Milosevic himself did not fall until it became clear that his people were against

Milosevic himself did not fall until it became clear that his people were against him and his security forces were not going to open fire on their own people.In the case of Iraq, there isn’t that unity behind war Far from it. In the case of North Korea, there isn’t yet a consensus behind a policy of containment. Let’s try and get that unity around an agreed policy of pressure and persuasion in both cases The carrot is engagement, trade and humanitarian assistance. The stick is international isolation and condemnation.As for regime change Yes, we want it – in the two countries.

If the example of Eastern Europe is anything to go by, it will happen if we stick to our principles in all our dealings with these regimes, and others But we have no right to intervene of our own accord. In international affairs as domestic ones, the law is there to prevent us taking it into our own hands.a.hamilton independent.co.uk
More from Adrian Hamilton. We develop a picture of the country we live in through many different lenses: glimpses from car and train windows, our own social circles, cramped tube carriages, busy high streets and, mostly, the press and television. If we believed only the latter – the Britain beamed into our living rooms through what Dennis Potter lovingly called “a window on the world” – we would think this was overwhelmingly a country of young, beautiful, and – most important – rich people. Even our soaps, once the repository of working-class stories, have undergone a process of embourgeoisement: Albert Square is one of the more lush streets in the East End, and the living standards on Coronation Street are now easily middle class. The census returns completed yesterday reveal a Britain very different from the one we imagine we live in – and it provides answers to two of the most pressing questions in British politics: why is the Tory party on a life-support machine, and why is there such dissatisfaction with New Labour?New Labour has not delivered with anything like the speed that is needed.

Snapshot figures – not necessarily the worst, but the most striking – show this with painful clarity. In 21st century London, one in a hundred people still has no toilet or bath of their own in their home. After nearly six years of Labour government, 13 per cent of households in Yorkshire and Humberside have no central heating. Today, 1.5 million people in England and Wales live in homes that are officially designated as over-crowded. The census is a slap in the face to those of us (and this includes virtually all journalists) who live in velvet-lined metropolitan dolls’ houses.

Britain is poorer, older and far more in need of social reform than might appear from Canary Wharf – or, indeed, Downing Street.One of the clearest messages is that rich Britons are becoming an ?te group with living standards vastly in excess of the rest of us. One in 10 households in south Buckinghamshire has three cars, and one in 25 have, breathtakingly, more than four. Yet while a substantial chunk of the population of South Bucks enjoy driving around in their fourth car, the pit villages of south Wales are sunk in poverty and ill-health.Nobody wants to go back to the mining days. It was a dangerous job, excavating a resource that is poisonous to both the environment and miners’ lungs.