arbitrary constant

Recent Entries in Society

• "Big changes as if under anaesthetic"

  The British have a habit of going into their big changes as if under anaesthetic. —Lord Richard Wilson, former Cabinet Secretary When making this quote, which I discovered whilst reading Peter Hennessey’s latest brilliant offering, The Secret State, Lord Wilson had in mind two major policy decisions of the last 40 years: Britain’s accession to the European Community in 1973 and devolution plus human rights legislation in the 1990s. To this, I think we can...

• Man walks into a column, no.11: Census

  A quick scan of the #census twittering made me feel quite positive about humankind: a nice mix of jokes (often at the expense of mystery ‘intentionally left blank’ Q.17 or, more frequently, about Jedis), pleas for help and clarification, low-level whinging (does it really need to be this long?) and declarations of pride in completion including in one case a man who was pleased to have eased the server load. On the downside I realised...

• Linking rules, IB & ESA and the removal of transitional protection

  It used to be that there were rules called "linking rules" for people in receipt of Incapacity Benefit (IB), which has been updated to become Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). Put simply, if someone stopped claiming IB or ESA but found that they needed to start claiming again within a certain period of time, then their "new" benefit would simply be linked back to the "old" benefit they received - they were "linked". If someone...

• Incapacity Benefit linking rules being stopped for disabled people

  Benefits and Work are reporting that the "linking rules" for disabled people, which provides some security for those who take up employment but are unsure what the impact may be on their health/impairment, are being stopped: Linking rules which allow incapacity benefit (IB) claimants to return to their previous rate of benefits if they try work and have to stop again on health grounds are to be scrapped from 31 January. From that date onwards...

• Social care and Foursquare

  It's around a week before the Local by Social event in the South West. I'm lucky enough to have been invited to talk on the topic of location-based social media and social care (thus the title of this post), and I said I'd share some of my emerging thoughts on what I'm planning to say. The thoughts below are therefore shared in the hope people will comment and offer their thoughts on the proposed argument...

• Man walks into a column, no.3: Freedom

  The links between right-wing rhetoric and the murderous acts of Jared Loughner are tenuous at best. But the hatred that dominates so much of political discourse in the US really does seem different to our own both in its prevalence and its force. Why is this? It's tempting for a Brit, a European, to feel smug about the apparent brutality of life in America at times like these. But acts of political violence and hatred are...

• Why is cutting funding to the VCS thought to be an "easy option"?

  I've been puzzling over something David Cameron has said on a few occasions (including at Prime Minister's Questions): When it comes to looking at and trimming your budgets, don't do the easy thing, which is to cut money to the voluntary bodies and organisations working in our communities. Why would Cameron think that cutting money to the voluntary and community sector is the "easy thing"? I can think of 6 reasons why he may think...

• Should there be more charity mergers?

  David Walker in the Guardian asks should there be more charity mergers? The answer is yes. Walker suggests the creation of an external agency, such as a "Mergers Commission" to "push, perhaps even compel, more charities into mergers". I'm not so sure about a specific commission to do this, and not one that has a role which requires organistions to merge. But (in line with my thoughts on mergers and reorgnasionations within government) I do...

• Life Opportunities Survey

  The Office for Disability Issues last week published the fascinating Life Opportunities Survey. The purpose of the survey is to compare how disabled and non-disabled people participate in a number of areas, including work, education, transport and use of public services. There is a huge amount of incredibly valuable information in this survey across a very wide range of areas. I don't think I could do it justice without a week in a quiet room...

• The case for DLA reform is shaky

  Beyond misuse of statistics, sloppy presentation of data and lack of evidence, there are further points to be queried. In a well-argued post on Benefit Scrounging Scum, Rhydian Fôn James has highlighted several major issues with the government's methodology in making the case for DLA reform. It's a great read, and required for anyone who believes in evidence-based policy and disability equality. (For anyone interested in the issues with the case the government has constructed...

• Andrew Lansley on the value of disability benefits

  People use the attendance allowance and disability living allowance to help them, under their own control, to create a quality of life for themselves that helps them to remain independent. That is precisely in line with the policy we are all trying to pursue. It is clear that if one narrowly focuses only on care needs, we will miss out much that goes to constitute well-being, and there is no health without well-being, and there...

• Full DLA reform consultation document

  Yesterday, I blogged on the government's proposed reforms to Disability Living Allowance. Just in case people haven't seen the consultation document or don't know where to access it, I have uploaded it to Scribd. A copy is embedded below. You can also access the document from the DWP's website. DLA Reform Consultation...

• Previous Tory views on disability benefits

  The government yesterday launched its consultation on reforms to Disability Living Allowance. I blogged extensively on it yesterday. One of the huge - and, as far as I can see, new - announcements was that the government is considering rolling out the cuts to DLA not just to the 1.8m of working age in receipt of DLA, but also those under 16 and those over 65. Given this, I thought it was timely to recall...

• DLA reform consultation: Great Expectations, Worst Apprehensions

  The coalition government today published its consultation on the reform of Disability Living Allowance (DLA). The headline is that DLA is going to be replaced by a "Personal Independence Payment" (PIP) from 2013/14. DLA has been in the news a considerable amount since the emergency budget in June this year, primarily because it has been the main disability-focused benefit the government has looked to cut. I've blogged quite a lot on the topic: see here,...

• Undermining personalisation in social care

  (Note: This is my personal website, so these represent personal views) Some leading charities yesterday issued a warning about Personal Budgets, claiming that they could be a means by which Local Authorities are hoping to save money. This has really riled me. The social care system is under immense pressure at the moment: huge current demand, massive future demand, huge funding pressures anyway, and significant cuts about to make themselves known (if they haven't already)....

• Redistributing my tax rebate: an update (updated)

  A few days ago I blogged about my good fortune of a tax rebate through the post: £2,460.97 reasons to be relieved. As I mentioned at the time, realising I'd been fortunate and noting that lots of other people weren't in the same position, I wanted to give away some of my tax rebate to an organsiation making a difference in their local community. Thus, I'm giving away £621.97 of my rebate. Since then, friends,...

• Disability hate crime: why an increase should be welcomed

  The Association of Chief Police Officers should be congratulated for publishing data on hate crime across England in 2009. A copy of the data, broken down by constabulary area, is included as a Scribd document at the end of this post. The data shows the following number of hate crimes, by type: Race - 43,426 Religion/Faith - 2,083 Sexual Orientation - 4,805 Transgender - 312 Disability - 1,402 Total - 52,028 Antisemitic (included in previous...

• 

  Social care and location-based social media

  Rob Dyson has an excellent article today on the Guardian's new Voluntary Sector Network blog (which itself is excellent). Rob's article covers how voluntary sector organisations can use location-based social media, like Foursquare and Gowalla, to promote the work that they do in a variety of different ways. For example: Christmas card fundraising charity Card Aid are... are adding 'tips' into venues' entries around the country so that when you check-in somewhere, you are alerted...

• The #BigSociety Awards

  News yesterday that the government has launched the Big Society Awards. The Awards are designed to recognise some of the excellent examples of the Big Society in action taking place all around the country. These awards seem peculiar to me for 5 reasons: Why do Big Society-type initiatives need central recognition? Surely the recognition of such things happens in local communities, where the initiatives have their benefit? Awards are usually a means to promote something....

• What's wrong with a Chicken McNudget?

  The Guardian reported that The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald's and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease. What's interesting to me is how we find it abhorrent that McDonald's may contribute to public health policy, but think it's fine if Jamie Oliver does. Don't get me wrong: I'm...

• Public's opinion on #DLA reforms

  I blogged yesterday on the public's support for out-of-work benefit reforms. Bizarrely enough the same survey included a question on Disability Living Allowance (DLA), even though DLA isn't an out-of-work benefit. Leaving this point and what it represents to one side (aside from one implication, which I'll highlight below), the results were as follows: 69% of people support more stringent testing for people receiving Disability Living Allowance Broken down by voting intention, 86% of Tories...

• Isolated people in care homes - government will exacerbate the problem

  The BBC was this morning reporting on the results of a survey by the Residents and Relatives Association. The top finding was that some 40,000 older people in care homes are "socially isolated". We shouldn't be surprised by this, and the aim of any effective social care system should be to keep individuals out of care homes for as long as possible. Not only does this cost the tax payer less money, but it means...

• Involunteering and the #bigsociety

  Matthew Taylor's post on the coalition government's proposals to compel people on out-of-work benefits to do voluntary work - which he names "involunteering" - is excellent. I recommend you read it in full. He highlights what I consider to be the key point: whilst conditionality in welfare is reasonable, compulsion takes it too far. Matthew highlights 4 reasons to be wary of it: It places extra citizenship obligations on people because of their circumstances It...

• Voluntary sector budgets: protecting or cutting?

  David Cameron during Prime Minsiter's Questions on 15 September 2010: When it comes to looking at and trimming your budgets, don't do the easy thing, which is to cut money to the voluntary bodies and organisations working in our communities. Look at your core costs. Look at how you can do more for less. Look at the value for money you get from working with the voluntary sector. Nick Hurd launching the Big Society strategy...

• Post-bureaucratic age, the #BigSociety and Ace Ventura

  There's a moment in the first Ace Ventura (Pet Detective) film when Jim Carey's character realises that the male sports star he's been searching for is actually the same person as the female police chief he's been battling with. With disbelief, he cries to himself: Ray Finkle is Lois Einhorn. Lois Einhorn is Ray Finkle. Oh my God. The realisation makes him sick. I've just had a similar experience. For reading Ian Birrell's account of...

• Back to the Bog

  If you read the coverage of the mad, genius Russians winning the Nobel prize for physics you'll know that a bit of silliness (e.g. levitating a frog in a magnetic field, co-authoring a scientific paper with your pet hamster) can help to unlock the stickiest of problems. So it's with that in mind - and leaving aside the immodesty of the allusion that Rich and I deserve to be bracketed in the same category as...

