Thinking about the political castration of Ken Clarke and the fact that not even the Treasury in its most R.G. Hawtrey-esque mood seems to be able to stop the expansion of the prison industry, it struck me that the political class’s attitude towards the public service known as justice is fundamentally different to its attitude…
Read More Why not foundation courts?OK, so the report by Gus O’Donnell into Liam Fox and Adam “I can’t believe he’s not Mike Ledeen” Werritty specified some companies as donors to the various odd parallel structures that supported Fox and Werritty. One of these is given in the report as G3 Ltd. This has been described in the papers as…
Read More Don’t faze me, sorry, tase me, bro!I think you’d have to be a perfesser to miss this point (h/t Jamie Kenny’s twitter feed). But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner…
Read More non-Thursday music linkI think you’d have to be a perfesser to miss this point (h/t Jamie Kenny’s twitter feed). But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner…
Read More non-Thursday music linkSo yer Djanogly and his legal aid bill and his insurance companies. Something I’d love to know more about is his rather odd statement that his kids had “non-interest bearing non-voting shares” in these companies and that they were “of no value”. This is of course another case of the principle that lawyering a statement…
Read More Moving swiftly onThe Independent on Sunday has another really excellent piece on Liam Fox including a very good network visualisation. See the power of the radial graph paradigm, and understand why I want Lobster to look like that! kc claffy wasn’t wrong.
Read More Adventures in radial graph visualisation – Sindy editionIt’s a truth universally recognised that if you find one security exploit you’ll find another. Something called CivilServiceLive has published a really excellent rundown of Tory and Lib Dem special advisers and – what is the word? – non-adviser advisers, here. I note that super-neocon journo William Shawcross’s kid has been placed with George Osborne,…
Read More to be filed for referenceIn the recent case of Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, there was an issue that the news media spent an enormous amount of time and effort dancing around with innuendo, newspaper code, and carefully lawyered prose. It is a fact that the word “lawyered” is to the word “lawyer” as the word “doctored” is to…
Read More Now that’s what I call lobbyingSo, I managed to get to watch the Grand Final on Saturday night! The first pub we tried had a private function where the TV is, although it also had Timothy Taylor’s Landlord Ale, and the other bar contained a group of Irish union fans who’d been drinking steadily since 6am. We moved on, and…
Read More Leeds. LEEDS. Leeds. (Look, you’re the richest club in the northern union. Get a better song)OK, so “Not All That” Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble. “He is an odd bloke,” said one fellow minister. “He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line.” Another Tory MP said Fox’s tendency to name-drop and brag about…
Read More Liam Fox: Not Fit For Purpose