Along with “paedophilia”, the term “child” has become so expanded as to risk losing coherent meaning.

In terms of child protection legislation, a child is anyone below the age of 18 years. That you can drive, have sex, get married and go to war whilst still a “child” is just to highlight our decidedly convoluted views on these matters.

I got this highlighted to me while travelling and thought it was worth flagging up.

Expose the BNP points out what happened in Bolton and how the media help and aid fascists from the BNP and EDL…

If they stand in my area, I’ll vote for the Pirate Party not because I believe in everything they stand for, but because I want this issue to get the scrutiny and focus it deserves. The Digital Economy Bill should be scrapped, and parliament should start again from scratch, drafting a law that has the propagation of knoweldge at its core, not the profts of big media.

As David Cameron reminds us often, social responsibility is not only and always the duty of the state.

So, as a small and symbolic mark of disrespect, this blog will henceforth refer to the non-dom billionaire as Not-Lord Ashcroft.

May we commend the practice to the blogosphere.

I cannot, in good conscience, exercise my legally-guaranteed right to participate in the democratic process when tens of thousands of Britons are illegally deprived of theirs. For that reason, I will be staying at home come election day. Not out of apathy, nor out of a lack of available alternatives, but as a small protest against a big injustice.

Guest post by luis enrique
I wish people spent more time looking at data and less time pontificating, so in theory I ought to love the flourishing of attention paid to household income data
But I don’t, because I think it’s being misused. It’s possible to misuse data like this in lots of ways, [...]

Teen mothers are vilified by Harris, while Loughton demands they suffer criminal penalties. The question of whether teenage fathers bear responsibility, or are worthy of our extreme moral disdain, or even our attention, never makes it onto their radars. That their attitudes are the norm tells us something important about our society.

As a bit of fun for a Friday morning we thought we’d offer our reader an opportunity to choose their political scumbag of the week, largely because this week has conveniently provided us with a strong field of contenders.

Labour is considering making the retention of DNA samples ‘an issue’ for the election.

But if people feel they are being labelled as suspects by the police, even when they are not criminals, then this might make them less willing to cooperate with the police. The police are no longer an extension of ‘us’, the law-abiding majority, but become an alien power whom many of us fear and resent. But if the police get less cooperation with the public, won’t they solve fewer crimes?

The reason there’s so little progress in the popular educational policy debate is that teaching is something we’re very ideological about while also thinking that our own experience and common sense have already given us the right answers. It’s not because the academic evidence that already exists isn’t of the right kind.