- Blog
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Mr Showbiz
Do not tell me you weren’t impressed by Gordon Brown’s ninth budget performance. He’s such a showman. He’s like a movie star of the Golden Age – a brooding matinee idol – Robert Mitchum or Ray Milland (with some Methodist preacher thrown in). His delivery is quite awesome. What about that perfectly timed “…and I…
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Eclipsed
Thanks to a gang of (presumably) drunken thugs in a Belfast bar, the 2nd-term Bush administration no longer has a reason to defer to the huge Irish-American vote on Northern Ireland. So Sinn Féin’s Capitol Hill access privileges have been revoked and the IRA faces an existential threat of unimagined proportions. What must it feel…
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Bracing wasn’t it?
Like a sort of constitutional cold shower. On balance, and setting aside the merits of the legislation itself (I know, I know…), I think last week’s strange and thrilling events in Parliament add up to a pretty good testimonial for British democracy – an eccentric, contradictory and sometimes barely comprehensible institution on top form.
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Terror’s pathetic end
I may be Irish (mostly) and Catholic (technically) and a republican (instinctively) but I’ve spent my whole life on the British mainland and most of it watching the men of the absurd, Lilliputian ‘Irish Republican Army’ acting out their lethal military fantasies. With their random brutality and their scary balaclavas and their shambolic graveside parades…
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Green paper not hatchet job shock
I’ve been performing a detailed textual analysis of the Government’s BBC Green Paper – using the awesome analytic power of the ‘Find’ command (It’s easy: download the Green Paper and search for important words: if your top word doesn’t come up, write something righteous about its exclusion. You are now a pundit). I’ve read the…
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Being afraid…
Abridging ancient rights seems to come naturally to British Governments of all complexions. Something about power makes them itch – all those quaint checks and balances and constraints on power really wind them up. “I am in charge now and I will permanently damage the Bill of Rights/Magna Carta/Parliament Act/Ireland Act (delete where not applicable)…
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Matron!
British general election campaigns are sick. Or at least they exploit the sick. Each needs its iconic sick person: someone so desperate for treatment they can even entertain the prospect of a one-on-one with Michael Howard, a man whose bedside manner might, at best, be characterised as ‘chilly’ (“Now, this might sting a little…”). I…
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The hackers are in charge now
Blogging ‘the hacker ethic‘ over at Thinking Ethics…
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Repeat after me:
It is