Anyway, so Tom “Boris Watch” Barry was having at the Grauniad’s Nicholas “He Said” Watt over thinking that Boris Johnson really is a frightfully nice chap. I responded, recapping a point I’ve made earlier, which is that Johnson skates because the national press doesn’t report London politics and the locals focus on their borough councils:…
Read More it’s personal, but not in a good waySo we now know that the thing invented to bully the exam boards because the Mail said so bullied the exam boards because the Mail said so, and no doubt something about Michael Gove will be along soon enough. How did people notice there was something up in the first place? Well, the long-term rise…
Read More Gove did it to A-levels as wellResponding to this tweet from Adam Bienkov: Gary Gibbon: Discontented Tory backbenchers want Philip Hammond or Liam Fox to replace Cameron. Boris doesn't even register #channel4news — Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) September 10, 2012 It struck me that I actually had some political gossip that was relevant. A while ago I saw an old university pal…
Read More 3 principles on ToriesAmong the fascinating prospects you poor fools are going to have to suck up is a full dress review of David Harvey’s History of Neoliberalism (shorter me: I think it’s adequate-ish), but before we get to that, a point I’d like to pull forward. In his conclusion, he spends quite a lot of time arguing…
Read More The sources of cupcake conservatismOK, so you all know about Grant Shapps, spamblogger with a nasty prosperity-gospel twist (check out his dailyincome.com) and Tory Chairman. Here’s another bit of Tory Internet weirdness, completely by chance. So I wanted to look up Maria Miller, our new Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, plus a lot of stuff Tories…
Read More Tories, the party of dodgy affiliate marketing and typosquattingHere’s a fascinating post on the Conservative Home Tory Diary from one Paul Goodman, complaining about the fact that No.10 Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood wants to have ministerial special advisers brought into civil service line management. The Awesome Whitehall Blog not yet existing, I’ll explain that a special adviser is a political appointee picked by…
Read More A little more on the Project 2.0 and beyondAdam Bienkov has an excellent piece out on Guto Harri, Boris Johnson, and the Murdochs. Harri was one of the alternative candidates to Andy Coulson for the No.10 press job, of course, then he worked for Johnson, and now he’s off to work for Murdoch. Bienkov points out that there is an increasing tendency for…
Read More The Project 3.0 – where are we going from here?So I went to the TUC’s Netroots UK shindig yesterday. I missed the first session, and chose to not go to the one with Paul Mason in order to go to one with practical content, specifically Richard Blogger and Ellie Mae O’Hagan’s on defending the NHS from within. Having joined an NHS foundation trust, it…
Read More Notes from Netroots UK, and NHS total defenceDoes anyone else see a parallel between the Murdoch e-mail timeline and some of the recent new information? For example, the meetings with Cameron regarding the Sun coming out for him seem to have happened not long before the new policy of “eliminating in a consistent manner across NI…emails that could be unhelpful”. More tellingly,…
Read More Your inbox is over its size limitRalph Musgrave‘s economics blog makes a case for a program of time-limited payments to companies who hire the unemployed, although I’m not sure if Musgrave is thinking of it as a permanent feature of the welfare state rather than an emergency response to depression. I might quibble with a couple of aspects – for example,…
Read More an original idea? the archive is full of ‘em