- Blog
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Questions questions
I have many questions about Islam and those cartoons. I wish I could sit down with one of the young, apparently intelligent and obviously articulate spokesmen I see rolled out by the various protesting Islamist groups and ask him a few questions. I want to know why Islam can’t respond in a grown-up way to…
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An open letter (about the Schools White Paper) to grumpy Labour backbenchers
Hello Guys, I’m pretty sure you won’t argue with me when I say that education is important to national competitiveness but I wonder if you’ll agree with me when I say that Britain’s only real hope in the next twenty, fifty or one hundred years is to be the best educated nation on the planet.…
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Big, stupid cars
If you do the school run in a Land Rover Discovery 3 you’re hauling fifty times your own weight with you (maybe twenty times the weight of your whole family). The car weighs nearly three tons. Just getting the thing moving consumes enough expensively-acquired energy (think Russian pipeline) to cook your dinner for a month.…
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The unlikeliest survivor
How can one man be so irrelevant and yet, at the same time, so influential? How does John Prescott, a politician who belongs not to the last generation but to the one before that, manage to get his oar into New Labour policy formation so profoundly as to stall legislation like the planned education bill…
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Sort of Proustian, really
Germolene used to be pink. It was famously pink. People used to call it ‘pink ointment’. For generations the distinctive colour and thick, putty-like texture defined the whole category. Everybody had a tin. I bet your Mum rubbed Germolene on your various cuts and scrapes when you were a kid. So what happened? It’s not…
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Cameron again
I schlepped down to Demos at London Bridge to watch David Cameron make an unimpressive speech in which he largely failed to convince his audience that a) Margaret Thatcher believed in social justice and b) he is the true inheritor of Tony Blair’s reformist mission. Assembled media, Great & Good, wonks, waiters and your loyal…
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Fear and loathing in Palestine
How do you get a stalled peace process back on track in the world’s most complicated and fragile region? Well, I’ll be honest, I have no idea (you thought I did?). But maybe, trying to think positively, what you do is you put the bad guys in charge. You elect the least democratic and most…
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So why did they do it?
Why did Google cave in to Chinese censorship? Because of American accounting principles. In the US (and, increasingly, elsewhere) a listed business reports to its shareholders every 90 days. The next quarter’s results are all that matters. Anything that ‘impacts’ three or more quarters into the future is not the legitimate concern of Google’s management.…
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Whalers on our whale
Naturally enough, when London’s poor lost Northern Bottlenose Whale started to get worldwide press I thought I’d see what the less sentimental whaling nations were saying about it. Not much, it turns out and nothing along the ‘chop it up and eat it you soft gits!’ line that I was sort of hoping for. Anyway,…
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Would you carry an ID card?
I might carry an ID card. I might carry one that said something like: “the bearer has proven, to the satisfaction of somebody accountable, that he is the person he says he is”. I might even carry one that contained some kind of biometric fingerprint so that nobody else could use it and pretend to…