(Alt. title: Look, it’s like a society but smaller!) OK, so you may remember the case of Startupbritain.org, a well-publicised eye-catching initiative that turned out to be little better than spam paid for with a government grant to some whose-kid-are-you types. It seems that the whole pointless wankabout was kicked off when one of the…
Read More Acid Helvetica titles do not make you a decent personOK, so as well as the big demo, currently standing at 578 coaches and counting, there’s going to be a day of action on the NHS on the 1st of April – April Fool’s day, surely someone can make something creative out of that. So I thought I’d open another flank. Flipchart Fairy Tales has…
Read More There is no crisisHere’s something interesting, from a post at Owen Jones‘s. Has Donal Blaney’s “Young Britons’ Foundation”, the Tory wanktank that was too wanky for the Tories, been reactivated? I will not distance myself from the right wing spin machine which attempts to bring down NUS’ credibility, but tackle it head on. Both of those occasions have…
Read More Enduring stare: Donal Blaney editionThe Philip Blond test: if you have a new policy idea, ask if Philip Blond would support it, and if so, bin it.
Read More Dumb BlondSo the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which…
Read More killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphereFollowing up on this post, I get e-mail from Matthew Turner, who points to an explanation. Communications & Strategy Management Ltd. does indeed have a web site of sorts, at csm-limited.com. It appears to be a political consulting/lobbying firm that does the Tories’ demographics/voter-database work, which basically consists of the Richard Murphy mentioned in the…
Read More CSM: a useful tip-offI have mostly been blogging the cuts at Stable & Principled this week. Somebody had to. How the Government produced a comprehensive spending review without mentioning the monster housing bubble or using the word recession more than once. Smoke and mirrors, and housing benefit cuts. Has Dave from PR got his jets mixed up? Why…
Read More all around the world I’ve been supporting team blogging proposalsOwen Hatherley has an immense post about Sheffield, modernism, socialism, privatisation, etc. Which reminded me of an estate agent ad I saw recently, for a gaff in the Highgate New Town estate. The sales-slug referred to a “3 double bedroom apartment in an architecturally-designed ex-local authority development, with 19′ kitchen/diner, 12′ reception, and exclusive access…
Read More architecturally designedZac Goldsmith! I wonder if they could perhaps have a look at this?
Read More cheers!OK, 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 buses