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Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs
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14th October 2025
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23rd February 2012 Windhoek, Namibia
Doubling of bilateral trade with Namibia in 2011
Amidst all the global financial doom and gloom, it was really heartening to receive the UK’s latest bilateral trade in goods figures for Namibia this week and to discover that both imports and exports had doubled in 2011. Imports of Namibian goods to the UK jumped up 108% in 2011 to hit £446m (up from […]
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23rd February 2012 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
The Ultimate Sacrifice…
Like everyone around the world, I was extremely saddened to hear about the tragic deaths of Marie Colvin, an American journalist for the Sunday Times, and French photographer Remi Ochlik, in shelling by the Syrian government’s force in the city of Homs. As the Foreign Secretary said in his statement, they died bringing us the […]
22nd February 2012
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
The Commonwealth and the Catholic Church
The senior leadership of the global Catholic Church has been in Rome over the last week to celebrate the latest Consistory of Cardinals, at which 22 new Cardinals were installed. These included the Major Archbishop of Ernakulam-Angamalay of the Syr-Malabars, in Kerala in India, His Eminence George Alencherry. Our congratulations go out to him and […]
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22nd February 2012 Bucharest, Romania
Great Britons in Romania: Shajjad and Katie Rizvi and The Little People
Second in our series of blogs about Great Britons in Romania are Shajjad and Katie Rizvi, founders of The Little People – a charity dedicated to providing psycho-social and educational services to children suffering from cancer. Shajjad came to Romania in early 1990 to deliver a shipment of humanitarian aid. He planned to stay for […]
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22nd February 2012
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
What the Dickens?
I hosted a lunch yesterday for celebrated British actress Miriam Margolyes who is touring Australia with her show “Dickens’ Women”. With her hugely varied and successful career across stage, TV and film she is one of our best loved actresses. Miriam has a lifelong passion for Charles Dickens, perhaps Britain’s greatest ever novelist, and she spoke entertainingly about […]
21st February 2012 Toronto, Canada
SIN podcast: Jason Hall-Spencer on ocean acidification
With the 2012 AAAS Annual Meeting just wrapping up in Vancouver, news stories and features from the leading edges of research are starting to percolate out into the mainstream media. One timely example is that of Dr. Jason Hall-Spencer, a marine scientist at the University of Plymouth who was featured on the BBC at the […]
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21st February 2012 Nairobi, Kenya
Why a stable Somalia is in our interests
As the first British Ambassador to Somalia for twenty years, people often ask me why we should get involved with Somalia at all: haven’t we got enough to worry about? Somalia has an unenviable record as a failed state. Its twenty-year civil war has brought lawlessness and chaos at a massive human cost: one million […]
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20th February 2012
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
70th Anniversary of Darwin bombing
I travelled up to the Northern Territory to participate in a weekend of commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the WWII attack on Darwin. 19 February 1942 was not of course the start of the war for Australia. Australian diggers had been fighting alongside their British comrades for two years and five months by then. […]
20th February 2012 Warsaw, Poland
UK and Poland – lots of opportunity to work on a growth agenda!
Since the global economic crisis started in September 2008, the story for Europe has been one of a stalling engine which has consistently failed to restart. Mired in mediocrity and wading through a bog of single market regulation, more than half of Europe’s member states are today less competitive than they were a year ago. […]
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20th February 2012 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
New Beginnings: Malaysia and Moderation
Welcome to my first blog from Kuala Lumpur. It’s hard to describe the excitement that I felt when I was offered my dream job as the Counsellor covering foreign policy and security issues at our High Commission. I couldn’t think of a more stimulating posting. And I can’t believe that I have already been in […]
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