There's editor Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh); G2 editor Clare Margetson (Marlborough); political editor Patrick Wintour (Westminster); economics editor Larry Elliott (St Albans); environment editor John Vidal (St Bees); fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley (City of London School for Girls); US editor Janine Gibson (Walthamstow Hall); literary editor Clare Armitstead (Bedales); film critic Peter Bradshaw (Haberdashers' Aske's); theatre critic Michael Billington (Warwick); associate editor Madeleine Bunting (Queen Mary's, Yorkshire); as well as columnists Jonathan Freedland (University College School); Seumas Milne (Winchester); Sinon Jenkins (Mill Hill); George Monbiot (Stowe); Tanya Gold (Kingston Grammar); Timothy Garton Ash (Sherborne); Chris Huhne (Westminster); Zoe Williams (Godolphin and Latymer) and of course Polly Toynbee (Badminton), who also sent tow of her own children to private school.The Eye also tells us that "it is written into the paper's union-ratified rulebook that staff posted abroad are entitled to have their children educated at the paper's expense - a perk most hacks take up".
"the later 19th century and early 20th century, when access to politics was restricted, and you couldn't afford to be in politics unless you had quite a lot of money, and it was expected that the aristocracy played a certain role. That diminished in the 20th century but it has reasserted itself for slightly different reasons. Class plays a role, but these people are more middle-class and they have the skills of their parents and networks. They're not from grand families, but they are from well-connected families."He adds that the political world isn't the only place where this is happening – journalism is another, and law.
"It's not a good thing that politics, or any profession, is open to certain people and not others."
But, at the same time, no particular social policy would necessarily follow from this fact. Some people might say: "Well, if this group is born less intelligent than that, society need devote less of its resources to educating it." But others might with equal justification say: "On the contrary, if they are born less intelligent society needs to devote more of its resources to educating them."
It would, in other words, be entirely open to people what policy decision they were led to by the same fact.Boris Johnson tries to get over this important point by using words like "species" to give his arguments a spurious appearance of science. But as Stumbling and Mumbling shows, he has misunderstood how IQ is calculated.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome over 900 Liberals from across the EU and beyond here to London's Canary Wharf.
The European Liberal family includes three current prime ministers and over a quarter of European Commissioners are Liberals. Liberal parties are in government in 16 different European countries, as well as being the third largest political group in the European Parliament.
This family is a truly formidable fighting force – and we British Liberal Democrats benefit massively from being part of it.
A word to the wise. Don’t fall asleep outside the building or Clegg will have you deported.
That one third is a minority but it is a considerably larger one than that which has ever voted Liberal Democrat. It is the obvious pool in which the party should be fishing.
The pro-European vote has effectively been abandoned in previous elections, perhaps on the assumption that it had nowhere much else to go. Not merely can that vote be awakened but it is essential that it is awakened ahead of any referendum eventually happening.At present Nick Clegg is veering between this approach and one that seeks to appeal to everyone. When pursuing the latter he talks about the centre, but in the case of immigration at least, he locates that centre far to the right.
"It's less friendly because of its sheer size... It's less homely than the Department for Transport. But it's a key government department and I'm happy to be there."And:
"Like the Generation Game, you can see these events coming past you and you have to work out what to do."But Norman told MPs he was "happy". Didn't he do well?
The age of the tram in Swindon was a brief but colourful chapter in the history of the town which included an early tragedy, a period of great success and finally a surrender to the more effective - though much less picturesque - method of public transport, the bus.
I remember coming back one night from Oxford, around four in the morning, and as we came in over the bridge into Central station I could see the lights and the open door. Walking down the street and in through the door, the jukebox was playing and there were two dancing couples.
There had been a good take-in from the till, and the coffee was still good and hot and fresh. There was blood on the floor, and the dirt from a fast night.
It was an oasis in a city of the dead. The only place open and exclusive; the sort of place where I could feel proud at being a customer.
participants watch awe-inspiring scenes from BBC’s Planet Earth documentary series or neutral video clips from a news interview. Afterward, the participants were asked how much awe they felt while watching the video, and whether they believed that worldly events unfold according to some god’s or other non-human entity’s plan.
Overall, participants who had watched the awe-inspiring video tended to believe more in supernatural control, and were more likely to believe in God when compared with the news-watching group. This effect held even when awe-inspiring but impossible scenes, such as a massive waterfall through city streets, were presented.
Another study showed that participants who watched the awe-inspiring clips became increasingly intolerant of uncertainty. This particular mindset - a discomfort with uncertainty - may explain why feelings of awe produce a greater belief in the supernatural.
