In an effort to clear some of the NOTWFail stuff out of my mind, I thought I’d try to come up with some useful pointers for further investigation. 1. The Daniel Morgan/Southern Investigations line of inquiry This is by far the most serious accusation, in every sense. It has police corruption, a murder, and the…
Read More neeeews of the worldThe Government’s Central Office of Information, essentially its in-house advertising agency, spent £193 million on advertising in the financial year 2009-2010. The year before, it spent £211 million, making it the UK’s single biggest media buying desk. Is it appropriate for the Government to be spending taxpayers’ money propping up the deeply discredited News of…
Read More Who controls Government ad spending?The Government’s Central Office of Information, essentially its in-house advertising agency, spent £193 million on advertising in the financial year 2009-2010. The year before, it spent £211 million, making it the UK’s single biggest media buying desk. Is it appropriate for the Government to be spending taxpayers’ money propping up the deeply discredited News of…
Read More Who controls Government ad spending?I note that “Not the Judge” Hutton is now said to be doing the rounds complaining that the sensitivity analysis chart from his pensions report – the one that shows that there is no crisis – is being “taken out of context”. This is of course pol-speak for “a fact I dislike is being inconveniently…
Read More there is no crisis except in Lord Hutton’s pants(Or, imagine you had to make a Homo economicus. Other than money, what chemicals would you immediately look up in Angewandte Chemie?) So Dave from PR’s constituency chairman was found dead in a portaloo at Glastonbury. Who now remembers William Hague in Notting Hill? This made me think of something. There used to be a…
Read More a theory of some people’s moral sentimentsTwitter is no fun when it comes to referencing a whole conversation, so you’ll have to do some work here. So Matthew Turner and I had a row with “Hopi Sen”, who apparently thinks the absolute top priority for the Labour Party is an attack on “waste”. If you browse through the pile o’tweets you’ll…
Read More Waste is a waste of timeMore AV comment, from a colleague: I voted “no”. Why? 1. Arrow’s theorem. Getting democracy “right” is mathematically impossible. 2. Elections are not there to select the “right” government, but to confer legitimacy on that which is elected, and to enable truly awful ones to be removed. FPTP is good enough.3. Fiddling with the electoral…
Read More Even more AVOK, so I’d just about reasoned myself around to voting no. But every time I get there I run into some nightmarish turdpool of mendacity from the no campaign. I may just not be able to stomach doing anything that George Osborne, John Reid, Robert Edmiston, Dan Hodges, and “Tom” “Newton”-“Dunn” agree with. I’d abstain,…
Read More Even more AVIf you were asked to write 1,572 words for a national newspaper on the role of voluntary associations in the Labour Movement, and thank the Lord neither you or I is likely to meet this fate any time soon, would you manage to mention trade unions at least once? Not if you’re Maurice Glasman. I…
Read More Glue Labour: how you can miss out the coalition and come up in 2015!After this post and the outstanding response to it, I’ve just been working on the lobby project’s underpinnings, specifically to backport some data cleaning from the analyser script into the original scraper, and to fix the one-edge-per-row version of the scraper. As a result I’ve had to flush the datastore and also search out some…
Read More Routine maintenance