2017

The Daily Telegraph is suddenly worried about the future of the aviation industry post-Brexit. As well it might be. But I remember distinctly that the source, the Engineering Employers’ Federation, spoke out in this sense during the referendum campaign. So did the individual companies involved, and the trade unions. And the Telegraph thought this was…

Read More the Airbus supply chain, the press, and leopards

Thinking about Michael Howard’s interview fart over the weekend, I done a twitter and they liked it: Remember when politics was all about minutely planned grids, media training, and message discipline, and everyone said it was terrible? — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 2, 2017 And then I remembered the sheer weirdness of standing in Parliament…

Read More Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

So Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on t’telly and continued trying to jawbone some sort of privileged access to WhatsApp messages. In the process she also: called on “people who understand the technology” and know “the necessary hashtags” to stop extremist material being uploaded to the internet. Anyway. This was all in aid of Friday’s…

Read More Exactly how those media reports about WhatsApp terrorists happened

Reading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…

Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failure

So I went to the Royal Academy’s Russia exhibition yesterday, which led to me looking up oligarch/collector Petr Aven on Wikipedia. He’s Mikhail Fridman’s business partner in Alfa Group, which means ironically enough I was looking at paintings belonging to the guy whose employees built a whole fake website to confuse me about their ownership…

Read More Wikipedia