He was a person, not a personality… You never get the feeling that he'd pined all his life to stand in front of a camera. He was doubting and melancholic and vulnerable…. It's a voice full of quiet despair. The repetitively falling cadence suggests an acute awareness of human impermanence and death's proximity.By contrast, Meades programmes are tightly written and, as Brown puts it, tightly choreographed. Even the scripts can make you laugh out loud.
The combination of the two voices at the start of this canticle, held over a luminous piano accompaniment of almost pure stillness, is one of the most magical moments in all of Britten’s vocal writing, especially if experienced in performance. There is a static reverence that is rarely found in any music up to this point, let alone Britten’s, as the voice of God is heard – but afterwards it is possible to hear the influence of this writing in the devotional music of John Tavener and Arvo Pärt.A lesser composer would surely have found a baritone to sing God.
"Someone, somewhere, has found £600m a year we didn’t know about down the back of a filing cabinet and has come up with the brilliant brainwave that the best way to spend it is to give a free school meal to all five, six and seven year olds - regardless of their income level. I am sitting there, gawping in open-mouthed astonishment."Harvey also considers how the party may react if the next general election again produces a hung parliament:
"I don’t think you should take it as read there would be a stampede to join a coalition again," he cautions. "I think there would be serious debate to be had inside the Lib Dems as to whether we would do better to remain outside of government and let them form a minority government."He and the interviewer between them also make a point that those who are debating which other party we should form a coalition with must take on board:
"We won’t get the choice. We don’t need to trouble ourselves. We are talking about a fluke within a fluke." This is because the Lib Dems will stick to the line that the party which wins the most votes and most seats will get the first chance to form a government. And it is also unlikely that the electoral maths will enable the Lib Dems to pick which larger party to drag over the finish line.But for me the most important point Harvey makes is one not picked out by the headline writer. Because he questions the deal that was struck to form the Coalition:
"It was completely unacceptable to ask a national political party like the Lib Dems to come into government on a comprehensive deal and then have some departments in which there is no Lib Dem minister," he says. "Why on earth should we support any executive action or any legislation which came form a department in which we don’t have a minister, it's absolutely preposterous."
"If you don’t agree with something don’t agree to it," Harvey says, slapping his leg for emphasis. "In the nature of the horse trading that has gone on we have agreed to a lot of things that we don’t basically agree with and I don’t think we would make that same mistake again."I am hearing reports of disquiet on the Liberal Democrat backbenches at the moment.They are such a disparate bunch that you suspect there may be as many reasons for this as there are backbenchers.
Imagine an English classical music composer who is so famous in his own lifetime that his name is known throughout the country, who is the first British composer to end his life as a peer of the realm, a composer from whom the BBC uniquely commissions a prime-time new opera for television, and whose every important new premiere is a national event, a recording of one of which – though it is 90 minutes long – sells 200,000 copies almost as soon as it is released, and a musician whose death leads the news bulletins and the front pages.I hardly knew anything about classical music in 1976, but I was 16 and it surprises me that I can remember nothing about Britten's death.
What you'll hear from Marion is an insight into a rarely seen side of the composer's character: his humour, his "terrible schoolboy jokes", his generosity, his competitive streak – he hated losing at tennis, which he would play on his grass court at the Red House in Aldeburgh – and what it was like to play duets while sitting next to him on the piano stool. Marion – who first married George Harewood, and after Harewood left her (Britten supported Marion throughout), married Jeremy Thorpe – was herself a fine pianist who would go on to found the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition.
Tory peer calls for clampdown on mooning after 40 schoolkids expose their backsides at him and wifeThe peer in question was the Conservative Lord James of Blackheath. The rest of his speech was even more bizarre.
In its wisdom, the Times ... is pursuing, to a ludicrous degree, the cause of cyclists to the point where they are creating a new and separate society in London, in which cyclists think they have a superior law and control over everybody in a motor car. This is going to lead to some catastrophic accidents very soon.
On three mornings, driving up the A3 in the Balham and Clapham area, I have seen cyclists put their cycles up against the central reservation—not the line where the bus lane is—stand in the middle of the road with a camera and defy you to run them down while they photograph you doing it. That is what they are longing for.How one warms to those schoolchildren!
It’s a shame because there is an interesting speech to be made about the prospects for a National Liberal party, one which brings together the Orange Bookers, the Blairites and the Cameroons. There would be disagreements over civil liberties, but on the economy, public services, the environment and Europe they would have more in common with each other than with their current parties. Tribal loyalties, combined with our stultifying electoral system which inhibits new parties, means such an alliance is unlikely to come to pass.To which I say is thank goodness for tribal loyalties.
