Category Archives: politics

Apologise, explain?

Totally not sure about this one. Someone emails their MP and gets an accidentaly-sent response (in the MP’s name? Not sure) calling the constituent’s mother-in-law “snotty”, and saying, effectively, “don’t rush to answer this, since they don’t like the government.”
So far, so unsurprising (though your attitude towards the government should not affect the [...]

Homophobic Christians

I started writing this post while watching This Week again. This time they were talking, inevitably, about the new equal rights legislation (good legislation; from this government? Amazing.) The Catholic church is trying to have itself made exempt from the new law; and the Church of England has come out alongside it. [...]

Death-Penalty Blues

This Week, BBC1’s late-night political discussion programme, had a piece last night from Colonel Tim Collins, who used to be “Britain’s most senior soldier in Iraq”. He was saying that Saddam Hussein should hang as soon as possible, and that we should have the death penalty in Britain.
I won’t reiterate the many general arguments [...]

On Security at Stansted

To Glasgow, then, and a weekend visit to my Mum. The kids and I caught the train to Stansted on Friday afternoon, to find the security theatre in full force. Although we made EasyJet’s last checkin time with a good ten minutes to spare, I really thought we would miss our flight when [...]

Copyright Matters – Pass It On

So here I am, all ready to write about my day for the “History Matters – Pass It On” site’s “One Day in History” project, which has been much hyped of late. But before I started writing I took a look at the terms and conditions, where I found this little thought:

You agree, by [...]

My "Big England" piece is up at Temperama

The lovely Dave Hill has posted my piece in his Big England series.
Such is Dave’s posting frequency that it has already rolled off his front page. But such is his site’s popularity that it went straight in at number 10 on a Google search for my name; and it has now risen to number [...]

"Hackers crack new biometric passports"

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Hackers crack new biometric passports

“The whole passport design is totally brain damaged,” Mr Grunwald told Wired.com. “From my point of view all of these [biometric] passports are a huge waste of money – they’re not increasing security at all.”

No surprises there, then. Except maybe how quickly it’s happened. [...]

Middle-East Madness

I’ve been thinking that I should write about the state of things between Lebanon and Israel, as it is the most profoundly dangerous ongoing event in the world at the moment. But I would have found it hard to express what I wanted to say without coming over as anti-Israel, and so running the [...]

Who the hell do we vote for?

It’s my custom prior to elections to write a post giving “voting advice”. Of course, I don’t expect anyone to take this advice: I’m just thinking out loud, really.
But now, with local elections happening tomorrow, I’m in something of a quandary. It’s always been easy in the past — or it was, before [...]

Clarke and the convicts

The fact that some of the ex-cons who are foreign nationals have offended again should come as no surprise whatsoever: many convicted criminals re-offend after their release. It should be nothing more than expected. Nor is the fact of their re-offending in itself part of the scandal.
Furthermore, as has been said elsewhere, [...]