Monkey see, monkey infer – “Monkeys keep turning out to be smarter than people think they are”. And funnier. He he he! Monkeys!

Over the last nine years, it’s become a pretty standard rhetorical trick to compare the progress of the Conservative party with that of Labour’s years in wilderness during the 1980s. David Cameron bangs on endlessly about the party’s need to come to terms with the modern world, while pundits endlessly debate whether the party has yet had the “clause 4 moment” that will symbolize its break with the past. “Oh, I think Cameron was a mistake,” someone said to me the other day. “They’ve chosen a Blair when they needed a Kinnock.” Read More

Passport weirdness – born in Britain with a British father? Sorry, not British enough…

Is there any problem with the way that the ‘foreign prisoners’ issue has been discussed in most of the media in the UK? In my view, emphatically, yes. Is it an appropriate policy response to the accusation of not having competently managed the existing procedures for managing the deportation or release of foreign prisoners for Clarke and Blair to suggest a tougher regime’? Emphatically, no. Read More

London council performance data Library visits per capita, and everything else you could possibly want to know ahead of the local elections.

Don’t confuse “the economy” with “the interests of those who hold economic power”

I’ve written before that I’m not a huge fan of direct democracy, not in the sense of doing away with MPs and replacing them with referenda. Fatally, demand-revealing governance hands more power to the rich, then compounds the error by legitimizing it. This is unacceptable.

I prefer a proportional representation system like open-list PR or a preference voting system like STV. However, as suggested by theorists of deliberative democracy, we do need more (and different) voter engagement. Read More

Jack Off – never mind the White Stripes, Coke really isn’t it.

BBC “must improve Mid-East view” – one to keep the Biased BBC crowd happy

The Top 50 (or so) Labour Sleaze Scandals
Iain Dale is compiling a book of the cream of New Labour scandals. Bob Piper is not happy.