• Introducing the #BogSociety

  Whilst writing a presentation yesterday, I accidentally typed "Bog Society" instead of "Big Society". My genius friend and fellow blogger Phil C seized on the opportunity and came up with the idea for a meme, based on willful mispellings. His first offer was WAGsociety: footballers' wives help out in their local community Which, I think you'll agree, is brilliant. As a result, here are various #Bogsociety ideas we game up with (Phil - PC, or...

• Confessions of a Regenerator

  Hello, my name is Stef_W (well it's not actually but anyway) and I'm addicted to Regeneration. Regeneration is neither Optimus Prime's secret gay transformer lover, the subtitle to a Terminator straight-to-DVD sequel nor the latest 'legal high'. Despite having just completed an MSc in 'Urban Regeneration', I'm still not particularly sure what it is myself but I do have some thoughts...but I've haven't really shared them with AC. It's the classic blog/career conundrum. To date...

• Mutuals and mutualism

  When you scythe through the hideous jargon and confusingly loose use of different names for what appear to be basically the same thing, there are actually some genuinely interesting debates to be had around the potential for staff, service users and communities to own public services. I should know: I've had the dubious honour of being excessively deeply acquainted with the arcana of co-ops and mutuals for the past several months (and as you can...

• Social Care Funding Commission - FOI results

  As you will have noted from previous posts (see here, here, here and here), I have a strong interest in the Department of Health’s Commission on the Funding of Care and Support. The Commission was announced by Andrew Lansley on 20 July 2010 and said it would report back within 2 months on the criteria it would use to judge the proposals it develops. That deadline passed 9 days ago, with no criteria published. Indeed,...

• Winston Churchill on the challenges facing CLG

  In 1907, when Winston Churchill was considering which to prioritise out of a number of Cabinet posts potentially open to him, he gave this verdict on the turn-of-the-century version of our beloved department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), the Local Government Board, which was in theory one of his options: There is no place in the Government more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of...

• Compact crap

  I don't know if either of my readers (Hi mum! Hi dad!) are familiar with the Compact - the understanding between government and the voluntary sector about how they work together. To say that the Compact is totally toothless and pretty pointless would be an understatement. Anything that is voluntary, is not legally binding and has content that is not legally enforceable should rightfully be considered rubbish, this indeed nicely describing what the Compact is....

• Social Care Commission - 2 months on (updated)

  [I] have asked them to come back to us within two months with the criteria against which they are going to assess the proposals, the solutions that they come up with. I think it is perfectly reasonable for them to look at that question that you ask in the context of how they are to set their own criteria for judging the proposals that they bring forward. That was Andrew Lansley, speaking to the Health...

• Nick "Dickens" Clegg

  More of that, erm, non-inflammatory language from the coalition government today, with this offer from Nick Clegg: Welfare needs to become an engine of mobility, changing people's lives for the better, rather than a giant cheque written by the state to compensate the poor for their predicament. Compensate "the poor" for their "predicament"? It's like living in a Dickens novel....

• 

  Care Commission - deleted? (updated)

  Just yesterday I was noting that not much has happened with the Commission on the Funding of Care and Support, set up by Andrew Lansley to look into this vital topic. I visited the site again tonight to see if there had been any updates, to find the site had been, erm, deleted (click thumbnail above for larger version; original screenshot here). It's entirely feasible that a new website is being prepared in time for...

• Lansley "acting quickly" on social care

  Andrew Lansley announced the formation of the Commission on the Funding of Care and Support on 20 July. At the time, he said he wanted the Commission to "act quickly" and report back to government within two months on the criteria it intends to use to judge competing proposals for reform. That means we can expect the criteria on Monday. Since the launch - some 57 days ago - the Commission's website has had, erm,...

• Trends in volunteering

  NCVO's Third Sector Foresight work is excellent, and has the added benefit of making you feel clever afterwards for having read it. That said, their conclusion about trends in recent volunteering doesn't bode well for the Big Society, or those seeking to become/achieve it: The ways in which people volunteer has changed. There has been a shift towards more short term volunteering and one-off activities, and people now tend to volunteer at more than one...

• Big Society equals organised chaos?

  In his post the other day Rich says there's a danger that Big Society will be allowed to wither on the vine in the places where local politicians and/or officers don't understand it and/or don't feel it's their responsibility to implement it. He mentions this in response to David Wilcox's point that there is not (nor should there be) a 'Big Society plan' or controller (see here), the implication being that the first is a...

• Big Society - falling through the gaps?

  Part of the point of the Big Society is that no one is really responsible for it - we're all responsible for it. As David Wilcox usefully notes, part of the implication of this is there's no big plan governing how it's rolled out, what its milestones are, how much money is available etc. etc. (for those familiar with Myers-Briggs types, and for those who know themselves to be J-types, I can only guess at...

• NTDTD approach applied to street signs

  The pioneering "non-top down, top down" (NTDTD) approach of the coalition government continues apace with this beautiful case study, courtesy once again of our friends at the Department for Communities and Local Government: Councils will today be urged to get rid of unnecessary signs, railings and advertising hoardings in a bid to make streets tidier and less confusing for motorists and pedestrians. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and Transport Secretary Philip Hammond are concerned that the...

• Can the Big Society cope with inequality?

  Cards on the table time: insofar as it exists as a negative agenda - a rejection of the overweening state, and in particular calling time on the idea that the answer to everything is to give someone a meaningless job with a title in the form [Name of Programme] + [Coordinator] - I'm quite a fan of the Big Society idea. Having spent a great deal of my professional life working alongside civil servants, I...

• More on The Spirit Level stat-fight...

  Unashamed research geek that I am (but pretend not to be at work and when around girls) I've been following and blogging about the debate between the authors of The Spirit Level and their detractors at the 'independent' (for which read: right-wing) think-tank Policy Exchange. My rather breathless summary of the tussle is here, and this is a more detailed post about The Spirit Level thesis itself. Well it turns out that I'm not the...

• Democratic accountability in the Health White Paper

  The Department of Health has published a number of accompanying documents to the Health White Paper that was itself published last week. Having written a detailed analysis of patient voice in the Health White Paper, I was thus particularly interested in the "Local democratic legitimacy in health" follow-up paper. Though the paper addresses nowhere near all of the questions I outlined in my previous post, there is some good stuff in this accompanying paper on...

• The BMA and the #healthwhitepaper

  Following a whole series of post on the #healathwhitepaper (see "other posts" below), it's interesting to note that the powerful BMA is doing its best to ignore the proposals contained in the White Paper and focused instead on GP contracts: We hope there will be few changes to the GP contract as this is a UK contract and commissioning is an England policy. We know that the government wishes to make a few, very significant,...

• The Health White Paper and social care

  Following up my post on patient voice in the Health White Paper, here's one capturing my confusion over how health relates to social care. It is baffling to me that a White Paper entitled "Liberating the NHS" makes so many references to social care. Indeed, the White Paper may be liberating the NHS, but it feels like it's making a landgrab for social care. The direction of travel all seems to be from social care...

• Voluntary sector, social care and the Big Society

  After a pleasant 30 minutes reading NCVO's excellent UK Civil Society Almanac 2010, here are some key facts relating to the role of the voluntary sector in adult social care: In 2007/08 local authority expenditure on social care was £20.7bn, of which £15.3bn was for adult social care. Social care workforce in the voluntary sector grew from 19% in 1996/97 (202,000 people) to 26% in 2007/08 (374,000). As a comparison, the voluntary sector as a...

• Not a "Death Tax" but a choice

  Having had a Royal Commission, two Wanless reports, a national debate, a Select Committee Inquiry, a Green Paper and a White Paper, and with a vision paper and a new White Paper on their way, the coalition government today set up it's Commission on the Funding of Care and Support to address the issue of funding adult social care. I don't know about you, but I'm just not sure we've thought about it enough. Anyway,...

• Social care reform: the journey from here (updated)

  The Health White Paper and some recently published documents have given some useful indications as to the timetable for social care reform over the next few months. Here's what I think we can expect: The Commission on the funding of long-term care will being its work in July 2010 and report in July 2011. I don't know why the coalition has called this work on "long-term care" rather than just "social care". I'm assuming it's...

• #irony in today's #bigsociety launch

  Plenty to be said on the formal launch of the Big Society today, which I'll write when I've picked myself up off the floor and stopped laughing. In the meantime, how's this for irony: having noted that the talents and initiative of people had been wasted, claiming that over-centralised government had turned employees into the "weary, disillussioned puppets of central government" David Cameron went on to say that Each of the project areas will be...

• Where's all the "Equity" when the NHS has been "Liberated"?

  This is a guest post by Christine Burns MBE, an Equality and Diversity consultant currently embedded in the NHS war zone. Since Andrew Lansley’s NHS White Paper was published last week, most of the public commentary has inevitably centred on the alleged savings to be achieved and the open door which the plans will create for privatisation. The White Paper, “Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS”, proposes to remove two tiers of regional and local...

• Public health

  There's a fabulous leader in the Observer today, detailing all of the major issues, inconsistencies and ideological drivers of the coalition government's approach to health. I urge you to read it: a regressive and potentially harmful new approach to public health being pursued by the coalition government which has much of the medical establishment worried and with good reason... Those who make or sell drink, cigarettes and unhealthy food can scarcely believe their luck. By...

• "Time to reflect and pray"

  The Anglican church continues to cover itself in glory over how it treats women. Having rejected a compromise position put forward by the Archibishops of Canterbury and York over women bishops, members of the Synod apparently pleaded for "time to reflect and pray" on the vote. I wonder what God told them when they prayed? Carry on, chaps: you're doing a great job of providing moral leadership and showing yourselves to be modern and progressive...

