- Blog
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Oi! referendum monkeys!
The political classes and the media should seize on the reform treaty referendum as an opportunity to spread understanding and get people talking. I’ll keep this brief (my wife says my blog is the most boring in Britain. She may have a point). A referendum is a deliberative device. It only works if voters understand…
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Postal tipping point
Tick tock tick tock. Time is moving on. Change is about to catch up with the Royal Mail. What worries me about the postal strike is that the men and women striking now are so poorly led (I might say ‘misled’). Their doctrinaire and backward leadership is taking them up a blind alley. Postal workers…
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Bunnies
Well I was just going into a sort of reverie about the lovely new Sony ad and thinking things like “I wonder if that’s what big brand advertising is for these days: making us smile once in a while” and stuff like that. I mean I really would be happy to watch ads like the…
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Misfit at Number 10
I’m sticking grimly with my image of Gordon Brown as Machiavellian hardman here. Although I suppose a week of political cock-ups: the disastrously managed Iraq announcement, the entirely unnecessary will-he-won’t-he election palaver and Cameron’s sure-footed conference performance ought to have me worried. I mean maybe he’s just a big, stupid Scotsman. A squinty, pudgy oddball.…
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Union trouble
What’s with the unions? Can’t they see that working people in a globalised economy need smart, strategic representation, not belligerence? Strikes are uncool. Strikers are uncool. They’re aggressive, negative, out-of-date. Strikers are defensive, anti-change, stuck in the 1970s. Everyone knows that. Strikes only happen in the backward industries: the dirty, blue collar industries. They’re counter-productive,…
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Tory softies blow it again…
The Tories are looking pretty pleased with their shadow chancellor’s inheritance tax plan but Brown’s on his way back to town – and he’s going to wipe the smile off their smug faces. Osborne may be… er… uncharismatic but he’s a useful politician. The inheritance tax announcement was about the only thing that stood a…
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Is this thing on?
I’m testing a bit of CSS diddling with some random words that should show that I’ve figured out how to style a blockquote properly: “But why is it so small?”
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Stopping a run
So let’s go over the logic of a run on a bank again shall we. To begin with, I guess it’s worth repeating, a run is never a good thing, neither for the bank nor for the wider economy. Runs rob institutions of the funds they need to operate. At best they freeze investment and…
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Keen and Twitter
Read a bit of Andrew Keen at lunchtime. I do feel like I ought to. I like heretics. Still, it’s a pretty miserable read. Immediately cheered up when I got back to my desk, though, by a tweet from my 9 year-old boy’s class saying: “We have just compared two story openings. We have focused…