I think everyone’s linked to this excellent piece on building a campaign against the cuts already, but I’d like to seize on this bit: The more we can build up a modern ‘doomsday book’ of the effect of the cuts, the more we can help people to make the second stage of that journey when…
Read More cuts near meBasically, what Ian McMillan said. Never buck the Nameless Dread. It tells the truth. It may not be particularly expressive, but neither is a tail-warning radar and the two concepts are similar in function. It’s interesting how many people remember sharing school textbooks as a 1980s trope. It’s my generation’s version of “if you can…
Read More free school mealsAnother story, but this time with real policemen – sort of. The interesting thing about the Safer Birmingham Partnership and its drive to cover Muslim areas of the city with ANPR cameras, using money from an “anti-terrorism fund”, isn’t so much the project in itself as what it reveals about the huge effort it will…
Read More parallel networksOK, so we took the piss out of the Policy Exchange crowd for seeing reds under the seats on the bendy buses. The group rights agenda. But the interesting thing about the Borisbus is that in a sense, it bears Dean Godson and Andy Gilligan out – design and architecture are, of course, deeply political…
Read More shower jobby: the politics of busesOK, so we took the piss out of the Policy Exchange crowd for seeing reds under the seats on the bendy buses. The group rights agenda. But the interesting thing about the Borisbus is that in a sense, it bears Dean Godson and Andy Gilligan out – design and architecture are, of course, deeply political…
Read More shower jobby: the politics of busesWell, 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 onContentFree Comment has been turning up some real nuggets just lately.
Read More sampling the ambientBack to the politics, although of a different kind. Here’s the Guardian‘s piece on Alfie McKenzie, the 14-year old socialist who succeeded in voting on Thursday. What strikes me as politically interesting here isn’t that Alfie’s a socialist, or that he pulled it off, or even that he refused to speak to the Daily Hell…
Read More a politics lessonA 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