• Heaven Census

  It's being mooted that the Census might face the chop. The reasons? It's expensive, the data is not collected regularly enough, and there could be enough other sources of information available. All crap reasons, of course. Next year's Census is likely to cost in the region of £482m per year. Since this is once every 10 years, that's less than £50m per year (much less, for example, than the government plans to save approximately per...

• Dodgy statistics, or missing the point?

  A couple of weeks ago I wrote on this blog about Richard Wilkinson's fascinating Spirit Level thesis: that... ...time and time again, using any number of societal outcomes as indicators, the more unequal a society is - i.e. the greater the multiplier between the richest and poorest, measured in terms of income - the worse a place it is to live, not just for the poorer people themselves, but for everyone. Whether you're looking at...

• Notts City Council and gay blood donation

  This is disappointing: Labour controlled Nottingham City Council made the shocking decision this week to remove references to gay and bisexual men from a motion celebrating World Blood Donor Day. I've blogged before on blood donation by gay people (original post and follow-up) and concluded that the ban is ridiculous....

• Two US perspectives on welfare / workfare

  Lawrence M Mead: In 1986, Mead's big idea was to push welfare recipients into jobs - an approach that came to be known as "workfare". Unlike those on the left who wanted to change capitalism, Mead wanted to change the poor. The academic argued that disorder stemming from the actions of the inner-city poor, rather than a lack of opportunity, lay at the collapse of their communities. What was needed, he argued, was to "enforce...

• Everyday lives on #DLA

  Following on from my long and detailed analysis of the coalition government's potential position with regard to Disability Living Allowance (DLA), I urge you to read @BendyGirl's post on what DLA means to her. It's an exceptional post, and highlights just one case of thousands relating the difference DLA makes in everyday lives. Here's an excerpt, though I urge you to read the rest: So, as someone who can't even sneeze without dislocating a rib...

• How inequality leads to unhappiness... and screws us all

  Just the other day I was lucky enough to hear a talk by Richard Wilkinson, co-founder of The Equality Trust and author of an influential treatise on the impact of inequality in the modern world, called The Spirit Level. The evidence he presents is, as he freely admits, in the category of 'things that come as little surprise to anyone', but like many others I was deeply impressed by the force and profundity of the...

• EHRC calls for disability hate crime evidence

  Several months back, I wrote a series of posts covering the topic of disability hate crime. These were prompted by the Equality & Human Rights Commission's report into "Promoting the Safety and Security of Disabled People", which noted that: Disabled people are 4 times more likely to be victims of crime compared to non-disabled people 47 per cent of disabled people had either experienced physical abuse or had witnessed physical abuse of a disabled companion...

• All on board the new London bus?

  The excellent Boris Watch picks up on whether or not disabled people were engaged up front in the design of the new London bus. The answer? No....

• Poverty, worklessness... and #DLA?

  The new coalition government published its "State of the Nation" report on "Poverty, Worklessness and Welfare Dependency" last week. This is clearly an important document since it sets out the perspective from which a key department will operate in a vital area over the coming parliament and, as the document itself notes, provides an overview that "will be used to inform policy decisions" (p6). This posts notes some key themes of and issues with the...

• On the Big Society

  I only half-joke that the Big Society should be called "BS" for short. Fortunately, Andy Westwood provides a more robust analysis of the Tories' big idea: [T]here’s the massive challenge that the Tories haven’t yet acknowledged: social capital and the Big Society will always be stronger in better off places... Much more important is whether building social capital and/or the Big Society can help to turn more deprived or just less well off communities around....

• Radio 4 and the social model of disability

  It was disappointing to hear on last Friday night's 7pm news bulletin on Radio 4 someone described as "severely handicapped". The term used should have been "severely disabled". I am by no means the PC police and I recognise an institution like the BBC (and particularly Radio 4) probably doesn't want another ticking off by anybody about its use of language. But in this case (and you knew there was a 'but' coming), what flows...

• Technologically happy, or better off in the slow lane?

  This is one of those cases where - unlike watching The Mighty Swindon Town FC, say - I have no particular privileged insight gained from years of experience, but Rich assures me that This Is OK and that concern about quality or expertise never kept a good blogger down (and anyway, as my boss said to me in a meeting the other day: "for heaven's sake, get on with it Phil"). Several interesting articles caught...

• Kent County Council to publish monthly accounts

  The Kent Messenger reports: Plans to reveal more details of how Kent County Council spends millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money by publishing monthly accounts have been backed by county councillors. The move is expected to result in the authority setting out much more comprehensive details about how it spends £1billion on goods and services each year... Cllr John Simmonds, KCC cabinet member for finance, said he wanted KCC to take a lead in meeting...

• Down with the kids

  Today Michael Caine supported the new tory policy of national citizen service for 16 year olds - will it really help the broken youth of britain?

• "We can succeed, because we must"

• The social care bus

  Typical: you wait for one paper to determine the future policy shape of adult social care and three come along at once. First, the King's Fund publish their follow up to the Wanless Review on 2006; then the Health Select Committee publish the findings of its Inquiry into Social Care; and then (the biggie) the government publishes its White Paper on Building the National Care Service. I fully intend to get my thoughts down on...

• What Cameron's gay rights gaffe means

  There was, rightly, a good deal of coverage of David Cameron's floundering during an interview with the Gay Times. The video below includes the key parts, if you didn't see it first time around: In a thoughtful post on the topic, Paul Sagar at Liberal Conspiracy notes: What’s especially significant here is both that the story is being widely covered, and that Cameron is being widely criticised. Not just for his indecision, but also for...

• Tom Shakespeare on disability hate crime

  Following my recent post on the Fiona Pilkington case, please do read this article by Tom Shakespeare (a well-respected disability academic) on the topic of disability hate crime. It is more powerful because Tom was previously skeptical about the specific issue of disability hate crime: David Askew's tragedy follows the deaths of Raymond Atherton, Rikki Judkins, Steven Hoskin, Barrie-John Horrell. Kevin Davies, Fiona Pilkington, Christine Lakinski and Christopher Foulkes over the last few years. Each...

• JRF's two-tier Care Levy

  In their customary thoughtful way, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has proposed a two-track Care Levy which sees each generation pay its own social care costs. (See also the JRF's contribution to the social care debate here). It works on the principle that each generation contributes to the costs of its own care in later life and works like this: part one of the so-called Care Levy recognises that Today's older people have not put aside...

• Where the hypocritical church leads, some people follow

  Unfortunately, though the church is clearly a hypocritical, sexist, homophobic institution which doesn't have any credibility, let alone moral authority, there are still some people who think it's lead is worth following. The stories below demonstrate as much. First, pharmacists: Pharmacists across the UK have been told they can continue to refuse to prescribe items that might clash with their personal religious beliefs.A revised code of conduct from the new industry regulator will allow staff...

• Enable the public to put their money where their voice is

  On the back of an interesting Twitter exchange with @paul_clarke and @jackcabnory, I wanted to get some thoughts down about budgets, transparency and the public. I'm afraid it is likely to be a rambling, incoherent post; it is also written by someone who has a keen interest in finance issues but who has literally no professional qualifications in its practice. Please do keep these health warnings in mind when you wonder what the hell I'm...

• Service user voices in social care reform

  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a useful Viewpoint on what some users of social care make of the impending social care reforms. The pamphlet is a useful contribution to the debate (all of my posts on this topic are linked to in this social care summary). It rightly draws attention not only to the issues of process and service delivery, but also the values base on which social care reform is being built. I...

• IPCC investigates the Pilkington case

  As much as anyone can be pleased with anything to do with this case, I am pleased to see that officers from Leicestershire police are being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over the tragic Fiona Pilkington case. I don't say this because I take comfort in any individual being hauled over the coals for what they have or haven't done, though I understand this is likely to be an outcome of the investigation....

• Church still pronouncing on morality

  They keep trying, don’t they, those religious folk? Take this from yesterday's Today programme: A group of British churches are issuing guidance on the morality of pay, fearing that the pay levels enjoyed by many senior executives in business and industry threaten to alienate them from the rest of society. I don’t know about you, and as I’ve mentioned before, I tend not to look to sexists and homophobes for any form of moral guidance...

• Right to Control Trailblazer launch

  I enjoyed attending the launch of the Right to Control Trailblazer yesterday. I attended as a representative of a user-led organisation in Essex - one of eight successful Trailblazer areas. The Right to Control represents an innovative project that seeks to bring together a whole range of funding streams so that disabled people have more choice and control over how they use the funding they're eligible for. It's actually really easy to get into the...

• Comparing voter turnout

  Voter turnout in the recent Iraqi general election was 62%. Voter turnout in the 2005 UK general election was 61.4%. In 2001, it was 59.4%. Voter turnout in the 2008 US general election was 56.8%. In 2004, it was 55.3%. In one way, this is heartening. In another, it's depressing as hell....

• Disagreeing with the TPA's budget cut analysis

  I more than disagree with the analysis proffered by the Tax Payers’ Alliance on how to implement budget cuts in the public sector. Stef uses the euphemism ‘thought provoking’ to capture his thoughts on the article; I prefer to call it a load of crap, for the following reasons: 1. Mark Wallace has it precisely the wrong way around: Councillors may be elected, but (in my experience) they are generally poor quality. It’s the managers,...

• Equality matters

  Two issues of equality to cover today. 1. Kathryn Bigelow has become the first female director to win the Best Director Oscar. For all you men out there who think women don't face any sort of institutional or societal barriers, I'll just re-emphasize that Bigelow is the first female director ever to win, in nearly 80 years of the awards. 2. The Vatican has been hit by a gay sex scandal, with a chorister there...

• Are people naturally inclined to pay tax?

  An interesting question came up over lunch with some friends: are people naturally inclined to pay tax? The question arose in my mind after hearing about someone who came into a good wadge of cash - around £20,000 - and asked a friend if they knew of any way to invest it to avoid paying tax. This anecdote is on the back of others I know who have taken on lodgers in their house and...

• Pay for less

  Will paying mendacious Council workers to identify savings in budgets lead to a better local government?

