On the face of it, the government all but telling everyone to panic-buy fuel looks like a massive blunder. Spokespeople for both the petrol industry and the AA have said as much, and in most circumstances creating a nationwide fuel shortage out of nothing is a pretty stupid thing to do. But I don’t think [...]
I’m launching a new conference on tax justice in London on May 2nd through International Tax Review magazine. It’s free to attend if you’re an activist or with an NGO and you’ll hear from a whole host of great speakers including former Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, and anti-poverty activist Richard Murphy. [...]
Ed Miliband accuses the Tories of playing politics with the tanker drivers’ strike. The Mail accuses Miliband of playing politics with the Olympics, because of the party’s funding by the unions (IIIE has already covered the ham-fisted idiocy that is the Tories’ attempts to paint the unions as undemocratic). Guardian commenters (again, let’s not go [...]
‘We hope this case will serve as a warning to anyone who may think that comments made online are somehow beyond the law’ said the state prosecutor, after the prisoner was taken down in chains. Nope, this was not a gleeful state official in China or Iran who’d just given a dissenting blogger his just [...]
The cash for access scandal is neither exciting nor particularly concerning. Representatives of big business do not need to endure dinners with David and Samantha in order to exercise undue influence over government policy. More worrying is that the revelations have, once again, given rise to demands for the state to fund political parties, so [...]
I got an email last week from London 2012, advertising a Cultural Olympiad gig in a park in Hackney. In the footer I noticed something bizarre: The email listed the Olympic and Paralympic corporate partners, and number one on the Paralympic list was Atos. Atos, who administer the deeply flawed disability benefits assessment. Atos, who [...]
Seven million people watched the first episode of the new series of The Apprentice, which screened this week on the BBC. This means that seven million people should have gained a rather interesting insight into the economy, and the government’s plan for recovery. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to have happened so I thought I’d spell [...]
Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers have “banged” the table at a cabinet meeting to mark the impending passing of the death warrant on the needy, elderly, and disabled into law, Downing Street has said. The Death to the Poor Bill, for England, has had a difficult passage through Parliament but was finally passed by the [...]
This is a guest post by Amy Kavanagh. You can follow her on twitter at twitter.com/BlondeHistorian. One of the classic responses I get from people when I tell them I am disabled is; ‘oh but you’d never know to look at you’. This is usually meant as a compliment. Yet I believe this twisted praise reveals [...]
Just when you thought that Channel4′s advertising policy couldn’t get any worse, they start putting up billboards like this. No doubt they believe that disabled people are an easy target, who won’t kick up a fuss. Please share, complain, graffiti, or whatever you deem to be the appropriate response.
