It looks like rusty old thatcherbot Sir George Young announced a COI review of government advertising in the News of the World today. Fortunately, the Grauniad published a list of the top 50 NOTW advertisers by spending, and they’re not on there, so you can be reassured the whole exercise was as pointless as everything…
Read More corruption production, fag packets, protection rackets…The Government’s Central Office of Information, essentially its in-house advertising agency, spent £193 million on advertising in the financial year 2009-2010. The year before, it spent £211 million, making it the UK’s single biggest media buying desk. Is it appropriate for the Government to be spending taxpayers’ money propping up the deeply discredited News of…
Read More Who controls Government ad spending?The Government’s Central Office of Information, essentially its in-house advertising agency, spent £193 million on advertising in the financial year 2009-2010. The year before, it spent £211 million, making it the UK’s single biggest media buying desk. Is it appropriate for the Government to be spending taxpayers’ money propping up the deeply discredited News of…
Read More Who controls Government ad spending?OK, I’m completely sick of paying far too much to my shitty boutique ISP and BT for crackly steam voice and ADSL2+ that regularly provides between 400 and 600 Kbps downlink and 30-100 up. Right here in London. The SNR margin, attenuation, etc look normal and the modem trains to over 10Mbps, but there is…
Read More ISPI may have to update the scoring in this post. I went to see this over the weekend – too late as it happened, but I floaked it – and I have to say that it’s not the project of someone torying-out. Far too 1945-68 British reasonablepunk.
Read More an updateI have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. It was already fairly well-known at the time…
Read More Reflections on a HOWTOI note that “Not the Judge” Hutton is now said to be doing the rounds complaining that the sensitivity analysis chart from his pensions report – the one that shows that there is no crisis – is being “taken out of context”. This is of course pol-speak for “a fact I dislike is being inconveniently…
Read More there is no crisis except in Lord Hutton’s pantsWhile I was thinking about VRCs, I re-read this post of Dan’s about how specialising in the problems of Irish immigrants was no longer as good a career move for a north London social worker as it had been in – say – 1981, although I think what he meant with regard to the date…
Read More “trolling d-squared sunday” continuesDaniel Davies has long had a beef with the government over its PR strategy towards the MMR vaccine, for which he sometimes seems to hold Ben Goldacre responsible. No, it doesn’t make much sense to me either, but as a student of the Davies oeuvre, I think it can be best understood as a system…
Read More now, where’s Hopi Sen when you need him…The Libyan rebels are making progress, as well as robots. Some of them are reported to be within 40 miles of Tripoli, those being the ones who the French have been secretly arming, including with a number of light tanks. Now that’s what I call protecting civilians. They are also about to take over the…
Read More If you’re out of luck and out of work, we could send you to the western mountains of Libya