• Customer journey mapping

  Customer journey mapping (CJM) looks to be a fruitful area of work for public service delivery. It's surprising it hasn't cropped up before, isn't it?

• The quality of Evan Davis / @Evanhd

  Evan Davis really is a breath of fresh air on the Today Programme. His irreverence; that slightly scoffing laugh he does when he’s amused by something the old blokes aren't; the rumours about his bodily adornments: all factors of his unorthodoxy and what makes him refreshing in an institution like the BBC. But his slight unorthodoxy hides an incredibly sharp brain and journalism that makes issues pertinent and accessible. A fantastic recent example is his...

• "Strangers in their own land"

  I was struck by a conversation with a friend a few days ago when they didn't seem to me to realise that their money concerns were a bit, well, "keeping up with the Jones's", given they (with their partner) are in a £70K household. Indeed, during the conversation, I noted the average wage of this country (£24,908 per annum / £479 per week in 2008) and the fact that you have to earn just £49,244...

• Your social care reader (for now)

  The three main protagonists in the social care 'debates' today clashed on the Politics Show. You can see the crux of that discussion here. The key point made was this: Why do we have a debate where we need to rule out options before we get to the table? I have been covering the issue of social care reform on arbitrary constant since the publication of the Social Care Green Paper back in November. Thus,...

• Social care blog round up (updated)

  I'm just catching up on the blog reaction to the social care 'debates' over the last few days (for more from me on this topic, see here: 1, 2, 3, 4). Here's a round up of those reactions from the blogs I follow which covered this vital topic. You'll note primarily focus on the posters rather than, you know, the policy content. Ho hum. — Events, Dear Boy, Events: Oops! Another Cameron fail: The Tory...

• Social care leader round up

  To finish off my series of posts about social care (1, 2, 3), here are two leaders, from the Times and Guardian respectively, which get the point exactly right. The Guardian: It is a mark of seriousness about government that, as an election approaches, oppositions bite their lip and resist cheap tricks when policies for which there are no easy answers come up for debate. Paying for old age, filed under "too difficult" for far...

• Social care: how would the Conservatives pay for it?

  The very issue I wrote about yesterday was raised as part of the 'debate' at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, and in various exchanges played out in the media. David Cameron asked Gordon Brown to rule out a levy of £20,000 on people to pay for their social care. He also asked the question "Where is the money coming from?" and noted that various people (local Councils of all political persuasions amongst them) had asked questions...

• Social care 'death duty': C4 fact check

  Following on from my post yesterday, Channel 4's Fact Check has picked up on the issue of the social care 'death duty', as mentioned by David Cameron during Prime Minister's Questions. You can read their analysis here, the conclusion of which is in line with my findings yesterday. Fact Check concludes: We'll have to wait for the government white paper to know for certain. But for now, compulsory insurance of some sort remains firmly on...

• The £20K 'death duty'

  I've noted here before that the future of social care is going to be a key election issue. This will be the case both in terms of the debate on the quality and delivery of a national care service and, inevitably, how it is paid for. To recap, the government published a substantial Green Paper in November 2009 on this topic, which started a genuine debate on what social care should look like, particularly the...

• Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein

  Proving how I am always ahead of the zeitgeist, anticipating trends before they happen, and living up to my reputation of informing the politics of the future, I have just read Nudge. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two sections, detailing how they do the sociological and psychological research which informs much of behavioural economics. As ever, though, the descriptive parts of a book like this don't translate well into the analytical parts, and Thaler and...

• Nathan Barley no more...

  So what was it I saying about planning? Another travesty has occurred as Hackney Council has agreed a planning application to demolish the Foundary. One of the few remaining original Hoxton establishments (along with the long since crap 333/Mother Bar), it occupied a special place in my heart, no doubt along with other Shoreditch Twats. Developed on very much a DIY ethic with free art and performance space which has been home to the likes...

• Enabled by Design / @enabledby

  For a while now, I have been following and impressed by Enabled by Design. The basic question that Enabled by Design asks is why should anybody who requires any form of assistive equipment to support them to live independently have to put up with stuff that looks like crappy hospital equipment? The wider question that Enabeld by Design poses, of course, is one that relates to disability as a whole: why is disability — as...

• A welcome apology from David Cameron

  I've only just caught up this week with a repeat of David Cameron's apology for voting against the repeal of Section 28. This is a welcome apology from the Conservative leader (though I have concerns about the party he leads, and their views on topics such as their voting record on gay rights). There's another point here, though: I welcome the opportunity for any politician, but particularly a party leader, to note they were wrong...

• Compulsory retirement

  There was something ironic about Jon Humprhys interviewing someone on the Today programme about compulsory retirement at age 65 this morning. This, however, is not the point I wanted to make, but merely a comic introduction. The debate around compulsory retirement is a very difficult one. I applaud the Equality & Human Rights Commission, though, for maintaining a good quality, evidence-based debate on whether or not retirement at age 65 should be compulsory. This is...

• Mental illness and school governors

  Earlier this week, Rethink launched a campaign to stop the ridiculous and discriminatory practice that stops people with mental health conditions being able to undertake jury service. In my post supporting the campaign, I noted an update that a similar position may apply to people with mental health conditions becoming school governors. I'm pleased to note that this isn't actually the case. In the Social Exclusion Unit's 2004 report on Mental Health and Social Exclusion...

• United States lifts HIV travel ban

  That's what I'm talking about: Beginning today, the United States' decades-old HIV Travel and Immigration Ban will be a relic of the past, and the stigma and discrimination it has engendered around the world will, with any luck, begin to fade, too. Good word, Obama: The President also announced today the elimination of the HIV entry ban. Since 1987, HIV-positive travelers and immigrants have been banned from entering or traveling through the United States without...

• The wonder of history

  I have spent much of the Christmas holiday reading Team of Rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It has been a revelation to me. Like most, I knew a little about Abraham Lincoln, why he is such a revered president and considered a great man; I also knew the bare bones of the American Civil War. But in Kearns Goodwin's book have I been immersed in a quite amazing telling...

• Quotation of the week

  I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to intercourse with plain working men. — Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England...

• On the disability reality show Cast Offs

  I'll admit to feeling some trepidation about the first in the series of Cast Offs — a "darkly comic drama series telling the story of six disabled characters sent to a remote British island for a fictional reality TV show" — tonight. As someone whose day-to-day business is disability equality, it's obviously excellent that a series like this, which is receiving so much attention, is about to be broadcast. Of course, it's also slightly wearying...

• Adult social care: at least politics means focus

  I recently expressed some concern that politics had entered the difficult world of the future of adult social care. Fortunately, there are other, eminently more qualified people than me who are more positive about the political focus: — Jenny Owen, President of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services: [N]obody should be too surprised that the social care content of the Queen’s Speech this week gave rise to mutual recriminations from all the leading...

• Excellent DDA victory

  This is excellent news: The Royal Bank of Scotland has been ordered to carry out £200,000 of work to improve wheelchair access at one of its branches after senior judges ruled that it had breached disability laws. In a test case three Court of Appeal judges ruled that the bank had failed to cater for the needs of a disabled teenager, David Allen, 18, who was awarded £6,500 damages. Mr Allen, who has muscular dystrophy,...

• Adult social care: politics makes its entrance (updated)

  As I hoped it wouldn't, politics has entered the future of adult social care. I'm not talking politics in terms of compromise, reasoned debate and the idea that someone's values and ideology can inform a principled policy position. I'm talking politics in terms of he-said, she-said. And that's what we got today: first, the Conservatives claimed 2 million people would be worse off as a result of the government's social care plans. In this case,...

• The reality of a care home

  With the focus on adult social care in the Queen's speech yesterday, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published some timely research on the experiences and, most importantly, the aspirations of older people living in residential and nursing home care. In the first place, the report rightly notes that people should live in their own homes for as long as possible. But the factors that often lead people into residential / nursing care — bereavement, health...

• Adult social care: Queen's speech, people's futures

  I wrote recently about the options available for the future funding of social care. Today's Queen's Speech contained one important legislative priority: the funding of care for older and disabled people, as follows: Around 280,000 of the neediest people in England will get free personal care in their own homes, as Gordon Brown announced at the Labour party conference in September. That will cover basic, everyday living tasks such as getting up, dressing, washing and...

• Spending cuts aimed at 'easy' targets

  Via the excellent lilwatchergirl came the news today that the Freedom Pass — which enables older and disabled people who live in London to travel free on London's public transport network. — may have its central government funding pulled: The future of the Freedom Pass was plunged into doubt this week after the government suggested it may slash funding for the free travel scheme enjoyed by tens of thousands of elderly and disabled Londoners. Minister...

• Capabilities

  There has been a lot made of the capabilities approach to equality and fairness (see, for example, James Purnell's move to Demos). It has a relatively long heritage, most notably through Amartya Sen (though see this Prospect debate for some other authors and critiques of the main works). In the UK, the Equalities Review of 2007 set out a new single equality concept, rather than one that talked of equality of opportunity or of outcome....

• Volunteering and disabled people

  A recent Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled that disabled people who volunteer cannot claim disability discrimination under the Disability Discrimination Act. So far as I understand the ruling of the case, it relates to the employment status of the individual involved rather than their impairment — it's thus the applicability of the Disability Discrimination Act, rather than the discrimination itself that's in question. This news comes at the same time as Volunteering England has announced it...

• Boris loses another adviser

  To lose one is forgivable. To lose two careless. Three, a serious issue. To lose six key advisers, however — as Boris Johnson has done — belies fundamental and serious issues with the way he runs his administration. The latest adviser to go is from the London Development Agency, for using the n-word in a meeting. As if this wasn't bad enough, the adviser, Nick Hoare, defended himself saying: My boss, Sarah Ebanja, she is...

• Time for a voluntary sector fast stream?

