I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.

Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.

The language of the heart
Is the only language
That everybody can understand.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.