Tories? Tories? Did someone say Tories? Yes, they surely did..Teh Grauniad covers a speech by Alan Duncan, the shadow DTI Secretary, to the Centre for Policy Studies, on the topic of youth. Verbatim: We need to empower teachers so that they can exert the control too many parents are unwilling or unable to exert,” Mr…
Read More All you need to know about the ToriesWell, I haven’t read the IPCC report yet, but I can report that I got my hands on an advance copy of Tim Worstall’s reaction to it. Here goes: Those scientist chappies are awfully clever. But what about this tangential issue? Here’s what the MSM isn’t telling you: if you make entirely different assumptions that…
Read More IPCC: First ReactionGambia’s President, Yahya Jammeh, whose personal plane, the Ilyushin 62M C5-GNM, is on the UN asset freeze list, is..well. You’d be surprised, but every now and then in this game I see something that shocks even me. Via Ben Goldacre’s Badscience, his pet newspaper, the Daily Observer, would like us all to know he’s discovered…
Read More Yahya Jammeh: Quite Literally the World’s Worst PresidentTony Blair doesn’t deserve to be allowed aboard one of HM Ships, let alone use one of them to speechify. Some of the press amused themselves by labelling photographs of Devonport Dockyard with the ships awaiting disposal. This wasn’t, perhaps, fair – the two biggest are Fearless and Intrepid, the two assault ships (LPDs) built…
Read More Blair: just an embarrassmentWell, where to start with my utter rage at the kiboshed Al-Yamamah investigation? It’s a total map of state direness, New Labour subtype: we have hypocrisy, we have a good day to bury bad news, we have cash, we have Lord Goldsmith, the professional get out of jail card himself. Obviously, this being a blog,…
Read More You’ve been bought and paid, you’re a whore and a slaveThis pissed me off all week. Yesterday, the world’s biggest container ship, M/V Emma Maersk arrived in Felixstowe on her first trip from China to Europe. There has been a degree of pre-Christmas hype about this sailing, revolving around the notion that she is packed with nothing but Christmas presents-to-be. This may be a little…
Read More Saving the planet in the slowest possible wayThe Guardian carried a large excerpt from George Monbiot’s coming book this week in which he launched a formidable attack on aeroplanes, on the grounds that they are indefensible in terms of climate change. I find it hard to work out his logic. For a start, if you get the data, you’ll find that, when…
Read More George Monbiot is WrongIt’s late, but this snark attack on Niall Ferguson must not be missed. Click through and read Rob Farley’s review of Colossus, too. After suffering through some of his earlier writing, I’ve always imagined Niall Ferguson sneaking into the Imperial War Museum in the dark of night. Certain that the coast is clear, he rips…
Read More Niall FergusonAnd again, we managed to miss it – the 10th of June, or blogday as it’s also known..three years of uninterrupted ranting. Just to celebrate, remember this post about casinos and the Dome? Well, it only took them a year to catch up. In other schadenfreude-related news, tedious europhobe hack Richard North has fallen foul…
Read More We missed itIt’s not religion, nor is it race. It’s class, class and geography. This we see in the Observer’s two-page spread on how their intrepid young female Muslim reporter (yes, I think Nick Cohen just came) spent a whole month in “the community the 7/7 bombers came from”, also known as Leeds. The first thing that…
Read More What divides Britain?