- Blog
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MPs’ salaries
There’s a market at work here. School teachers are underpaid because they like the job, prefer it to working in The City or the civil service. MPs are underpaid (relative to the middle-ranking managers they compare themselves to) because of the job’s many (quite legitimate) privileges: the pleasures of public service, status, lucrative director’s gigs…
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Non-Aligned Movement obscure? I suppose so
Ivan, in a comment, says that my Non-Aligned Movement post is obscure and I suppose it is (which is the point of the story, really) but when I was a kid, the Non-Aligned Movement was a big deal, a sort of glamorous anti-UN for hot countries (countries usually lead by blokes wearing army fatigues or…
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Non-Aligned Movement Non-Interesting
The Non-Aligned Movement (anyone remember the Non-Aligned Movement?) has decided that it doesn’t get the news coverage it deserves in the Western Media and that the movement needs to do something about it. The group, which was set up in the Sixties as a kind of alternative, anti-imperialist UN, and which still represents over half…
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Excited scientists
At the bottom of the Southern North Sea there is a landscape: river beds (including one as big as the Rhine which has been named The Shotton), coastlines, lakes and lots of preserved human settlements, spread out over the tens of thousands of square kilometres of land lost when the last ice age ended and…
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Heartbreaking space news
I don’t think I could work in space exploration (like they’d have me). The stress or the grief (or both) would kill me. The tiny (really tiny: it weighs about a pound) probe dropped from the Japanese Asteroid mission Hayabusa has got lost, drifting off into space instead of cleverly bouncing across the surface of…
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I’m growing a beard
Just a little one, a goatee really. My wife says Trinny and Susanna reckon it’s the best look for a middle-aged man with a big fat head. Who am I to disagree? I’m looking forward to it. I used to have a beard, when I was a student. It wasn’t a good look for a…
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Sophisticated kids’ fiction
Elmore Leonard, A Coyote’s in the HouseCarl Hiaasen, Hoot Under the seedy glamour and wise-cracking cynicism of your classic American crime novel there’s usually a pretty basic story with all the ingredients for a great kids’ book – a hero, a journey, a challenge, a resolution blah blah. I don’t know why nobody thought of…
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Outstanding political radio
Geoff Mulgan ran New Labour Think Tank Demos and then Number 10’s Strategy Unit. He’s an interesting man, full of ideas, unconventional, a proper modern thinker/doer. His three part series for Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour is the best political radio I’ve heard in years. A genuine insight to the policy-making process and a really…
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Howard flips
We’re getting used to a certain amount of political role reversal since Blair turned the tables on the Tories eight years ago but watching Michael Howard putting the boot into the police in yesterday’s Commons debate was about the most surreal political inversion I’ve seen, at least in this parliament – almost worth the historic…
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The trees are moving
This is where the story starts to get really Shakespearian. Blair’s messianic tendencies – his readiness to put belief ahead of logic – make him look more and more like Macbeth by the day (the fact that the cast of characters is practically all Scottish helps). His isolation can only intensify now. Gordon Brown –…