- Blog
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Excellent business radio
Peter Day’s excellent In Business is back on Radio 4 – and, now that they’ve got a podcast, I don’t need to steal the episodes any more. The first in the new series is about Britain’s stubbornly low rate of productivity. Some fascinating and surprising conclusions… Like, for instance, one way to increase our effective…
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Nick Griffin and Mussolini
Are the BNP fascists? Ordinary members and voters may not be. They may own none of the party’s deeper convictions. Ordinary Germans who voted for the National Socialists in 1932 weren’t fascists either. The BNP’s hierarchy, though, is most definitely fascist through-and-through. Griffin’s convoluted thought process (which I hesitate to characterise as an intellect) delivers…
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Fascists?
Some debate about whether or not the BNP are fascists. I guess a narrow definition would exclude them (but then some unhelpfully narrow definitions exclude the Nazis). I like Umberto Eco’s 1995 definition of something he calls ‘Ur-Fascism’. He provides a handy 14-point, cut-out-and keep recognition guide, including, selectively: ‘1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism…
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Still angry really
What’s frustrating about Blair’s culpable ineptitude in the last fortnight or so is that it favours principally the Old Labour rump of maybe 50 bitter and increasingly vocal old-timers. Gordon Brown may be rubbing his hands in anticipation of an accelerated succession but his own room to manoeuvre will be sharply restricted if the old…
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I’m angry
Why am I angry? Lots of reasons. One: Charles Fucking Clarke gave the fascists a dozen seats because of his complacency and his arrogance and his inability to acknowledge that the foreign prisoners issue was a powder keg. Two: Tony Fucking Blair threw away dozens (a hundred? A hundred-and-fifty?) seats because he fired Clarke after…
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Londony things
I drove, on the afternoon of yesterday’s catastrophic elections, across a large slice of North and East London, from suburban Hertfordshire to Stratford in the East End and then – via a nostalgic peep at my old flat next to the flyover (and the planned Olympic Village) in Bow – to Stoke Newington and back…
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New Yorky things
Nice feature about The New Yorker from Naomi Gryn on Radio 4 the other day and, if you can still get it, you should pick up Metropolis Magazine’s April issue which is a 25th anniversary special and is full of brilliant stuff, like Bruce Sterling on being a ‘visionary in residence’ and Peter Hall on…
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Artists at work
This morning two men came to my house and, with something I can’t call anything but grace, delivered a piano. Watching Sean and his mate from Elstree Piano Removals moving quickly and smoothly – tilting and guiding and tipping and rotating a 75 year-old, iron-framed upright piano into our back room in about two minutes…
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Umlauts. What are they good for?
Moben, a Manchester company that makes fitted kitchens, has been going around with an umlaut over the ‘o’ since 1977 but a few years ago someone (who exactly?) managed to persuade a court to stop them using the two dots because it made the company appear to be German which would obviously be a bad…