Glyn Ford - The Japan Times

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Glyn Ford

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 6, 2003

British National Party must be stopped

BRUSSELS -- There has been a step-change in the activity and success of the British National Party. It is now a serious element in electoral politics. Driven by new ways to attract voters, party members no longer cry "repatriation." Instead, their slogan "pensioners before asylum seekers" is aimed at...

COMMENTARY / World

Aug 27, 2003

Machiavelli on the Mekong

BRUSSELS -- In the West, Cambodia is synonymous with the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. David Puttnam's film "The Killing Fields" seemed to tell it all. Towns and cities were emptied into the countryside and the population enslaved and brutalized. "Luckier" intellectuals were...

COMMENTARY

Jul 5, 2003

'Neocon' recipe for disaster

BRUSSELS -- Newspapers are awash with speculation as to the likely outcome of the Korean Peninsula's nuclear crisis. Will it be the United States that blinks or North Korea? Nobody knows. What is clear is that while North Korea and the world wants and needs a solution, opinion in the U.S. is sharply...

COMMENTARY

Feb 19, 2003

Missile defense is an offense

BRUSSELS -- It is difficult to understand the Bush administration's determination to deploy a national missile defense system, or NMD. All test launches to date -- to prevent theoretical nuclear missile attacks -- have been either failures or "partial successes."

COMMENTARY

Feb 6, 2003

Misperceptions fuel Korean crisis

BRUSSELS -- The crisis in Iraq overshadows everything. Yet far more dangerous is the Korean crisis. At worse, the Iraqi crisis will lead to a conventional war with tens of thousands of casualties. In contrast, millions of lives could be at risk in the Korean crisis -- triggered by U.S. revelations that...

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 13, 2003

Britain's far right poses a rising threat

BRUSSELS -- The press in England has had a field day over the past 20 years chronicling the rise of the Continent's far right. The first chance came in the early 1980s with the emergence of France's National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man who believes the Americans built the gas chambers in the...

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 2, 2002

Back to the future via broken promises

BRUSSELS -- Next year's crisis on the Korean Peninsula has come early. The year 2003 was to see an explosive conjuncture of events: a change of regime in South Korea, markedly less sympathetic to engagement with the North than that of current President Kim Dae Jung; the final failure of the United States...

COMMENTARY

Jul 26, 2002

Iran's reformers need support

BRUSSELS -- Images of Iran seem stuck in a time warp that dates back to the early 1980s, when the country was considered to be one of the world's "rogue states" due to its militant standoff with the United States and its state support of Islamic terror groups. Now it is a flawed democracy -- with a distinctly...

COMMENTARY

Apr 26, 2002

Le Pen's success is no shock

BRUSSELS -- Last Sunday's results from France saw Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right Front National, finish just behind French President Jacques Chirac, eliminating Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin from the May 5 second round of voting and prompting him to retire from politics. Yet...

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 14, 2002

Britain and the euro: victory for the brave

BRUSSELS -- The introduction of the euro in 12 of the 15 member states of the European Union has been an unqualified success. The changeover had none of the hitches and glitches that many -- including myself -- thought would mar its early days.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 2, 2001

Uptick noticed in N. Korean economy

LONDON -- There is a bustle on the streets of Pyongyang that has been sorely missing for at least five years. The shops -- never consumers' havens -- have some goods on the shelves. Restaurants on Changgwang Street, North Korea's pale equivalent of Tokyo's Ginza, are open and serving. Even street vendors...

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 8, 2001

Taxing currency speculators

LONDON -- The decision by European economy and finance ministers in Liege on Sept. 23 to commission a study of the effect of "Tobin-style" taxes on currency transactions indicates a new and surprising high-water mark of support for taxation on speculative capital flows.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 28, 2001

Now it's time for New Labour to deliver

BRUSSELS -- The historic second landslide election victory for the Labour Party has given Tony Blair an opportunity that no Labour prime minister has had before -- a second term of office. For the first time in history, a Labour government can build on its work and set in place radical reforms to realize...

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 15, 2001

Heading off the MD disaster

BRUSSELS -- The argument for missile defense is based on a series of misunderstandings and exaggerations. The claimed threat is neither real nor credible. Yet U.S. President George W. Bush is using it to underpin the United States' deployment of MD in the interests of the arms industry and to the detriment...

COMMENTARY / World

Jun 23, 2001

Learning the lessons hidden in victory

It was a stunning night for Labour June 7. British political geography has been permanently transformed. Yet learning the lessons of defeat is comparatively easy. British Conservatives are already starting to learn those lessons.

COMMENTARY / World

May 31, 2001

Europe seeks more equality with the U.S.

Relations between Europe and the United States are at a watershed. The post World War II global settlement is no longer anchored in contemporary economic and political realities. The Soviet Empire has crashed and burned. Emerging from the ashes, Russia is barely more than a Third World country with nuclear...

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 26, 2001

Nice Treaty upholds Britain's interests

BRUSSELS -- A "stronger Britain in a wider Europe" has been the vision of a succession of British governments but increasingly this debate on the future of Britain in Europe is one in which the media is having to place severe constraints. The strong tradition of English exceptionalism and isolationism...

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 9, 2001

Hope fades for reconciliation in Kosovo

The West's intervention in Kosovo was a reaction to the Serbs' final solution to the problems of the recalcitrant province. The Serbs attempted to drive out the Albanian majority using soldiers and civilians for mayhem and murder. It was not an arbitrary, irrational act, merely a final inhuman escalation...

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 15, 2001

Tory grip on rural areas must be broken

With a British general election schedded for May 3 or earlier, the party machine is geared to turn out again those who gave us victory in 1997 -- traditional Labor voters and those who voted Labor for the first time -- to win that elusive second term. Yet this is not enough. We must also win the battle...

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 17, 2000

Strong pound strangling British industry

BRUSSELS -- Britain's exclusion from the single European currency and the resulting high pound has led to a bleeding away of jobs in manufacturing. Day by day, the press publishes the casualty figures as stories of closures, amalgamations and redundancies, for in manufacturing the high pound is a weakness...

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