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An impossible crash brought Keynes back to life
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Thursday, October 23, 2008
When Alistair Darling said that “much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense”, anyone under 40 might well have asked: “And who on earth is Keynes”?
When I first started writing about him in the early 1970s, John Maynard Keynes was a name to conjure with - not in the league of Led Zeppelin, to be sure, but certainly familiar to the mythical educated layman. Economic policy was “Keynesian” - that is, governments aimed to keep unemployment below the “magic” figure of one million, as they had for the previous 30 years, by expanding public spending or cutting taxes.
Then Keynesian policy suddenly became obsolete and the theory that backed it ...
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David Miliband must stop playing with fire
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Thursday, August 28, 2008
Russia, according to President Medvedev, is ready for a “new Cold War”. If politicians, including our own, want a new Cold War, they will get one. But the fault will lie as much with us as Russia.
Every move in Russia's foreign policy is greeted by the West with alarm and suspicion. But its policy has been perfectly consistent for years. Russia's aim has been to rebuild itself as a great power, and use that power to regain a dominant position in the old Soviet space it surrendered in the 1990s. In Russia's perception, the United States wants to take over the space vacated by Russia as fruit of its victory in the Cold War, using Nato as a ...
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Russia and Britain: it looks chilly… but it’s far from a cold war
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Friday, July 11, 2008
Britain and Russia have uniquely bad relations with each other - far worse than between Russia and any other main EU country, and worse than Russia's relations with the United States. This frostiness was highlighted again yesterday when a new spying row broke out after the Russians accused a senior diplomat in Moscow of working for British Intelligence.
So it is hardly surprising that the one-hour meeting this week between Gordon Brown and President Medvedev at the G8 summit in Japan failed to resolve five years of bickering between Britain and Russia.
It is reported that Mr Brown raised three issues: the murder of the KGB defector ...
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How Russia became doubly delusional
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Saturday, June 02, 2007
THE LITVINENKO AFFAIR gives a human dimension to what we in the West find most disturbing about modern Russia. It leaves the impression of rogue elements of the Russian State murdering enemies with impunity, at home and abroad. Add to this Andrei Lugovoy’s surreal claim that MI6 had a hand in the murder and Russia’s use of its “energy weapon” to bully its neighbours and it is as if the Cold War never ended.
How Russians see the end of the Cold War is actually a good place to start to understand the muscle-flexing of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Two explanations are popular in Moscow. Liberals argue that the Russian people voluntarily ...
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Could the poisoner be from Prince Putin’s court
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Monday, November 20, 2006
THE POISONING in London of the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko confirms what we already know: that it is dangerous to criticise the Kremlin. It comes less than a month after the shooting in Moscow of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who tirelessly exposed Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Paul Klebnikov, another crusading journalist, was shot dead in 2004.
Dozens of other critical journalists have lost their lives or their jobs since Vladmir Putin came to power. And not just journalists: Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin in 2004 when he ran against a Kremlin-backed opponent in the Ukrainian presidential election. ...
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