The idea of Monty Python reforming is like the prospect of a great band getting back together: they're the ultimate comic supergroup. The Led Zeppelin of comedy.
The technology used by Britain's spy agencies to conduct mass surveillance is "out of control", raising fears about the erosion of civil liberties at a time of diminished trust in the intelligence services, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown.
The peer said it was time for a high-level inquiry to address fundamental questions about privacy in the 21st century, and railed against "lazy politicians" who frighten people into thinking "al-Qaida is about to jump out from behind every bush and therefore it is legitimate to forget about civil liberties". "Well it isn't," he added.
Since 1918, women have been more likely to be MPs in towns and cities than in rural constituencies. This at least partly reflects the tendency for Labour seats to be in urban areas and the higher number of women Labour MPs, compared with other parties. But women MPs have also tended to cluster in constituencies in some of the UK’s biggest cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.
"Press the horn, then, and fetch your father so that he can move and let our friends through. You've no right to park your car right there. Why don't you leave it on the road where it belongs?"
"Friends! Percy sneered. "They can't be your friends. They're gipsies."
Malcolm Saville Lone Pine Five (1949)It is not just that the Gypsies Reuben and Miranda are good characters in the early Lone Pine stories: it is that you can tell other characters worth by their attitudes towards them. Good characters like the Gypsies, but the baddies hate them.
Malcolm Saville had clearly met a Romany group and was determined to break down a stereotype by presenting them as noble savages, almost as middle class. “Peter soon learned that she really had found fine friends in these wandering Romanies, who were so different from the rascally van-dwellers which many people miscalled gypsies” (Neglected Mountain, p.145). His Romany family only had one child (the norm is one a year), and paid its way (no stealing). The narratives gives many opportunities for expressing prejudice and breaking it down. The result is worthy, even if inaccurate.By contrast, Gyspies tend to be villains in Enid Blyton's work. Yet, as Stephen Bigger point out, she and Saville were writing only a few years after Gypsies had been the victims of genocide under the Third Reich.
"I want to tell you what the Conservative party is doing, what we're up to, give you behind-the-scenes access so you can actually see what policies we're developing, the things that we are doing, and have that direct link ... watch out BBC, ITV, Channel 4, we're the new competition. We're a bit shaky and wobbly, but this is one of the ways we want to communicate with people properly about what the Conservative party stands for."
In the southernmost corner of Crystal Palace Park are thirty life-size models of prehistoric monsters, installed in 1854: the first dinosaur theme park, a pedagogic entertainment. I have been a loyal visitor to them ever since I was in my teens. I have marvelled at them, filmed them, persuaded visitors to this city that the trip to its deepest recesses is worthwhile.It had an impact on me because I have seen these creatures in one of my favourite films, Our Mother's House. As I wrote in a post on a "horror week" on the BBC, this sort of domestic horror is important for our understanding of the culture wars of the 1960s.
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| Photo of Jumbo by David Hawgood |
When I was knocking at one house I had called at a few minutes before, and started chanting at me. A rhyme about being a Catholic and about where I could shove my rosary beads. I have never been on the receiving end of discriminatory hate before and it is, even for a thick-skinned politician, a really unpleasant experience.Surely bigotry is most often encountered in clashes between different religious groups? Again, it seems unfair to pin it on atheists.
The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the Prime Minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.
Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.
But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.
It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which had been role model for Cameron and Osborne's "open source politics".Computer Weekly also tells you how the Tories did it, but there is some good news:
The Internet Archive was unavailable for comment. But a fortnight after Computer Weekly started asking its San Francisco HQ for an explanation, the Conservative speeches have begun reappearing on its site.This suggests we should not trust anyone - certainly not political parties and certainly not Conservatives - with keeping the only copy of their own archives.
the rise of the mainstream blogging has crowded out most of the amateurs. Many are still blogging, but look down the 2008 list of top 100 political blogs compiled by Total Politics magazine – and compare it with who the most influential online political voices are today – and you’ll get a sense of how the caravan has moved on. Talent will out, of course. But if you want your blog to get noticed now, best to develop a niche in which you’re an expert (such as Simon Wren-Lewis in economics or Tom Bennett in education, or of course your local neighbourhood if you’re a campaigner) — or else land yourself some kind of paid gig.As several people pointed out in reply - Stephen helpfully linked to some of them in a later post - amateur blogging is alive and well.
