I can’t decide on this David Davis thing Is it just a stunt? Is he genuinely concerned enough about civil liberties to take the chance (small though it is) of losing his seat? Certainly he sounds sincere when he talks about his concerns about the growth of state power; and Shami Chakrabarti of [...]
So the Tories took Crewe and Nantwich in the by-election.
I don’t understand (never have) the mentality, the mindset, the brains of ‘floating voters’. I’m not saying that no-one should ever change their mind, in politics or anything else; nor do I think that people can’t be convinced by the arguments over issues – nor, [...]
You know what’s coming. It’s nearly the 1st of May, and that means elections. An all-too-infrequent chance to exercise our fundamental democratic right and duty. Always important, even when you’re quite happy with how things are. Somebody else won’t be, and you don’t want them to change things.
Of course, that’s not [...]
My son will be starting secondary school in September this year. So towards the end of last year we spent a lot of time reading up on the policies of our and adjoining London boroughs, visiting schools, and finally applying.
The application works like this. You can name up to six “preferences” (not “choices”, [...]
It is a tragedy that a member of the public, when interviewed on the radio, should say, when the phrase “human rights” comes up, “Oh, bloody hell, human rights, suffin fussin wussin mumble grumble,” in a tone of disgust.
The subject being discussed was the call to ban this “Mosquito” device, which is intended to stop [...]
I probably don’t need anything more than the title for this one. I mean, who the hell would ever think it was a good a idea to let McDonald’s issue qualifications “equivalent to A-levels”? I’ve nothing against on-the-job training, of course: that’s a good thing. And businesses sponsoring people to study for [...]
Creation science is a purely destructive enterprise, like comment trolling or wiki vandalism. Its entire impact results from scrawling across the work of real scientists questions and cavils phrased in a manner just scientific-sounding enough to trouble anyone who knows nothing in detail about the field being traduced.
From the excellent Mr MacLeod. Let’s start [...]
I see that Tony Blair has become a catholic. No surprise there. But as an ex-catholic atheist myself, I’m feeling down with Nick Clegg.
In other catholic-related news, there’s a fine analysis of ‘Fairytale of New York’ on the BBC website, after the Radio 1 farrago. And I hadn’t realised that Shane McGowan’s [...]
The people who are queuing outside branches of Northern Rock are fooling themselves, and if anything are likely to trigger the problem they fear.
I must admit that, if you had asked me a few days ago, I would probably have said that I thought that the Bank of England already backed the banks to the [...]
Took the kids to see the Transformers movie tonight. It’s not a franchise that I grew up with, of course, but my two older nephews were into them when they were kids, and so I was aware of them even before my son started watching the more recent cartoons a few years ago.
But I [...]