Last November, there were areas of Paris where you could be forgiven for imagining the rioting was someone else’s problem. To many affluent Parisians, within the city limits and behind their digicoded front gates, these rioting youths could just as easily be in some far off country, instead of a handful of miles away, across the peripherique.

Surprisingly, one of those quiet places was La Caravelle, a 1,600 apartment, social housing project in Villeneuve la Garenne, an estate in the 92nd departement with a history of youth violence, car burning and other vandalism. What made La Caravelle different? Read More

The Nether-World: Power to the People Conference – an in-depth report on today’s Power Inquiry event

New York Times – Mandate for ID Meets Resistance From States, even though compared to the UK version it’s nothing…

An invitation to a party – Compulsory voting as a pseudo-Shakespearean farce.  Or something.

Blair blah Brown blah blah Blueblair bloodymargaretbeckett. Schoolsnhospitals britishnationalists and reshuffles. More of that here later. Meanwhile, over there, the new Prime Minister: Read More

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.