  The public sector employs 52% of all university leavers. By 2014, it is anticipated that 290,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector, which basically means graduates are, well, screwed. So, instead of 22,500 graduates applying for the Civil Service Fast Streams (representing a 33% increase on the previous year), an equivalent in local government and the usual round of graduate schemes at the Big 4, perhaps it's time someone created the Voluntary Sector...

• Mother figures

  Following father figures comes something for mothers or, more specifically, mothers-to-be. A recent study by the National Childbirth Trust revealed that only 4.7% of all pregnant women are offered a choice of where to have their baby. Despite there being 3 options for where a woman can have her baby — in hospital, at a birth centre, or at home — only 11.2% of women live in areas where at least 5% of births happen...

• Father figures

  Earlier this week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission published an interesting report looking at fathers, family and work, as part of their Working Better series. The series explores how the Commission can match the aspirations of people (including parents, carers, disabled people, young and old people) and the choices they are faced with as employees with the needs of employers. The fathers' report has a number of interesting findings. They may have more pertinence...

• The end of entitlement (for poor people)

  A lot of people on the right, such as the Spectator, were excited by Reform's report "The end of entitlement" (pdf) which identifies the costs of 'middle class benefits' to be £31bn and suggests their abolition, providing savings/cuts of £14bn. The benefits include Child Benefit, Child and Working Tax Credits, Retirement Pension, the Winter Fuel Allowance and Statutory Maternity Pay. Reform also goes further to suggest benefit rules and operations should be outsourced to social...

• Doing Seniority Differently: leadership and disabled people

  RADAR has recently published an excellent report, called Doing Seniority Differently, which looks not just the inclusion of disabled people in the workplace, but at the issues of disabled people’s career progression and ensuring there are disabled people in senior positions in a range of organisations. We know that there is a focus (rightly) on gender equality in the workplace, both in terms of pay and ensuring equal representation of women at senior levels across...

• Dave's progression shows his party's regression

  I was pleased to see David Cameron support all-women shortlists. It's a progressive action which is a proportionate action to address the institutional under-representation of women in Parliament. (In fairness, the Tories have to do something about their record on this: only 18 of their 193 Tory MPs are women. Only 28% of all their candidates are women.) But the general reaction of his party was what made me really pleased. This from John Strafford,...

• Legg it

  So far as I can see, the only thing that has distracted newspaper editors and subs from the content of the story regarding Sir Thomas Legg's recommendations on MPs' expenses has been the potential for puns arising from the retired civil servant involved. My own poor and totally unrelated attempt is given above. Why not? The rest of the story is a joke. For the last 20 months, I have been claiming £22.50 for half...

• Equality issues in important matters

  You wouldn't think there'd be much that links the X Factor with the governance of the country, but there is. When Dannii Minogue uses someone's sexuality as the basis of her feedback, as she did to Danyl during Saturday's live show, she was making the same mistake as those people who used the results of Gordon Brown's recent eye test as an opportunity to suggest he is unfit to be Prime Minister: she used something...

• Funding social care for the future

  The future funding of social care will become a key political issue in the next few months. Although I am glad that social care funding will have a tremendous amount of focus on it, I'm unhappy it will become a political issue: it's far too important for that. Let's go through the current situation. There are two, linked drivers for the reform of social care funding: the first is the expected costs of care funding,...

• Disability hate crime

  Fiona and Francesca did not need to die. This is the sad truth of the case of Fiona and Francesca Pilkington, in which a mother killed herself and her disabled daughter after years of abuse. It may seem incredible that one person may choose to abuse or hurt another person on the basis of disability (be it a physical or sensory impairment, a mental health condition, a learning disability or a long-term health condition like...

• Who should pay for higher education?

  The answer to the question 'who should pay for higher education?' is very simple: it should be the people who benefit from it, namely students. This answer is made more pertinent when the well-known expansion of student numbers is taken into account: in the 20 years to 1997 alone, the number of students more than doubled and public funding for higher education increased in real terms by 45% (though as a proportion of GDP it...

• Primary academies

  The Conservatives have suggested that Academy status should be extended to primary schools, and not just secondary. They're right, though aren't applying the principle to the correct schools: it should be weaker primary schools that can move to Academy status, not ones that are good already. Unfortunately, Labour has opposed this. Conor Ryan points out the problem: A clever Labour response would have welcomed the Tory embrace of Labour academies, but argued that part of...

• Too little immigration

  The UK fertility rate is declining in the medium term, which makes the Office for National Statistics predictions of high and sustained net immigration seem at least plausible. However, there is a real risk that declining fertility will create a 'need' for migration which will not be met... If the official predictions are correct, immigration will allow us to maintain the population growth we would have had if we had maintained the fertility rate we...

• Digital inclusion

  This is one of the most interesting slideshows you could possibly spend a few minutes looking through: Digital Inclusion: The Evidence. It starts from the commonly-held assumption that Everyone's using digital technologies ... and then blows that assumption, correctly, out of the water. Some key stats include: — 29% of adults don't use the internet — 25% of adults have never used the internet — 35% of households don't have the internet — 70% of...

• The financial crisis: other consequences II

  I noted in a previous post that this month's Prospect magazine highlights a couple of other consequences of the financial crisis, relating mainly to equality. The first was for women and the fact that the recession is likely to have much longer-lasting impact on them than it will for women. The second, which is potentially more positive, is on developing countries: Yet the economic news for the bottom billion is not as dire as might...

• The financial crisis: other consequences I

  The consequences of the financial crisis reach everywhere; there is seemingly no limit. This month's Prospect magazine, though, highlights a couple of other consequences, relating mainly to equality. The first is for women: This, then, creates the possibility of hysteresis for women [when a recession can have long-lasting effects and not just be cyclical]. Both men and women will lose their jobs in the downturn—and it is too early to be clear on the proportions....

• Protectionism isn't always bad

  There's plenty of criticism following people around who advocate a protectionist policy to help revive national economies, represented by an anti-protectionism push (as advocated by, for example, Gordon Brown). But is protectionism de facto bad? Well, no, not in all cases, as Ha-Joon Chang notes: When big adjustments are needed, temporary protectionism helps to create the breathing space for companies and workers to reinvent themselves... Such mild protectionism can be explicitly time limited. Indeed, evidence...

• Radiohead Shelter

  Radiohead have given permission for one of their tracks to be used in a TV advertising campaign for the first time in a campaign for homeless charity Shelter voiced by Minority Report and Longford actor Samantha Morton. The TV campaign, which breaks later this month, is called "House of Cards" and aims to raise awareness of the fragile housing situation in the UK in the current economic climate. You can see the video here. (Aside:...

• Government intervention

  Iain Dale has this one about right: clean up your own pavements. This is part of a wider point: there's loads of snow, and everyone looks to local government to get it sorted. The banks are buggered, and everyone looks to government to get it sorted. The government says how it would like to get everything sorted, and are accused of being a nanny state. Heh....

• The effect of migrant workers

  Who else to turn to on the question of migrant workers but Chris Dillow? So let's be clear. On average migrant workers do not jeopardize British jobs or wages. Shouldn't politicians and trades unionists be saying this more loudly and clearly? Please, please: read it all....

• Carol Vorderman: One from the bottom (updated)

  As a school governor with Link governor responsibilities for numeracy, I was interested to read today that Carol Vorderman — whose knowledge of maths extends to the numbers round of Countdown, fronting maths textbooks that are written by someone else, publishing sudoku books and, erm, endorsing a debt consolidation company — will chair a Conservative party taskforce developing policies to improve the teaching of maths. None from the top and one from the bottom, eh,...

• "It's ok: I'll be a teacher"

  The economic downturn seems to have brought out the caring side in many: now that their jobs have either gone or are unsafe, many are considering teaching. There are two issues with this: (1) People looking to switch careers don't seem to take account of the fact that teaching is not just a vocation, but a profession; and (2) Teaching is not easy. If there is an increase in the number of people applying to...

• Failing schools, but in what context?

  For me, politics is the fundamental part of building a successful and cohesive society. Furthermore, education is one of, if not the key building block of a successful society, clearly requiring politics to build and maintain a top-class education system. I have fully supported most of the government's education policies over the last 11 years, including league tables and academies and, broadly speaking, think the government has their education policy right (though see here my...

• Interesting Christmas card circular

  Personally, I've never received a Christmas card circular from some distant relatives telling me what they've done in the year gone by and what they'll be doing in the year to come. My loss, obviously. The story of one Christmas circular caught my eye: a stockbroker wrote some thoughts on the economic crisis in a note that accompanied his Christmas cards, and parts of the analysis ended up in the Sunday Times. The story is...

• Why I like Twitter

  I spent most of my Christmas holiday trying to explain to recalcitrant friends and relatives what's so good about Twitter. Below are a few personal reasons why I like Twitter, all of which are quite in addition to the normal reasons someone might cite (e.g. keep in touch with friends, keep track of what I'm doing, keeping up with famous people etc.) The first reason is a nice email I received from a cousin a...

• "Does Brown believe in God?"

  That's the question, as posed by Benedict Brogan: So surely 'tis the season to complete the hat trick: Dave says he does, Nick Clegg says he doesn't. Does Gordon Brown believe in God? A bigwig in the CofE told me the other day he reckons not: "The Prime Minister's Christianity is cultural, and all about social capital. But does he believe? I don't think so." Others have suggested the same to me in recent months....

• The financial crisis: two useful explanations

  Of the many, many explanations of the current financial crisis (both here and in America), these are the 2 I have found the most enlightening: 1. Oliver Kamm: First, governments and central banks didn't constrain the credit expansion of the early years of this decade. This fuelled a destructive property boom, and a huge market in mortgage lending founded on the delusion that house prices always go up. Secondly, financial regulation was badly designed and...

