2020

Following Dan Davies’ tracers here. The guy who the care-home industry pushed out to pick a row with the prime minister this week, hoping it would divert attention from their atrocious labour practices and how they helped their customers catch COVID-19, turns out to be the very same whose £100m-big operation got caught perpetrating £20k…

There has been quite some concern about what policy Labour can pursue in the context of a Conservative government that has essentially abandoned fiscal austerity as a goal. The good news is that there’s been a natural experiment on this in the United States, as this salty tweet points out – the $1200 emergency aid…

James Butler has thoughts! You should probably read’em! However, this take seems stale: Such permeating cynicism arises above all from depoliticisation: the claim, advanced over the past few decades, that ideological difference is dead, markets ought to be insulated from political contestation, and politics is merely a set of technical quibbles between administrators. Depoliticisation has…

Did the Government abandon a working strategy when it shut down contact tracing after the now notorious March 12th COBRA meeting that decided to move from the “Contain” to the “Delay” phase of its flu-based pandemic plan? It’s what I said at the very beginning of April: the worrying thing is I think we might…

While I was writing the previous post, on a table outside my flat, I noticed some sort of commotion in the street. Then somebody shouting from the third or fourth floor of the block: “There’s…someone behaving…oddly in the road…do something”. Looking across the street I could see some people who might be doing something, and…

The fantastic Schibboleth blog recently ran this recipe, and I can tell you that it makes an absolutely superb steak. You don’t really think of Vienna as steak country but of course it was old central Europe’s stockyard city, with its vast rail-fed central markets. When I lived there, although the markets were no longer…

When something is described as a classic, we expect it to be, most of all, capable of endless re-invention. I was reminded of this by the incredible story about an Oxford professor of classics allegedly selling papryi for hard cash (more). The classic I am thinking of is a theme rather than a single work.…

The Guardian‘s Harry Fox Davies has picked up on the Tigger thing. Neil Davidson is quoted so: According to the report, the documents were destroyed “during the winding down of operations”, but Davidson said this related to actions taken by former members of staff between June and July last year. So – in his telling…