Common Sense and Honesty Please

It is time for less reactive hysteria in respect of the events unfolding in Libya and the wider Arab world. I can not see any reason why the Director of the LSE should resign. For many years it has suited everyone from individuals via corporations to governments to indulge in commercial, educational and social intercourse with a regime we ostensibly find distasteful. There is no bigger example than the post-Lockerbie rapprochement made predictably if uncomfortably in deference to wider interests and presumably on the assumption that, 20 years on, the relatives of the lost would hurt less.

Put simply, everybody has been at it including Tony Blair whose judgement might be characterised if necessary by the single example of Gulf II and WMD. I find it, therefore, entirely unremarkable that  a key educational establishment should have been offering tutorage to a clique with whom they might not have cared to share drinks at The Athenaeum.

The spectacle of mass flagellation of self or others whilst bathed in the bright light of the nova death of expediency is at least unseemly and certainly avoidable were our moral compasses not so frequently set by commercially driven co-ordinates.