• Mental health advertisement

  This is a good idea: England's first mental health promotion TV campaign is launched today to show how lifestyle choices can boost wellbeing. A commercial is to run five times a day for five days in the Anglia region, in a campaign to show how healthy eating, exercise and maintaining friendships are linked to mental health... Previous campaigns have highlighted mental health problems or stigma but this seeks to "empower individuals to protect and improve...

• The financial crisis: two opposing views

  — The entire system is shafted; capitalism will rot in hell and we'll all be paupers come the revolution, especially those in America (seeing as most of it is their fault anyway) (John Gray) — The system's fine; it's just the people that have been in it for the last few years (Will Hutton) Which side do you come down on?...

• Caring reality

  This sort of thing goes on everywhere, every day: No one tells you anything - what you are entitled to, or where you can go for help. There is just red tape galore, tying us up and strangling us. It's just crazy. We are carers and need to be valued; we save the taxpayer millions every year... The system forces a fight for every basic human right for a person with a disability. The future...

• What the fuck?

  Now it is true that I have been known to overdo the use of 'foul language' but in the circumstances it seems only possible to paraphrase Richard Mottram: We're all fucked: I'm fucked, you're fucked, the whole world's fucked* * Except possibly China and some of the Gulf states** **But including the vast majority of their population, whom are fucked on a daily basis I have been saying that I want to get a qualification...

• TUC requests equal effort

  The Trades Union Congress is calling (subscription required) for voluntary sector organisations to be legally required to produce equality schemes. Appearing to work on the basis that "we have to do it, so why shouldn't everyone else?", the TUC clearly has little idea of what resources are available to voluntary sector organisations and often what the purpose of such organisations is. Equality legislation in this country is proactive and generally excellent, if not slightly disjointed....

• Poverty of aspiration

  I thought I had written about this before, but I hadn't: linked to inequality in education (and elsewhere) is a poverty of aspiration: in essence, pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and the schools that teach them don't aspire to the same things that their better-off counterparts do. Some stats bear this out: — 51% of pupils think that which higher education institution you attend has no impact on earnings — 45% of pupils did not...

• More on genetically modified food (updated)

  I've written before in support of genetically modified food (1, 2). Those of us who take this positive view of gm food are in short, though increasing, supply. And the best advocate we could possibly have to help us with that position? Without a doubt, it is Prince Charles. The heir to the throne claims that gm crops "risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster" and peddles his usual line regarding messing with nature. The reaction...

• The reality of Obama

  After the round-up of Obama-related news, here's the money quote, from John Rentoul: There was a moment last month – it was when Susan Sarandon, the actress, said she might emigrate to Italy or Canada if McCain won – when it seemed essential to the sanity of America that Obama should lose. But, no, it is more important that the daydream should be broken. The idea that there is some kind of clean, different, painless,...

• Still alive?

  Are you still alive and not the innocent victim of a black hole caused by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern? Yes? Thought so. That's because, rightly according to Professor Brian Cox: Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat. For more, see here, here and here....

• Tories: we believe in individual libertarianism, except when we don't

  The Tories are all for individual libertarianism, i.e. government doesn't need to tell people how to behave because they'll make the right choices themselves. So how do they square that belief with the circle of this comment? Councils should consider using their powers to impose a 15 certificate on the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, the Conservatives said today. The Tories seem to be suggesting that parents aren't responsible enough to decide if the...

• Quotation of the week

  There is a fundamental economic illiteracy about British politics that contradicts the idea that Lady Thatcher brought about a revolution in attitudes in this country. Profit is still too often a dirty word. Just as it is still almost universally expected of politicians that they should provide "affordable housing". Yet when the market suddenly provides lower house prices, the cry goes up for politicians to make housing less affordable again. — John Rentoul, as picked...

• So anti-PC we discriminate

  Good stuff from Barbara Ellen: Alternatively, maybe it is time to acknowledge a bizarre cultural shift. That far from being a nation of politically correct scaredy-cats, we have all gone too far in the other direction, becoming so kneejerk anti-PC that any legislation to give minorities a much-needed boost is rubbished before it is given a fair hearing. That in our quest to pooh-pooh 'positive discrimination', we have forgotten that negative discrimination, otherwise plain old...

• Evidence-based policy, at the peril of values (updated)

  There is a thought-provoking post at Stumbling and Mumbling on what role should empirical evidence play in policy making. Chris Dillow's suggested answer is very little, and he makes a strong case for it. By and large, I'm swayed by it, on the basis of the argument made: if the public want one thing but the evidence says another, which should politicians go with? What if the evidence doesn't exist or is too short term...

• Schools: improve or close

  This is the message being sent by the government to schools: if you don't improve, then you must close. This is a tough issue, because there are a large number of factors well outside the control of schools that affect their achievements. There's also a problem with what the government values from a school — concentrating on 5 "good" GSCEs is to focus too narrowly on what schools do for their pupils and the communities...

• A further step to equality in NI

  The always excellent John Rentoul on the Independent's Open House blog: The age of consent for gay men in Northern Ireland is to be made the same as for heterosexuals at 16... I mark this a significant gain in the plus column of Labour achievements....

• "The irrelevance of toff bashing"

  Being the title of an interesting article at First Drafts. Two big quotes: To this day, the number of people bracketed as ‘working class’ by sociologists is falling, while the number identifying as such is rising. And: Moreover, once class becomes understood in cultural terms as opposed to economic ones, no class is ever doomed to the historical dustbin, but can wax and wane over the years. Fair enough. I would describe myself as working...

• God-free zone

  According to Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Britain "cannot become a God-free zone". There's loads in it of interst, but there are two points I'd like to make. First point: in his speech, O'Connor says: I detect among many people a sense of loss, of not being in touch with living sources that can nourish them. They want to live by shared values that can sustain our society but do not know where to find them....

• F*ck 'Ems

  Excuse the vulgarity of the title of this post: some people just have that effect on arbitrary constant. One such example is Foxtons the estate agents, which has been affectionately renamed "Fuck 'Ems" in this household. Not usually being one given to irrationality, the renaming is what feels like one small victory against the proliferation of the agency's minis and their invariably brash drivers found the country over, as well as said estate agent's generally...

• The young and the old

  As a glance at the tabloid newspapers will confirm, England is a nation of overweight, binge-drinking reality TV addicts. But it's also a country of animal-loving, tea-drinking, charity donors, where queuing remains a national pastime and bastions of civilisation, such as Radio 4, are jealously protected. That's the latest Rough Guide, on England. Or rather, in my view, the first paragraph is on young England (roughly less than 30) and the second paragraph is on...

• Typography for people with learning disabilities

  Mencap has recently created, in collaboration with people with learning disabilities, a font which is accessible for everyone to read easily. Mencap has big hopes for the font: FS Mencap will be available for public use, rivaling Arial and Helvetica as the standard accessible font. It is hoped this will make reading easier for thousands. The process for creating the font sounds fascinating, and highlights the importance of typography in communication: Over a three month...

• The London mayoral election voting system

  Voting systems are usually the preserve of psephologists and constitutional anoraks. I'm no psephologist, but I wouldn't argue against anyone that called me the latter. Britain has, to many a person's chagrin, a first-past-the-post voting system. This means the person who gets the most number of votes — be that 1 more or 100,000 more — is the winner. For those that voted for the loser this can feel particularly harsh, especially if there are...

• How will London look in the future?

  The classy Stephen Bayley in the Observer: How will London look if Ken's scheming endures or Boris's or Brian's schemes succeed his? It will be less polluted, whoever wins. Livingstone's form we know: big promises, small deliveries and more tall buildings. Probably more logos, workshops and units too. Boris speaks airily of a leafy Elysium with a return to human-scale architectural quality he will invigilate from his bike. Paddick will advertise and decentralise. Architecture is...

• Racism in Parliament: a Tory issue

  They're letting anybody in nowadays. That's a Conservative Member of Parliament (David Heathcote-Amory) to Dawn Butler, one of two black women MPs (as reported by the Observer). Aside from the fact that being democratically elected is hardly being "let in", it shows that your traditional Conservative will never really understand or promote equality and rights. As if to reinforce this, Heathcote-Amory, in his defence, went on to say the following: The trouble is that feminism...

• Impending food crisis: GM a solution

  The Observer reports on the food crisis: In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s. It's a pressing issue, and one more immediate than climate change (though...

• Doing themselves out of a job

  Who? Mediums, psychics and the like. Why? Because of this: A change in the law could mean mediums, psychics and healers face prosecution if they cannot justify their claims. Two things: (1) I doubt any mediums or psychics can justify their claims; and (2) they didn't see the change in the law coming, did they? I mean, come on: they're having a laugh!...

• Fairness in social housing

  An interim report on a study into social housing allocation, commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Local Government Association, shows that there is no bias towards foreign migrants. Within the findings are the following: — New migrants to the UK over the last five years make up around three per cent of the total UK population but are less than two per cent of the total of those in social housing...

• Independent states for the mega rich?

  Just back from 3 (vidiprinter says - three) weeks holiday. Refreshed but am now paying the price of doing some uni work, where I came across this about the privatisation of public space in Britain, with in particular shopping malls and business areas (see 'MoreLondon') looking to attract the wealthy and get rid of the poor, the implications of which are pretty scary. This relates to/is illogically fueled by a couple of interesting books I...

• White and working class: not a compound problem

  I don't see any reason for the bbc to conflate being white and being working class as reasons combined for the white working class to be in decline. It is very well known, documented, researched and corroborated that being non-white in this country puts you at a disadvantage to being white. In education, for example, as documented in the cre's legacy document, A Lot Done, A Lot to Do: — Black pupils are permanently excluded...

• The Sun on child poverty

  There's a treat waiting for me every Wednesday: in picking up the Guardian for the Society supplement (at 80p), I always round up my spend to a round £1 by picking up a copy of the Sun, too. For 20p, you can't go wrong, and — with a circulation of some 4 million — it's probably a more relevant read in terms of the politics of elections than the Guardian. Having caught up on the...

