An assessment of Labour’s performance on poverty measures. Better than the usual halfwitted rants…

Birchill on Tesco: actually quite good

It appears The People, or at least that subset of The People that post on acrimonious talk boards and read tabloid newspapers, are getting annoyed by immigration.

This comment from this Commentisfree thread is a typical summary, directed at the kind of woolly liberals who think that offering a home to the poor and the persecuted might actually be a good thing:

You and others like you always take the moral high ground when it comes to defending the rights of illegal economic migrants, irrespective of their impact on the lives of ordinary working people, whom you know next to nothing about and I suspect care even less.

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Religion is not oppressed by secular society (and Christina Odone is a paranoid loon)

British Muslims have exactly the same values as the rest of us. Fact.

If you run a broadcasting organisation, you hire a journalist who discovers that the government is misleading the public in order to justify a foreign war (but who makes his report in a slightly exaggerated fashion, even though that has no impact on the substance of the accusations), and you back him up in the early stages of the subsequent investigation, then that is a resigning matter.

If you are the producer of a kids’ TV show, your external phone lines go down during a phone-in, and you put a child from the studio audience on the line instead of abandoning the item (or if you decide the audience has picked a silly name for a cat, and go with their second choice), then that is a resigning matter.

If you run a TV channel, you hire an independent producer to make a documentary about an elderly woman, and the independent producer cuts some PR footage of the elderly woman visiting a photographer in a way that implies she was more angry with the photographer than she actually was, then that is a resigning matter.

However, if you merely spread outrageous, scaremongering lies, in order to turn something which is entirely and unequivocally safe into an issue of serious concern and worry for gullible parents everywhere while promoting a pig-ignorant anti-science and anti-scientist agenda, then that is an ‘improved training” matter.

Quite right too. We should save resignations for the things that are really important…