OK, I remember that lot; they had a chief economist who ran a rather good blog and published this chart about the sources of the government deficit (see this Stabprin post). Then he got to be Vince Cable’s sinister eminence and stuff. I wonder if the ad might imply we might see more of him…
Read More Enduring stare: recruitment editionThis sycophantic FT piece on David Laws has been kicked around quite a bit already. Personally, I feel it represents a new kind of journalism – writing that should have been kept behind a paywall, so nobody would have to read it. Beyond that, though, it’s pretty weird. Check out this par: From 1987 to…
Read More I fought the Laws and the half-molten clock seduced a giant tortoiseBest lobby metrics (lobbylyzer? lobster, for LoBbying Social Topology ExploreR?) result yet. Today I implemented my gatekeeper vs. flakcatcher metric – it averages the edge weights of all the neighbours of a minister, and returns a ratio of the difference between this and the average weight and the difference between the minister’s weighting and the…
Read More lobbyists lobbying for lobbyingSo I went to protest the London Lib Dems’ conference, held in the late Blairite magnificence of Haverstock School NW3. Arriving punctually, what did I find? No Liberals. In fact, not only had they vanished from the Haverstock, it turned out they’d given up on the whole idea of having a conference and punted it…
Read More the lack of liberalsElsewhere: how the Lib Dems learned to love Nemesysco’s fake lie detector and outsourcing to Crapita. Yes, really.
Read More elsewhereChris Dillow has a good go at the Government’s “Thatcherism – Choose Your Own Adventure” Web site and the Have Your Say-style idiots who frequent it. But the fate of another, related Government Web project is interesting. The number10.gov.uk e-petitions site will be remembered mostly for its role in kiboshing the horrible “road-pricing” (aka total…
Read More the right to be ignoredMeet the new project, everyone – reporting on our new Stable and Principled government, especially its unstable and unprincipled bits. I have just broken my duck. There’s also a twitter feed, facebook group, so on and so forth. It comes with Tom Boriswatch and Naadir Random!
Read More stable and principledWell, ha ha. But I do think we should note that David Cameron’s appointment as Prime Minister was greeted by the markets with a dramatic spike in the price of gold, not usually seen as a vote of confidence. Here’s the data, at Felix Salmon’s; as he points out, trying to map events in consensus…
Read More Flushing the cacheWell, that was grim, wasn’t it? I refer, of course, to the new government. Having read through the coalition agreement, I’m almost convinced by Charlie and Jamie‘s argument that it’s really not that bad. Almost. I’m not particularly worried by the supposed 55% thing either, for reasons well explained here – it’s fairly obviously an…
Read More Moving swiftly onA quick lesson in political plane-spotting: we observe, about 2.25pm today, a small business jet type, with minimal wing sweep and a tail about half-way up the fin, in an approach profile heading northwest over North London. Conclusions? It’s an RAF Hawker 125 heading into Northolt, and Gordon Brown is probably back in London. This…
Read More how criminals communicate