• Trevor Phillips on Barack Obama

  An article by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, on Barack Obama in this month's Prospect magazine has caused quite a kerfuffle. Here is that kerfuffle in a few, short links: — Healing postponed. The original Trevor Phillips article. — Trevor Phillips: why I'm not backing Obama. Supplementary post at the Prospect First Drafts blog. — Britain's equality chief: Obama will only prolong America's racial divide. The Independent weighs in with...

• Agile? Let's start with good!

  As I wrote the post on party funding late last year, it occurred to me that, though agile government is no bad thing, it would be good if we could just start with good government! At the very least, the recent events show how Politics — and not just politics — can get in the way of the greater good. Let's hope Gordon Brown's evident intent is a sign of surer things to come....

• Human rights: people needed to make the case

  I wrote recently about a survey which showed that few people in Great Britain knew what human rights were covered under the Human Rights Act. In the same survey, there were some similarly interesting findings concerning how people thought the Human Rights Act is used, as well as findings which suggested as to some ways of increasing informed knowledge of human rights in this country. On the one side of the story, there were some...

• What are human rights?

  Some recent survey evidence showed that the understanding of human rights in Great Britain is poor. The survey, by GfK NOP (only privately available at the moment) showed that, although some 97% of respondents had heard the phrase "human rights", some 36% had no knowledge of what human rights are enshrined in UK law. Furthermore, 7% or less mentioned any human rights other than freedom of speech and freedom of worship / religion. These results...

• How much will it cost?

  You have to laugh. A passenger was asked on the bbc news what he made of the above-inflation rises in rail fares. His answer was a sort of question: I don't know how much this is going to cost on top of my annual season ticket. I'm not sure, but given that the average rise in train fares will be around 5%, I reckon it will cost the insightful commuter around, erm, 5% more than...

• Informed debate, not campaigning zeal

  Concerning issues such as the identity card and associated national id database, and the extension of the pre-charge detention period, my natural inclination had always been to trust the government of the day. Thus, I was willing to accept a curtailment of civil liberties in order to meet the need for the government's ability to provide increased security to Great Britain. In time, my position on these issues has changed, and especially so with regard...

• Agile government

  Demos has recently released a joint paper with the State Services Authority in Victoria on "agile government". By this, it means governments should be able to make decisions quickly, allocate resources flexibly, take appropriate risks, access high quality data to understand the environment, and balance short term responsiveness with long term management of uncertainty. Overall, governments should "scan, respond [to] and shape" the environment. It's an interesting piece — indeed, its purpose is to "provoke"...

• Capturing innovation

  I noted the Young Foundation's recent publication, In and Out of Sync, in a recent post on innovation in the voluntary and community sector. This month's Public magazine (concerning management of the public sector, published by the Guardian) has a brief article based on the same publication. It rightly highlights that it isn't good enough to just create and expand a social enterprise — the learning and innovation that comes from such organisations needs to...

• What should education teach us?

  Via normblog comes this thoughtful article on what education — and specifically a university education — should achieve. The argument of the article's author, Anthony Kronman, is that the concentration of academics on developing a specialism in order to focus on their research output, as well as the "careerist anxieties" of students, have both contributed to a decline in universities enabling students to consider what living is for. Put more simply: [University] is a time...

• Genetically modified food: not bad at all

  I've always been slightly skeptical of organic food, and nodded in approval when David Miliband highlighted that organic food is more an issue of lifestyle than health. Similarly, I've always been slightly baffled by the reputation and reception of genetically modified (gm) food. An excellent article in the continually excellent Prospect magazine (1 and 2) highlights why that bafflement has been justified. A few points in the article stand out, including the fact that no...

• "Ugly" society

  Ever the pessimist, arbitrary constant felt some resonance emanating from the Ecologist magazine's cover story. Here's the Observer's summary of that story: [This is] what is wrong with British society: superficiality, selfishness, social fragmentation, hypocrisy, disempowerment and the destruction of nature. What makes for ugliness? Bagged salad, fake tans, reality television, mobile phones, wheelie bins and discarded chewing gum all make the list. All very valid items that belong to this shopping list of social...

• Popular racism

  The Observer reported over the weekend that Keith Jarrett, a senior police officer, has urged police to stop and search more people from ethnic minorities, in order to address inner-city gun and knife crime. A few days ago, I noted the comment of a Times reader who thought that no one, these days, is racist. I'd challenge that reader to read through the following, reader recommended comments on the bbc's Have Your Say and still...

• "Beyond the point of acceptable debate"

  The Science Museum has cancelled a talk that the scientist James Watson was to give this week because he said that black people were less intelligent than white people. In doing so, it has got it both exactly right and exactly wrong. In denying Dr Watson the platform it had originally offered him — from which he could further espouse his deplorable views — the Science Museum is right. (Oliver Kamm has highlighted the example...

• Double devolution and back again

  The increasing and future importance of the voluntary and community sector is encapsulated within the phrase "double devolution". This essentially involves central government giving more power to local government and local government giving power to local people, the latter often brought together into some sort of collective or voluntary organisation. Voluntary organisations are often able to be incredibly innovative in the work that they do because, although funding is often tight, they provide a service...

• "Taxing the naturally successful"

  I was just thinking. Can I claim sex discrimination against a company, because I don't get maternity pay because I'm a male. No? This doesn't sound any different to saying that a woman can claim discrimination because she's more junior than the men because of time she took off for children. Why don't we just admit that almost noone [sic] these days is racist or sexist, and admit that the combined equality organisation is just...

• Using human rights to challenge poor treatment

  I wrote here recently about how legislation can help impact positively on the ability of public services to deliver a better and more efficient service to its users. That legislative mechanism is known as the Disability Equality Duty. Similarly, legislation exists that can have a positive impact on individuals' lives — this is the Human Rights Act. A useful, short document of how the Human Rights Act can work in practice — in the public...

• Public services at the crossroads

  Decentralisation can only happen if local government and the public service workforce take on the challenge of becoming more ambitious, more accountable and more responsive to their users and their local public. Meanwhile, we also need to engender new behaviours and attitudes on the part of citizens and service users themselves. As well as being equipped with the information, capabilities and support necessary to navigate and govern their services, the public should also be encouraged...

• The new Equality and Human Rights Commission — a beginning (updated)

  Today sees the start of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission (echr). The new Commission brings together the 3 previous rights-based commissions — the drc, eoc and cre — and has a mandate to champion equality and human rights for all. Information on the new Commission can be found at its website — equalityhumanrights.com — but this is what it is seeking to achieve: [T]o eliminate discrimination, reduce inequality, protect human rights and...

• Creating responsive public services

  Public service reform is near constant and an important part of the political sphere of British life. The difference between the politics of reform and what happens on the ground — your and my interactions with the local council, schools or hospital, for example, — is often marked: the two feel divorced from each other. What is more, the distance between law as stated in the legislation, which enacts policy, and public services on the...

• Spacebook

  Facebookers! Are you interested in any of the following: ending the early release scheme for prisoners, tougher sentencing, streaming by ability in schools, a tax cut 'for families', additional taxes on polluters, emergency pension funds, or having more police on the beat. What's that? No, you're not? You're just interested in poking your friends, writing on their wall and giving each other free cyber-gifts? Oh, well, erm, right then. This being the case, perhaps David...

• Silence is healthy

  I was pleased to read the following this week: Thousands of people in Britain and around the world are dying prematurely from heart disease triggered by long-term exposure to excessive noise, according to research by the World Health Organisation. Coronary heart disease caused 101,000 deaths in the UK in 2006, and the study suggests that 3,030 of these are caused by chronic noise exposure, including to daytime traffic... Research published in recent years has shown...

• Quotation of the week

  Lawyers are all right, I guess... I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys' lives and...

• On Wikipedia

  The news that staff of the Australian Primer Minister have made numerous edits to "potentially damaging entries" will be music to Oliver Kamm's ears. Oliver has been one of the keenest critics of Wikipedia and, though trenchantly argued, many of his points are good ones. It is true that Wikipedia relies on the wisdom of crowds, that a lot of the articles are useless and that Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an...

• Quotation of the week

  The "quotation of the week" has lapsed on arbitrary constant. This post aims to re-introduce it with the following long quotation from Raymond Chandler's The Long Good-bye: There's a peculiar thing about money[.] In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of...

• Wots it all about

  As both Rich and the slightly less esteemed people at the RSA get all introverted about the internet, blogging and it's place in society, I'm just starting to get into Facebook. What with me being entirely against all of this slightly creepy virtual world, this is something of a development. These debates made me recall a hypothetical scenario proposed by a Government debating initative about the potential future directions of science and technology called Science...

• Child poverty and disability

  Figures showing a 200,000 rise in UK children living in relative poverty last year have been described as a "moral disgrace" by Barnardo's. The children's charity said ministers were a long way from honouring a pledge to halve child poverty by 2010. In 2005-6 3.8m children were in poverty - in homes on less than 60% of average income including housing costs. But Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton said "considerable progress" had been made...

• Dissassembling Dacre

  So, you're the head of the most widely read and influential newspaper in the country, you earn £1.2m a year (that's twice what the BBC director general earns), you never talk on the record and in your first public announcement for years, decide to launch a vicious, bile filled attack (what else from the Mail) on the BBC, which only the most insane conspiracy theorist would sign up to. (Although I am in no way...

• Out of my skin

  Channel 4's latest titilation-a-thon skins , which starts this Thursday, is (hopefully) a tit-a-minute saga about, well seemingly, swearing, sex, drugs and booze. All of which is absolutely fine by me. However, being of the vintage that I am, I'm worried that this could be the first instance of me feeling a bit out of touch with the kids. Obviously not the first instance, but one which could bring unwanted clarity to the passing of...

• Up the arse of those that want them dead

  The title of this post is an excellent phrase from Martin Amis in a recent Q&A with readers of the Independent (and which comes via norm). The rest of the Q&A is here, though this is the particularly good Q&A: What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best? The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying,...

