In the recent case of Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, there was an issue that the news media spent an enormous amount of time and effort dancing around with innuendo, newspaper code, and carefully lawyered prose. It is a fact that the word “lawyered” is to the word “lawyer” as the word “doctored” is to…
Read More Now that’s what I call lobbyingOK, so “Not All That” Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble. “He is an odd bloke,” said one fellow minister. “He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line.” Another Tory MP said Fox’s tendency to name-drop and brag about…
Read More Liam Fox: Not Fit For PurposeWhat is it with Tories and loan-sharking? We all know about Francis Maude, the toxic pusher and secret ruler of the world, or at least we all should – he was a director of a company offering dodgy “debt consolidation” deals, and also Spanish sub-prime mortgages that were marketed as an inheritance tax avoidance scheme.…
Read More …wi nowt taken outIn the light of this it’s fairly clear that open data as a project is now over. (Hey, it was the week it turned out the government wants to just throw away the Forensic Science Service’s archive, you know, just hire a skip because who wants a load of old stuff, right?) Tory plans seem…
Read More the Conservatives really do hate you as much as you fearedTanya Gold brings the fisk to A4E: Why does this feel so dodgy? I called Harrison’s PR and asked her what will happen if there are no jobs. What then? “Emma believes there are jobs,” she replied. “There are hidden jobs.” Oh yes, those hidden jobs, buried under trees and lying at the end of…
Read More Read, mark, learn and inwardly digestPeter Oborne‘s piece on post-Murdoch Britain is interesting, although mostly for the sheer otherness of his thinking. He’s at least got the good sense or moral minima required to end up on the right side of the debate, but he gets there through some truly odd reasoning. Can anyone remember even one instance when any…
Read More the giant squid meets the criminal octopus as the last Tory sings his swan song(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 sentimentsFrom 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, dammitQuiggin is discussing why some things are neo- and others are post-. How do we deal with the current revival of high modernism (see Owen Hatherley’s blog and indeed his career, the proliferating Mid-Century Modern groups on Flickr, the wave of preservation campaigns for mid-20th century landmarks)? It’s obviously silly to call it post-modernism and…
Read More post-IKEA and indeed post-furnitureSo 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 result