streets and pavements in their thousands, but not entirely for pleasure. An especially crowded route has been the half-mile or so between Tiergarten and Zoological Gardens stations, a wide pathway through the park alongside the zoo, from where, at one point, you can glimpse a cluster of healthy-looking camels.

Mary Dejevsky: My problem with teenage mothers

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

When a Labour prime minister talks about placing teenage mothers in supervised hostels, you can be sure an election is in sight. Gordon Brown's excursion into this tricky area earlier this week was couched in conspicuously careful language. He spoke of teenage "parents" not mothers (no sexism here), of not wanting to leave them isolated, and of "shared homes offering a new start in life". In other words, it was all for their benefit rather than ours.

Mary Dejevsky: Do we really need to remind the police what crime is?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

So now they are sounding contrite, and saying it should never have happened and promising that in the future they will respond differently. Yesterday, in the wake of the jury verdict of the Loughborough inquest – verdicts of suicide and unlawful killing – the powers that be were jostling for microphones to offer public apologies: the Prime Minister at his party conference, the Home Secretary on the BBC Today programme, the temporary chief constable of Leicestershire.

Mary Dejevsky: Back to business as usual in Germany? Far from it

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Blink, and you could almost have missed it: a six-week campaign that bored even the most committed of voters; a couple of potentially lively issues that never really took off – Germany's presence in Afghanistan, and recidivist youth crime after the killing of a "good samaritan" in Munich – and the return of a beaming Angela Merkel as Chancellor for another four years. That was the German election that was. As a quizzical local commentator wrote yesterday, even the usual immigration controversy failed to raise its head.

Mary Dejevsky: Germany remains divided, despite Chancellor's election success

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from Germany's election result, and less obvious ones. The obvious ones are that Ms Merkel has won another term, and freed herself from the constraints of a partnership with the centre-left; that the Social Democrats' poor result reflects in part the desertion of the party's left-wing voters to the Linke, and that the Free Democrats' five-point improvement compared with 2005 shows that something similar, if less dramatic, happened on the right. The two big parties that governed as a "Grand Coalition" were, to a greater or lesser extent, punished by a section of their voters for moving to the centre.

Mary Dejevsky: Rust-belt support transforms fortunes of former communist

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Germany's rust-belt, the Ruhrgebiet, is undergoing a faltering revival, but it remains perfect campaigning territory for the far-left party, the Left. One half of the party's populist dual leadership, the engaging Gregor Gysi, stopped off yesterday for a couple of hours in Duisburg, the erstwhile city of steel. He drew an enthusiastic crowd of 400 or so, undaunted by drizzle that turned to a downpour.

Mary Dejevsky: Less of the professor and more of the fighter, Mr Obama

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

There are times when you don't know whether to laugh or to cry – in foreign policy as in so much else. Only three months ago, Barack Obama was being taken to task by his own disillusioned voters for not supporting Iran's election protests more vigorously. Now, more predictably, he is taking flak from the right.

Mary Dejevsky: St Nicholas and Soviet-era brutalism

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The Soviet system's inhumanity to man left psychological scars that will endure for generations. But it also left more visible scars on the architecture and townscapes of the communist world. The city of Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, shows Soviet-style "renovation" at its malevolent worst.

Mary Dejevsky: Let's choose our GPs – and much more too

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

For a long time government ministers bombarded us with talk of "choice", without offering much that anyone could really exercise. There's no point in having "school choice", for instance, if there are only two substandard comprehensives with places.

Mary Dejevsky: Nato's dissolution is long overdue

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

With the number of British and US casualties rising, the election results mired in complaints of fraud, and the Obama administration still reviewing its strategy, the war in Afghanistan is at once in crisis and in limbo. It is no wonder then that the Prime Minister should have started the new political term by trying to convince British opinion that this operation still has purpose and, more to the point, an end.

Mary Dejevsky: A better way to fight child sex crime

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

All they have in common is that they were young girls who met with a cruel fate and their faces, pictured in happier times, smiled out at us around the same time. In most other respects, their cases are quite different. Yet the laws in their respective countries gave one a better chance of avoiding her fate – and it may not be the one you would think.

Mary Dejevsky: Why is Britain so often blind to Germany's success?

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The script, as so often, was written by the victors, but also – on this first of many 70th anniversaries of the Second World War – by the victims. And Poland's commemoration in recent days demanded more of Russia than of Germany, on the grounds that Germany never tried to evade its responsibility for Poland's suffering. The Poles have in mind mostly, but not only, the Russian massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.

Mary Dejevsky: Hotels: just do your job and leave us alone

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:00:01 GMT

How many laments have we heard recently for the traditional British pub? Far too many, I say. Not least because those who dwell on the falling numbers of old-fashioned, male-orientated, food-desert boozers are obscuring another trend that is highly positive. This is the diversification of pubs into civilised, family-friendly, overnight stops of which we have long had a strange dearth in this country. Let them prosper this bank holiday weekend!

Mary Dejevsky: A mean streak in the US mainstream

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:00:01 GMT

When we Europeans – the British included – contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States? How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?

Mary Dejevsky: Buses, Boris and the upside of city transport

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:00:01 GMT

London is one of few places to emerge well from a nationwide survey of bus fares published yesterday. Which pleases me, as someone who delights in riding buses. Nor is it just the fares I like – which are comparatively cheaper the more you travel – it is the number and seeming quirkiness of the routes, some of which date back to horse-and-carriage days.