• Saddam's hanging

  Justifiably, there has been a lot of coverage of Saddam's hanging. Though I do not resile from anything I have said before on this, I do think that there was something of an underestimation of what the literal process of hanging would entail — namely jeering and people being glad Saddam was to die — that has led to something of an over-reaction to the mobile phone video footage that has been released on the...

• Rise of the extreme right

  There has been quite a bit of coverage concerning the far right in Europe, and the UK in particular, of late. Some time ago I wrote an essay on what has caused this recent "wave" of extremism in Europe, which is reproduced below. It's a bit dry but will, it is hoped, be of interest. There are a range of established theories that seek to explain the recent "fairly strong wave of right-wing extremism washing...

• Right person, wrong subject no. 3: Elton John

  Continuing this very occasional series — entries one and two can be found here: number 1 and number 2 — that celebrates experts or artists in a specific field using the fact of that expertise to make an inappropriate, uninformed or plainly ridiculous statement in a field on which they have no knowledge, we today have Mr Elton John on the subject of religion. Take it away, Reg: From my point of view I would...

• Watching campuses

  Following on from my last post, I'd like to express both worry and delight in the way in which university campuses appear to be vital to the efforts of many disparate groups and organisations. The first example of such behaviour is Ruth Kelly's recent request for a "campus extremism watch", in which academics have been asked to watch out for extremists on campuses and report suspicious people to the authorities. In asking for such vigilance,...

• On religious belief and a secular society

  The subject of this post is easily stated: can — and should — a secular society accommodate religious belief? This subject is inspired by an article in PPR by Julian Baggini (subscription required) and the answer offered here, as there, is: yes it can but no it shouldn't. To do this I'll first, provide some definitions of secularism and atheism, which will lead to a discussion of why atheism — though suffering from a natural...

• Category of leader

  Thanks go to Stef for his posts over the last couple of weeks. I hope that he will consider writing here more often in future and will update readers on that in the near future. I'd like to pick up some of the themes Stef has established here recently, and consider especially some of the "right-of-left-of-centre" ideas he hasn't espoused. There's also some fun stuff to catch up on, including my total inability to predict...

• On A-Levels

  I'm not going to add to the chorus that polishes off its song book and sings the song of exams getting easier at this time of year. Instead, let us note the news in today's papers which highlights One in three employers have to give their staff remedial lessons in basic English and maths. For me, this points to the reason why there is such a predictable response from a large proportion of the British...

• Distinguishing

  I'm pleased to see the resurgence in the numbers of students taking maths at AS- and A-Level. Maths is, I'm afraid to say, a great subject for anyone willing to move beyond their basic fear of it. I'm not going to go into whether or not A-Level exams are easier now than they used to be. But I will offer for your consideration some information, and will follow that information with a question. I spent...

• 18.23 miles per hour

  The bbc reports that the average commuter spends 139 hours a year travelling to and from work. Taking these commuters to have a generous leave entitlement of 30 days a year, that's not much more than 37 minutes a day travelling to and from work — my implication being that 37 minutes a day is not much. Londoners average 225 hours a year commuting, which is almost exactly one hour per working day. Given that...

• On compulsory turnout

  The institute for public policy research (ippr) recently released a paper entitled "A Citizen's Duty: voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout" [1], which makes the case for compulsory turnout in the face of decreasing election turnout and voter inequality. Although the arguments made in the paper would be effective in increasing turnout, this post will argue that compulsory turnout (even with the chance to purposely abstain from voting) is an artificial measure that...

• Quotation of the week

  Conventional military operations against states cannot remove the threat of further attacks by networks that no state controls. — John Gray (in False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism)...

• Bottled water: in the mind

  Thames Water is currently losing some 864m litres of water a day through its dilapidated pipes, an enormous waste which is only underlined by their face-saving advertisement campaign. Thames Water's issues are based in engineering, whereas the public's relationship with water — specifically bottled water — is all based in the mind. Consider the following: the British public spent £1.5bn on 1.7bn litres of bottled water last year. It might be a "lament that resurfaces...

• 8%

  You wouldn't believe me if I said that the power to reduce the uk's domestic energy requirement lay at your fingertips — but it does. As widely reported in the press in the context of the government's plans to commission a new generation of nuclear power stations, 8% of all domestic electricity usage is currently used by appliances that are on stand-by [1]. A fact sheet (.pdf) produced by the International Energy Agency explains exactly...

• On Madeleine Bunting

  Whilst I am invoking far better writers than me to make cases against writers I don't much care for, it would be remiss of me not to mention Madeleine Bunting (on the back of the recent announcement that she is to become the director of Demos). Norman Geras — of the inimitable normblog — has long commented on Bunting's peculiar notion that "the root cause [...] of a lot of the world's troubles is liberalism"...

• Open Spaces

  Note: this is a guest post by Paul Canning I'm very lucky that the business park where I work backs onto the River Mole and a large parcel of common land which is there for no other reason than the enjoyment of the general public. For those of you who don't know Leatherhead (which will be most of you), it's a pleasant if unremarkable town whose most significant achievement was probably getting its own junction...

• Tough treatment

  In a recent issue of the Economist was to be found this gem:Saddam Hussein said he had gone on hunger strike to protest against tough treatment he is receiving during his trial.Tough treatment. The only tough treatment he has encountered is that he inflicted on the many thousands of Iraqis tortured under his regime (of which this is one example)....

• Shitty necessity

  There was a challenging article on the subject of breastfeeding published in the Guardian recently. For the first time in my adult life I encountered a breastfeeding mother today. Far from being offended by this, I was quite enamoured by the quite cute sounds made by the baby — sounds which could accurately be described as "gurgling". What I was offended by, however, was the changing of a soiled nappy just after the breastfeeding. Although...

• 10 reasons

  Posting will still be light until early next week but I wanted to draw attention to the following since it is a time-dependent issue. There is a Stop the War Coalition demonstration tomorrow — Saturday — in which 10,000 people will have considered their 10 reasons for being there. I won't be joining them, for the very good reason that I supported the War in Iraq and continue to support the Iraqis' fight for democracy....

• Fine?

  There's nothing people love more than having a good moan over some disproportionate fine issued for a seemingly innocuous reason, is there? A teenager is refusing to pay an £80 on-the-spot fine imposed by a police officer who overheard him swearing in a private conversation with friends. An Essex man who threw chips out of his car window has received fines for littering from two councils because they fell across both districts. A motorist has...

• Freedom of speech? Not in marketing

  You couldn't help but notice the fuss over freedom of speech of late. A recent article (subscription required) in the Economist, though, highlights an interesting related topic known as "ambush-marketing" in which non-sponsors piggy-back on a big sporting event that has already been sponsored, often by a competitor. For example, [a]t the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Nike handed out caps at transport hubs that spectators wore into the stadium—to the consternation of Reebok, a sponsor....

• Hunting and class

  Fox hunting. It was basically about class, wasn't it? Dick Cheney shoots a guy in the head. That was basically about how the US and the UK shouldn't have gone to war against Iraq, wasn't it? No? Well, I'd agree with you on that. Actually, Vice President Cheney's recent difficult in identfiying the difference between an animal and a lawyer could lead to warfare of a different nature — class warfare, says (subscription required) the...

• David Irving and freedom of speech

  The recent Austrian trial of David Irving, the Holocaust denier, came at a difficult time for defenders of freedom of speech. How can someone who has used his freedom of speech to say, amongst other things, that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a "fairytale" and that Adolf Hitler protected the Jews, actually be entitled to say such things? My answer would be as follows: within the boundaries of the law, freedom of speech does not...

• Yeah but...

  Harry is right on the money on what amounts to an unhealthy dose of hypocrisy in Britain — as represented by the British media.The British media and to some degree public opinion does seem to be rather expert in this ‘yeah, but’ attitude to scandals. Two weeks ago the question was raised if it is acceptable for a journalist to disguise himself as an oil sheikh and secretly tape and then publish and broadcast a...

• The world’s most famous violinist

  Norm links to a story about Nigel Kennedy - the "world's most famous violinist" and possibly one of the world's most famous Aston Villa supporters too (aside from this bloke). I met Nigel Kennedy in a restaurant in Guildford once. Or rather, I didn't meet him so much as watch him trying to control his young son running around the place in a Spider-man outfit whilst a reasonable number of beleaguered eaters tried to finish...

• Our Lady of Fatima

  Sister Lucia, the last of three shepherd children who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary appear in 1917, has died. The story is one of the best-known instances of holy visitations bestowed upon us mere mortals, and laid the foundation for the scenes of delirious nonsense in Fellini's La Dolce Vita.Between May and October, 1917, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three shepherd children in the fields outside the village of...

• Don’t make me laugh

  Janet Street-Porter on the new American television import Desperate Housewives in today's Independent, under the headline "The banality of American popular culture":From The Office to Little Britain, the best television in the world starts here [the UK]. We are capable of constantly reinventing formats, revisiting classic series, and pushing the boundaries of taste with reality television and original documentaries.This from one of the Z-list celebrities who took part in the third series of I'm A...

• Sound and fury

  Howard Jacobson's article in the Independent's Iraq one year anniversary "special" has really hit home. I have always respected Jacobson's pieces and for a long time bought the Independent on a Saturday for the sole reason that it was the only place to find his weekly column. His article highlights for me everything that was wrong with the mass demonstrations concerning the war, which forms a smaller part of the problems with society - I...

• Same-sex marriages

  An article in today's Independent reveals that same-sex marriages are on the increase and are apparently becoming big business. Nearly 1000 couples have "tied the knot" since partnership ceremonies were introduced two years ago:Although partnership ceremonies have no legae effect, that will change if if the Civil Partnership Bill announce in the Queen's speech is passed. Same-sex couples who legally register their relationship will have the same rights on tax, benefits, inheritance, property and pensions...