Save British Science

Amid the fuss this week as the coalition government announced that NHS direct would be scrapped and replaced with the cheaper NHS111, the Telegraph reported that for the second time in three years Jodrell bank is under threat of closure.
It’s not clear from their article whether that means their new visitor centre or any or [...]

Why I superglued myself to the Royal Bank of Scotland

This article first appeared in The Scotsman on August 31st and is kindly cross-posted at the author’s request.
Scotland is a country deeply associated with standing up for the underdog and challenging injustice. This is reflected in steps to become a Fairtrade nation, to build closer links with Malawi, to invest in renewable [...]

Philippe Legrain at the Edinburgh Book Festival

A vision of a world fairer, safer, richer and greener.
Thomas Friedman says the world is flat – Philippe Legrain doesn’t think so. What matters most to how you do in life is where you are born and who your parents are. Philippe’s envisioned world is one where the benefits and opportunities of the middle classes [...]

Climate Camp – why RBS?

The camp for climate action came to Scotland this week.
To those wondering why so many people are angry with this bank, the answer is pretty simple: when it comes to climate change, RBS make it happen – and they do it with taxpayers’ bail-out money. RBS is Europe’s biggest financer of the fossil fuel extraction [...]

Jilted Generation – book review

If you were born after September 1979, this book is about you. You are a member of the jilted generation. We are the jilted generation. Or so Shiv Malik and Ed Howker tell us in their book of the same name, coming out next week.

And they make a pretty convincing case that our generation has [...]

100 Days of Solid Ideology

The coalition is 100 days old. And what a hundred days it’s been. They’ve ended the huge waste of building new schools. They’ve said they’ll end detention of children of asylum seekers, and explained that this will be by speeding up deportations. And they’ve delivered their promise to be the ‘greenest government ever’ by supporting [...]

Why not nationalise to cut the deficit?

The national deficit isn’t really a problem. Well, at least, certainly not in the short or medium term. The UK government is borrowing less per unit GDP than most other Western countries. And 80% of this money is borrowed from UK citizens – largely pension funds. This means, in the unlikely [...]

How the left won the argument on inequality… and where it got us…

People’s politics are very often located very deep in their psychological makeup. I am someone who finds it very hard to see the worst in human character. I am therefore a progressive – my politics seeks to make a better world by harnessing human goodness. Other find it hard to see the best in human [...]

The TaxPayers’ Alliance: Not Entirely Wrong

The Tax Payers’ Alliance (TPA) have a new report on welfare reform. Don Paskini’s already had a review of it over on Liberal Conspiracy. He makes some interesting points but I think in his rush to rubbish anything the TPA come up with (and, generally, that would be my reaction too) he fails to quite [...]

‘we have to do something about the economy’

The idea that big problems require big solutions is not entirely rational. But it is psychologically compelling. And so it is that politicians can secure radical policies more easily in the year after a crisis than in a decade of stability.
We have seen this to astonishing effect over the last two months: the speed with [...]

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