You know Save Our Thing. It happens every other year in every British community. Some sort of public service is moving, or closing, or reorganising, and someone is agin it, and we are all asked to roll out, get fell in, and demand that they Save Our Thing. Some people, reliably, are convinced that if…
Read More Against Save Our ThingSo, I was at today’s NHS demo. Somebody had to be – I was shocked by how many people weren’t there. The streets were full of people who weren’t there. And there was a pretty standard demo pitched up on the pavement outside the Department of Health at Richmond House, 97 Whitehall. Speeches. Depression. Workers’…
Read More A report back from the NHS demoOver at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves…
Read More technique of generalised mayhem without any particular directionOver at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves…
Read More technique of generalised mayhem without any particular directionThe 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?From yesterday’s Obscurer, a story: A senior union source told The Observer that it was clear Alexander had jumped the gun as the Treasury attempted to show it was taking a hard line on the burgeoning pensions bill. “Danny Alexander has been reined in by the Cabinet Office,” said a union source. “What he did…
Read More There is no crisis, dammitSo it was OpenTech weekend. I wasn’t presenting anything (although I’m kicking myself for not having done a talk on Tropo and Phono) but of course I was there. This year’s was, I think, a bit better than last year’s – the schedule filled up late on, and there were a couple of really good…
Read More OpenTech washup, and an amended resultI’ll be out tomorrow. Obviously. Setting off from Archway tube at 1015. Anyway, updates will be at the twitter feed.
Read More marchIs it meaningful to say that the Egyptian revolution is calming down, or petering out? I ask because a common flaw of the reporting on it has been to treat the basic dynamics of mobilisation as if they were signs of huge political shifts behind the curtain. It’s obviously true that both revolutionaries and reactionaries…
Read More From the noisy phase to the quiet phase