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Brian Barder

Brian BarderBrian Barder was born in 1934 and joined the Labour Party at 21. He was Chair of the Cambridge University Labour Club and worked in the Civil Service, Diplomatic Service, UK Mission to the UN, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He was Ambassador to Ethiopia between 1982 and 1986 and to Poland between 1986 and 1988. Brian was High Commissioner to Nigeria and Ambassador to Bénin between 1988 and 1991 and High Commissioner to Australia from 1991-1994, when he retired.

Since retiring, Brian has been Chair of Civil Service Selection Boards and sat on the Boards of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. Commonwealth Observer Mission, Namibian elections, '94. Brian blog at barder.com/ephems/.

Posted on May 09, 2009 at 02:20pm

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Contributor's latest posts

How to vote for Labour’s leader: It's more complex than it looks

2:35 pm, Wed 1st Sep 2010
How to vote for Labour’s leader: It's more complex than it looks By Brian Barder / @brianlb This is about making your vote in the Labour party leadership election this week do what you want it to do, and how not to make it self-defeating. It's not about who I think you should vote for. So in the examples I give, I have given the five candidates pseudonyms: A, B, C, D and E. For the purposes of this article, I am taking the view that the only two candidates for the Labour leadership who possess the basic qualities required in a party and national leader are "C" and "B"; and that...
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Five days in May: the lessons for Labour

10:17 am, Fri 27th Aug 2010
By Brian Barder / @BrianLB In the last of three articles about the events of the five days immediately following the election in May leading to the formation of the coalition, Brian looks at the lessons of those events for the Labour party.  The first two articles are here and here. In the five hectic days between the election results on 6 May 2010 and the appointment of David Cameron as prime minister on the 11th, Labour never had a chance of a deal with the LibDems that would have kept Labour in office, even under a new leader. Some LibDems have suggested...
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In those Five Days in May, the LibDems made the wrong choice

2:10 pm, Sat 21st Aug 2010
By Brian Barder / @brianlb The LibDems made the wrong choice in May, not in going into coalition with the Tories instead of with Labour, but in going into coalition at all. With the experience of 100 days of coalition government, and with hindsight, we can now see that the LibDems were wrong to go into coalition with the Conservatives: they could and should have let David Cameron form a minority government, promising to support it, perhaps for a year, in votes of confidence and on the budget, but keeping their options open on everything else. This would have maximised...
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In the coalition politics era Labour should court, not vilify, the LibDems

10:06 am, Mon 2nd Aug 2010
In the coalition politics era Labour should court, not vilify, the LibDems By Brian Barder / @brianlb Several lessons for Labour need to be learned from Nick Robinson’s BBC programme Five Days that Changed Britain, broadcast on 29 July, about the five days in May between the election and the formation of the Tory-LibDem coalition government. The first and most important lesson was summed up towards the end of the programme by Peter Mandelson, usually a canny strategist, when he speculated that we were now in an age of coalition politics, in which no single party was likely in the foreseeable future to win an overall majority in the house of commons,...
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Lockerbie, al-Megrahi and the irrelevant Prisoner Transfer Agreement

10:12 am, Mon 26th Jul 2010
Lockerbie, al-Megrahi and the irrelevant Prisoner Transfer Agreement By Brian Barder / @brianlb David Cameron’s visit to Washington this month collided with the resurrection by some American Senators of the controversy over the release in August 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government’s Justice Secretary of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Many, not all, American relatives of Lockerbie victims, and their Senators, are furious, not only that al-Megrahi was released, but also that he’s still alive, 11 months after being released on the grounds that he had only three months to live. This seems...
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There's nothing fair about a graduate tax, Ed and Vince

12:42 pm, Thu 15th Jul 2010
There's nothing fair about a graduate tax, Ed and Vince By Brian Barder / @brianlb Ed Miliband, second favourite after his big brother for the Labour leadership, has written a piece on his campaign blog in which he argues for a graduate tax as a fairer alternative to tuition fees. Four of the five candidates now favour a graduate tax and the press reports that the coalition government is actively encouraging the idea. Vince Cable was on the radio this morning talking it up, not as an alternative to tuition fees but as an addition to them. I see nothing fair about this idea. I have posted a comment on...
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David Miliband: Time for some policies?

5:29 pm, Tue 13th Jul 2010
David Miliband: Time for some policies? By Brian Barder / @brianlb The reception for David Miliband’s Keir Hardie lecture on 10 July 2010 has been rapturous in some quarters — e.g. John Rentoul in an Independent newspaper blog, and, more surprisingly, by Jon Cruddas, standard-bearer of the left in the Labour Party (“the most important speech by a Labour politician for many years”).  This is an opportunity to have a look at how successful the front-runner in the Labour leadership election has been so far in promising to re-format the party’s attitudes and values, and thence its policies, in the aftermath of a serious election defeat...
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Afghanistan: the dog that still doesn’t bark in the night

9:34 am, Mon 28th Jun 2010
Afghanistan: the dog that still doesn’t bark in the night By Brian Barder / @brianlb It’s extraordinary that the national political discourse isn’t dominated by the war in Afghanistan.  We have been engulfed in it for nine years already and almost every bulletin brings news of yet more deaths of young British men and women — not to mention the far more numerous deaths of innocent Afghan men, women and children at our and our allies’ hands.  As soon as any of our leaders tries to define our current objectives in Afghanistan, it’s instantly obvious that none of them makes any sense, and that there’s not the remotest prospect of...
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The inherent injustice and inhumanity of IPPs

10:07 am, Fri 25th Jun 2010
The inherent injustice and inhumanity of IPPs By Brian Barder / @brianlb Many things are badly wrong with our prisons policies:  chronic over-crowding of ageing prisons, too many on short-term sentences with no time for rehabilitation, leading to high re-offending rates.  But another little-noticed scandal is the system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, oddly abbreviated to IPPs.  Literally thousands of people are indefinitely incarcerated, sometimes for years after serving the punishment part of their sentences, but still kept in jail because they can’t prove that they won’t re-offend. Last week I wrote this letter to the Guardian (which published a heavily edited version of it on 22...
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BP, the oil spill and the Congressional committee

3:59 pm, Sat 19th Jun 2010
BP, the oil spill and the Congressional committee By Brian Barder I’m generally a fan of the American constitution, its Bill of Rights, and especially of the American commitment to due process. In the words of the Fifth Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury … nor shall any person be … compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law… ” Anyone tuning in on Thursday to UK or US television coverage of what...
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