Having spent over £1 million collating the files of MPs’ expense claims in order to make them available under the Freedom of Information Act, the Government is now trying to pull off a last-minute parliamentary ambush that would exempt them entirely from this disclosure. They are attempting to use the provision in section 82 of…
Read More Action: Government trying to kibosh MPs’ expenses disclosureI’m increasingly annoyed by official-media consensus that young people will suffer more than anyone else from the recession. Not that I especially doubt this; I doubt the reasoning, which appears to be that they’ve all gone soft and they’re not like we were in my day. As a general principle, I believe this is usually…
Read More you can’t blame the youth of todayAs usual, the Daily Mash catches the zeitgeist. Clubbers ditch ketamine for elephant tranquillisers – “it makes you feel really elephanty”. In North London, meanwhile, they’re wanking on the streets. Seriously. So far this weekend, I was standing in a toilet in the Sir Richard Steeles* when I heard groaning. I cancelled the maniac. But…
Read More surrounded by wankersIt seems the UAE’s Antonov-12 ban is real. The shortage of inbound flights in the Viktorfeed continues; out of 57 overnight movements, in itself an unusual low, there were 10 inbounds after cleaning up the odd false positive. Here is a list: South-Airlines STH7002 Erbil Sharjah scheduled 1600Z Transaviaexport TXC1722 Kabul Sharjah scheduled 1500Z Safi…
Read More fly or dieSo Shriti Vadera thinks there are signs of improvement in the economy. The Tories have messed themselves, predictably. Hey, she rationalised the railways. But there are good reasons to think this: there are indicators. Notably, the spread – the difference in interest rates – between blue-chip and risky commercial paper is narrowing sharply. Similarly, the…
Read More reasons to be cheerful, part 3Bruce Sterling quotes a study into state failure which – counter-intuitively – puts Iceland and Canada at the top of the list of stable polities. It’s worse than that, though; they reckon Hungary is superstable , and they’re in the middle of an epic bank-currency-credit-mortgage crisis which has metastatised into a panic call to the…
Read More StabilityI’m getting reports that the UAE authorities have revoked permission to fly for all Antonov-12s, and the substantial fleet based on Dubai and Sharjah has been given notice to quit last night. Apparently the proximate cause was a spate of embarrassing and perilous runway excursions, as well as the recent loss of an Antonov-12 with…
Read More when you feel the heat you’ve got to move your fleet (2)Blog awards, eh? What a gaggle of crap that is. It’s not just the staid and ossified elite who are always in these things (haven’t we had enough chances to vote for BoingBoing or Andrew “Overrated” Sullivan?), it’s the volume of egregious turdmerchants who still get in. 17,000 votes for Hot Air? I’m expecting Vint…
Read More blog awards, still direReduced blog; I’ve been working on a version of FixMyStreet for Symbian S60 devices. If you want snark, how about this? I always thought that the BMW not-minis were telling in themselves. Objects are an ideology made manifest. The original Mini was a minimal car, one designed to be even cheaper than the ones sold…
Read More no-one ever gets the truth from plastic manOK, the last post wasn’t totally serious. But is it too much to say that John Redwood is back? He’s been given a committee to chair, which sounds like a kick to touch, but we live in committee times. The Government is handling the economic crisis through a combination of outside committee-ists and a civil…
Read More the time has come to shoot you down