- Blog
-
Lots of good politics this week
Climate change – some kind of watershed. Iraq – another watershed?. Immigration – the numbers confirm Britain is a net consumer of migrants and has become a kind of ‘interchange’ for mobile populations (probably not a bad role for a post-imperial power at the edge of a major economic bloc). Privacy – ours is becoming…
-
George Monbiot is annoying
Look. I know. You’re going to think this is petty (or just stupid… or hateful) but the annoying thing about Britain’s overnight conversion to the need for action on climate change is that we’re all now kind of obliged to acknowledge that George Monbiot – Britain’s most annoying Green – was right all along. Or…
-
A failure of nerve on immigration from accession states
Britain deserves better than a knee-jerk ban on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants Closing the door to Romanians and Bulgarians is not irrational. No nation should be obliged to provide unlimited access to its labour market. Only free-market ultras believe that a territory can arrive, without help, at a kind of benign population homeostasis. Labour markets…
-
Nasty news from Tibet
This video, which looks horrifyingly like one of the dopey Flash shooting games my son plays, ran as an exclusive on ITV News this evening but it’s evidently been on YouTube for a week. While it was breaking (somewhere in the world) last week, the People’s Daily (China’s official organ) ran with Tibet sees surge…
-
Wanted: PHP5 or Rails coder for eBay widget
Could you code a clean, usable web widget using the eBay API. Required functionality • The widget will display a user’s eBay items for sale (and possibly some other stuff) on their blog or homepage, using a script tag that renders the widget’s content. • Users will add the widget to their pages using Snipperoo’s…
-
Today’s stupidest job title
Independent Domestic Violence Advocate I know it’s not really funny and I know this is a serious job dealing with sad people and I’m pretty sure this job doesn’t actually involve advocating domestic violence (“Go on. Get it off your chest! Just lash out. You’ll feel better…”) but couldn’t they have picked a better title?…
-
Another sad, jug-eared Tory comes out…
I bring you – without comment, of course – the voting record of Gregory Barker, utterly true blue MP for the constituency of Bexhill and Battle. I think you’ll also want to note TheyWorkForYou‘s (entirely algorithmic) assertion that Barker’s record shows him to be ‘moderately against’ equal gay rights (Stephen Newton, though, points out that…
-
Neglect, plain and simple
This note was sent downstairs long after bedtime by my eight year-old last night. He got his sister to bring it down because he’d been sent back to bed without the right amount of sympathy. I particularly like the ‘e.g.’
-
Competition in unexpected places
Competition has already arrived in bits of the marketplace that seemed out of reach not long ago: domestic electricity and gas supply for instance. So called ‘natural’ monopolies turn out not to be so natural when you put them under the free-market microscope. How about this, though. I bet you never expected to see competition…
-
Hungary 1956 links
A handful of interesting archival videos at YouTube, including this lovely 90 seconds of trams in Budapest (nothing to do with the uprising, though, as far as I can see). Pictures, some contemporary, from flickr. Terrific interview with Gyorgy Ligeti (by John Tusa) who escaped Hungary in the wake of the revolution. Timothy Garton Ash…