Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs

A unique insight into UK foreign and development policy

30th January 2015 Pretoria, South Africa

by Judith Macgregor

British High Commissioner to South Africa

Climate change: calculating the risk – and opportunity

This week the UK Government launched the Global Calculator, a free and interactive website that allows anyone to test out different solutions to climate change and find out what it really takes to stop global warming. Climate change often feels like such a massive and nebulous problem, and so for me it has been fascinating […]

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30th January 2015 Gaborone, Botswana

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by Nick Pyle

British High Commissioner to Botswana

Botswana’s Business Environment

The imminent presentation of the budget speech has made me focus on Botswana’s economic development and in particular the business enabling environment.  Botswana is judged by international institutions to be amongst the best destinations for doing business in Africa and, in perception terms the least corrupt country on the continent. These ratings quite rightly reflect […]

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30th January 2015 London, UK

Consular appointments – our approach to development and training

How the appointments service was developed, the teams involved, and the first training iteration While developing our consular appointments service through alpha to beta, we’ve worked closely with our partner BookingBug to customise their Software-as-a-Service offering to our needs – both user needs and organisational needs. As the development was not in-house good communication was […]

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28th January 2015 Bucharest, Romania

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by Raluca Bragarea

Head of Communications, Bucharest

On Invisible Slaves and Involuntary Slave Masters

Today’s blog post is written by Cora Motoc, my colleague in the political section. It deals with a topic which is often much closer to our everyday lives than we might initially think. What would you say or do if you knew that behind your most beautiful vacations or most perfect evenings out, there are […]

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27th January 2015 Washington DC, USA

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by Lindsay Chura

Senior Policy Advisor in Science and Innovation

Falklands Symposium: Q&A with Dr Carlos Andrade – Amaya (Colombia)

Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, the first ever Pan–American Science Delegation to the Falkland Islands is participating in a week-long mission to showcase the beauty of the UK South Atlantic Overseas Territories and immense opportunities for scientific research and collaboration in the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. Scientists from the US, Canada, Chile, […]

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27th January 2015

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by Greg Dorey

Diplomat

Never Again

International #HolocaustRemembranceDay (#HRD) is observed on 27 January to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. On this day we remember the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated six million Jews; one million Roma; 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people; and 9000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. When the […]

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27th January 2015

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by Nigel Baker

Ambassador to the Holy See (2011-2016)

Remembering the Holocaust

In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly declared 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date recognises the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau slave labour and extermination camps in 1945.  As well as being an occasion to remember the millions who suffered and died under Nazi policies, Holocaust Memorial Day gives us a chance […]

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27th January 2015

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by Carolyn Browne

Former ambassador to Kazakhstan

The Birds Don’t Sing

Guest blog by Sara Pickering, Deputy Head of Mission I read this sentence in my guidebook before visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1992 and found it hard to believe. But once there, you can almost touch the memories and echoes of the evil that happened.  It was, indeed, silent. I have been reading recently about two British heroes […]

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