I wrote a piece at the New Statesman's CityMetric on the current state of the UK's railways (spoiler: not that bad, you just don't like your commute), and a really stupid proposal by the government's Competition & Markets Authority to ruin them. Go and read it, if you like.
Banditry
Like most countries founded by people with a passionate and blind terror that they might at some point be subjected to democracy, Australia has a Senate with more-or-less absolute veto power over its House of Representatives. As in many federal countries, Australian Senators are allocated on a state-by-state basis, not on a citizen-by-citizen basis. The result is that … Continue reading My preference is that the clown show leaves town
Because I am a naive optimist, when I migrated various defunct blog archives from elsewhere to here, I assumed that running them on auto-updated WordPress would be fine. This was a stupid move. Not specifically because WordPress is bad, but because everything is bad, and hacking is easy. And, of course, happened. After several months … Continue reading Dropping the dynamic, because everything is awful
I've got a piece up at the New Statesman's Citymetric on why, although it sounds nice, a freeze on London public transport fares would actually be a rather bad idea.
Extremely sad to hear about the sudden unexpected death of long-time friend, crony and partner in crime Tom Barry, of BorisWatch and @boriswatch fame. Tom provided exactly the kind of hard-nosed, subject-expert and ruthless research and writing into London's terrible mayor and supine general assembly that nobody in traditional local journalism has (bothered to do / had time for) … Continue reading He was watching the defectives
Congratulations, the US Supreme Court, for making a sensible decision based on Constitutional precedent that horrendous rightwing idiots will pretend is overreach until long after we're all dead. To celebrate, here is a nostalgic musing on religion in education. There was a strange Welsh Baptist chemistry teacher at my high school who ran a renegade version … Continue reading Today we’re all gay Americans
This is a very sentimental post. My last surviving grandparent died today. She was born in Caerphilly (better than being born carelessly, I guess) as Peggy Jean Jenkins. Not as Margaret Jenkins, that'd be boring. And because Wales, she was never called Peggy Jean by anyone; she was Meg from birth. Her husband, who died last year, was … Continue reading Meg Williams, a woman of all importance
One of the most interesting questions after the 2015 UK General Election is, how could all of the electoral polling possibly have gone so incredibly wrong? Labour and the Conservatives were predicted to be neck-and-neck and both short of forming a government on their own, with Labour losing about 50 seats in Scotland to the Scottish Nationalist … Continue reading There was no late swing, and there were no shy Tories
There was a massive fuss last week about the UK Greens' plan to restrict the term of copyright to 14 years, whilst also replacing the current benefits system with a guaranteed basic income that would prevent people with other things to do being forced into paid employment [1]. Suddenly, left-leaning writers who generally claim to … Continue reading On copyright laws and basic economics
The UK's New Economics Foundation, who style themselves as nef because that's the sort of thing that was cool in 2003, are one of the worst think-tanks going [1]. With a couple of weeks to go before the 2015 General Election, they have jumped on the election news bandwagon. Their effort is well up to their normal … Continue reading FPTP doesn’t mean your vote is wasted – just ask a Scot