Oi Daily Mail – who you calling a “Plastic” Brit?
Just who is a “Plastic Brit”? That question is provoked by the Daily Mail’s sustained campaign against some of the athletes who will be competing for Britain in the Olympic Games this summer.
The newspaper today rails against the choice of Tiffany Porter as athletics captain.
It also offers a handy montage of its previous headlines against “Plastic Brits”, such as “Team GB have ended up with a bunch of foreign wrestlers. I wish they would all SHOVE OFF!”
Why the Libdems won’t last in the Coalition until 2015
So each of the Coalition parties are currently entertaining the theory that they would be better off dividing a good way before the short election campaign. But it is less obvious that they can both be right.
The shared problem for each is the threat of a General Election.
The Conservatives are more nervous about the path to a Parliamentary majority than they appear in public – not least because none of their leadership team shared the confidence of the party and its press supporters that it was heading for a clear victory next time.
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Did 9/11 really change the world as much as journalists claim?
September 11th 2001 was the day the world changed.
That journalistic truism will be endlessly repeated this week in the wake of the killing of Bin Laden, some 3520 days after Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on New York on Washington. This will now symbolise closure for many people on those terrible and shocking events.
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Libdems could have no women MPs at election
A General Election in 2011 is no longer unthinkable, argues Jackie Ashley in The Guardian. Few LibDems would relish the prospect.
But how many realise that, if such an election took place, they would face a serious risk of ending up with no women MPs at all?
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Why we need a public inquiry into the phone-hacking revelations
The News International statement admitting culpability over widspread phone-hacking at the News of the World – and the failure to properly investigate it even after a reporter was sent to jail – was an extraordinary development.
However, the most troubling questions are not for News International, but for the police (non-) investigation. Why the Metropolitan Police appear to have had a quiet determination not to notice evidence and to ignore leads raises more troubling questions about the effectiveness and non-partiality of the rule of law in this country.
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Would those opposing intervention in Libya also do so for Ivory Coast?
I have been deeply sceptical about ‘whataboutery’ when it is used an argument for consistent inaction on human rights everywhere.
Nicolas Kristof captures a central point in his last New York Times column:
Just because we allowed Rwandans or Darfuris to be massacred, does it really follow that to be consistent we should allow Libyans to be massacred as well? Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?
Boris Johnson was for student violence before he was against it
Mayor of London Boris Johnson badly overstepped the mark yesterday, ludicrously claiming that Labour leader Ed Miliband will have been “quietly satisfied” by the violence in the capital which risked overshadowing the TUC’s March for the Alternative on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Boris can hardly be surprised to be accused of silliness and hypocrisy for a response in the lower traditions of student politics, though Shelly Asquith misses out what is surely the most hypocritical about the claim….
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Why is the government imposing ‘Big society’ on academia?
Is this the latest “big society” paradox? The Observer reports that senior academics are deeply concerned about the way in which a department of state is alleged to have insisted on the ‘big society’ as a major academic research theme as a condition of renewing academic funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
This report of about rather top down insistence on studying the bottom up doctrine speaks to a recurring tension as to how government can get traction for its ‘big idea’ without undermining the point.
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Even Tories know Osborne’s tax changes won’t help lower paid
Osborne will use the increase tax threshold to claim that he has lowered personal tax bills, and is trying to take the poor out of tax.
That the claim is misleading was obvious as soon as this key budget pledge was pre-spun on 1st March – as the claim relies on ignoring the VAT rise.
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Banning soup kitchens is only the start of the attack on London’s homeless
The richest Tory-run Council in the country is seeking to ban soup kitchens for the homeless from an area around Westminster Cathedral. Labour Uncut has provided the documents to prove that they really hadn’t made up the story with a “you couldn’t make it up” feel to it.
A controversy over banning soup kitchens could prove particularly toxic for the “big society”.
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