In the last month we’ve all heard about David Cameron’s proposed crackdown on benefit frauds. Lots has been said around the left about how these proposals are completely missing the mark in terms of where the government can be saving money if need be, but there hasn’t been much of a defense of the benefit [...]
So the con dem coalition are looking to make cuts a little bit more popular. And what better way than to talk about cuts to housing benefits. If you read the papers last year you would have seen a number of “scandals” over the high amounts of rent local authorities were paying to house larger [...]
BREAKING NEWS – PLEASE REPUBLISH!
Earlier this afternoon all staff in the Arts and Education section of Middlesex University received the following email:
Dear colleagues,
Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche,
informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his
recommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate [...]
Tonight a man’s life and livelihood hangs in the balance. He has been savagely denigrated in the national press, and the most personal details of his life laid bare. And tonight he is suspended by his employer and looks set to be sacked. His crime? To engage in the wrong kind of sexual role play [...]
As I was leaving a poker game at the School of African and Oriental Studies a week ago I saw some bloke removing a flyer from one of the trees outside. It was a manifesto for Clare Solomon’s election campaign for presidency of the University of London Union. Upon my questioning him he said something [...]
Guest post by Ben Lyons
What do Blue Peter and John Bercow have in common? Neither of them pay their interns. With an increasingly competitive employment market, getting a job today often relies less on your interview skills than your ability to intern for free. An article in the New Statesman this week highlights this problem, [...]
This is a guest post by Francesca Rose Lewis.
Much has been written recently on the malaise (if not quite death) of feminism. In 2006 Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs bemoaned the desire of women to become sex objects in a perverse re-reading of female power. Germaine Greer went on Celebrity Big Brother, and, in the [...]
This week the identity of one of the internet’s most infamous bloggers was revealed. Belle de Jour, who wrote anonymously about her life as a highly paid call girl turned out to be Dr Brook Magnanti, 34, a research scientist in Bristol. Cue moral outrage and titillation – the favourite combination of the right-wing press.
“By [...]
The recession seems to have become a pantomime this week. At every opportunity the Chancellor tells us: “it’s behind you”, then the Office of National Statistics (ONS) yell: “Oh no it isn’t!” So are we in recession or aren’t we? There’s an easy answer to this – some of us are and some of us [...]
For all of you unionists out there, there’s an interesting-looking free conference on in London this Saturday called by SOAS UCU, SOAS Unison, and SOAS Students’ Union.
“Hands off my Workmate Conference
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Saturday 17th October 2009
10am to 5.30pm
On the 12th June this year, the School of Oriental and African [...]
