Tony Harrison, reviewed by Nicholas Lezard: he says “When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void / what’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs? / The cunts who lieth ‘ere wor unemployed?” That hasn’t changed, not really: and “call-centre worker” isn’t something you’d want on your gravestone either, as my own experience has taught me Here’s…
Read More Some Yorkshire linksSo I’ve been reading Clausewitz. In the original German. It took me months – *humblebrag*. Anyway, if the government were to fall next week, what should Ed Miliband do right now? It seems to me that quite a lot of thought is going into the long term. There’s a complex of ideas around changing the…
Read More A quick hits agenda, with ClausewitzRemember BuyThisSatellite? So your man heard about Terrestar going bankrupt and one of their comsats going begging, and had the brilliant idea of crowdsourcing the money to buy the thing and redeploy it over Africa or perhaps Iran and, uh, provide Internet access to people who really needed it. So what happened? Well, someone with…
Read More Rewind on a projectIt’s time to review this post on the implementation of the Tories’ Health & Social Care Act in my local area. The news is, I think, good. The local rag: The Haringey branch of national pressure group 38 Degrees is only the third in the country to get all its suggested amendments on buying health…
Read More Fixed in placeHere’s someone from Policy Exchange arguing that what the prime minister needs is an internal thinktank made up of partisan Tory special advisers, not civil servants like the people in the No.10 Policy & Implementation Unit. That might cost money, but… it tends to be forgotten that some of the special advisers to the Centre…
Read More Best wanktank pitch everNick Sommerlad of the Daily Mirror, with some help from the GMB research department, has a hell of a scoop: a full third of the Right to Buy properties are owned by private landlords. And a very substantial chunk of those, in some London boroughs, are owned by Charles Gow, the son of the government…
Read More British KakistocracyUpdate: in this post, I wanted to know which questions were asked in an ICM poll. ICM has now released the full tables. The question was: You may have seen or heard that Britain slipped into a new economic downturn during the last quarter of 2012. Which do you think was the single most important…
Read More Update: ICM economy questionShorter John Lloyd: The Iraqi people have proved unworthy of me. And all those soldiers of ours are a bunch of girlymen. You think I’m joking? But we did not anticipate that Iraqi forces who hated the US – including those loyal to Saddam – would dominate after the invasion, that the population would not…
Read More you haven’t got any less wrong, you knowChris Dillow says: “In this sense, short-term fiscal conservatism might create social norms more supportive of social democracy” But this is just contrarianism. We can actually observe the opposite happening. After all, wouldn’t it be more likely that prolonged high unemployment, degradation of the public sphere, encouragement of dodgy coping-strategies like pretend self-employment, and perceived…
Read More The transition towards a low-trust societyThe prime minister is a godawful cricketer, and the way you can tell is that he’s trying to show technique when just moving your feet and whacking the fucker would do far better. https://twitter.com/Number10press/status/303477789837910017/ His head isn’t over the ball, his eyes aren’t on the ball, he’s forward while playing a back foot stroke, his…
Read More In the style of a national newspaper columnist