Your starter for 10: Which voice of Britain’s embattled public sector workers said this yesterday? We acknowledge that some cuts are necessary due to the parlous state of the country’s finances, but we feel greatly let down that we are not considered to be a protected priority area by the government. They have and will [...]
The supreme court ruled today that Raymond McCartney and Eamonn MacDermott are entitled to compensation for being wrongly convicted of murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This news doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact, which, when you look at the actual substance and implications of the judgement, is kind of odd: [...]
We can’t in all honesty, remember if one met Kate Middleton at St Andrews. We may well have – St Andrews is a small place, without any appreciable nightlife beyond the two streets where the students cluster. With the weather so consistently bleak only alcohol could really induce us to travel outside. And so to [...]
“There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading…To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it [...]
This is a guest post by Andy McGowan, Access Officer at Cambridge University Students’ Union So Nick and Dave are at it again – and I don’t just mean making embarrassing slips of the tongue like this one. They’ve also gone back to having a go at easy targets as a smokescreen for their own [...]
As you may or may not have noticed, the lefty blogosphere erupted in mild outrage recently over the news that Camden Council had ‘banned’ the anti-monarchist organisation Republic from holding a ‘not the Royal wedding’-themed street party in Covent Garden. (The party wasn’t strictly banned – the council just refused to close the street – [...]
It’s safe to say that relations between the police and the activist left – the revolutionary left in particular – are generally somewhat less than cordial. So with that in mind, it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of reaction yesterday’s news of eye-watering cuts to officers’ wages and the possibility of a [...]
In what some boring chauvinist somewhere is almost certainly calling ‘a victory for common sense’, the European Court of Justice yesterday ruled that car insurance providers can’t charge men higher premiums to men simply on the grounds of their sex, overturning years of flagrantly anti-male discrimination by the insurance industry. Or, if you prefer, unelected [...]
When explaining the Conservative vision of the ‘Big Society’ to the public, Cameron and co. have always emphasised the role to be played by the voluntary sector (after all, most people would agree that charities are generally a good thing). The state, they claim, often ‘crowds out’ other non-government organisations that are better suited to the task of [...]
(A response to Paul Mason’s own theses, an excellent piece at Idle Scrawl). 1. The problem with most analyses – Mason’s included – is that it discusses economics and technology, but only as something which can be contemplated, and not as something which can be changed. The actual everyday practice of the people involved in [...]
