So we’re waiting to know if the UCU’s higher education committee has decided to call off the action or not. It’s been a tense couple of weeks – the “EPF” came out with its super-extreme and deeply dodgy plans, the UCU rolled out, the universities threatened a variety of draconian punishments, and then they began…
Read More Waiting for #defenduss…Many IMSI. So catching. Much aeroplane. Such Dirtbox. OK, so the US Department of Justice, or more directly, the FBI is flying around in light aircraft carrying an IMSI catcher in order to spy on the cellular traffic of evildoers and, hey, anybody else in the 37km max diameter of a GSM cell centred on…
Read More the British origins of #dirtboxCon trick. £30bn extra cuts. That lower immigration thing is no longer operative. Voting on the European Arrest Warrant or maybe not. They get precisely nothing from their “renegotiation” and then the courts take the whole point away. Miliband goes to the CBI and the members hiss a journalist for talking leadership crisis. The Libyan…
Read More Still the Omnishambles governmentA bit more Guardian journamalism. Here’s Nicholas Watt having at “Ed Miliband’s supporters”. You might not notice that he managed to report one of the two “plotters” backing out of the plot, but buried the lede right down to the very last par. The internal critics agreed. But they took issue with the leadership’s response…
Read More Never give up.Here’s an astonishing piece of journalism from last weekend’s Labour mini-crisis. Daniel Boffy, The Obscurer‘s policy editor tells us: Even more significantly, this newspaper has learned that 20 Labour frontbenchers have indicated they are “actively considering Ed Miliband’s future”. The information came from a senior Labour MP who last week canvassed the parliamentary Labour party…
Read More Forget letters from 20 MPs. Remember ScotlandThe sheer mendacity of the USS management, or rather, the Employers’ Pension Forum, has been breathtaking. The outrage ought to be greater. Dennis Leach of Warwick is doing a great job calling out the bullshit. For example, the EPF’s Q&A document supposedly explaining changes to the scheme gave the increase in life expectancy since 1974…
Read More a brief collection of the EPF’s lies on #ussWhy are a lot of professors going on strike? Or rather, on a marking boycott? The answer ought to worry anyone who is a member of a pension scheme, of any kind, in the UK. To start with, we’ve got the USS, the pension fund for the universities as they were before 1992. All the…
Read More #solidarity with the UCU: if you have a pension you want to read thisTheresa May says that #CSAinquiry can start its work even though it does not have a chairman/woman. (Panel’s first meeting next week.) — ExaroNews (@ExaroNews) November 3, 2014 Perhaps they could have an empty chair? Or what about a serious suggestion? As Chris Brooke was saying in the other place, couldn’t we borrow a Commonwealth…
Read More A serious suggestion.Does anyone know what Larry Page means by this? Even more than technology, he puts this down to policy changes needed to make land more readily available for construction. Rather than exceeding $1m, there’s no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t cost $50,000, he says.
Read More Thiel-ing out at GoogleNick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute has recently been yukking it up in the papers in favour of Oxbridge getting to put its prices up more (I shorten). That Hillman is a former Tory SPAD and failed Tory candidate is no surprise but I am really quite impressed that he lists as one…
Read More World class wanktanking