Andy Coulson’s arrest by Strathclyde police differs dramatically from the other arrests in the great Murdoch scandal. Rather than been asked to come into the station by appointment, he was lifted at zero-dark-thirty without anyone hearing about it in advance. Obviously, 0630 isn’t exactly a dawn raid at 53 degrees North in late May, in…
Read More there’s been a murrrder.This PRISM piece has been doing the rounds. I think it’s interesting more for the patterns it reveals, which are those of the early 1970s. The argument is that the British armed forces are unlikely to deploy anywhere in future, for various reasons that aren’t really unpacked, but which are basically “because Iraq was a…
Read More Doomed Britain is doomedFCR is wondering if we face a Post-Liberal Future. Unfortunately, his sources are David Goodhart and Michael White, two men who have been vigorously promoting the unpopular populism of very real concerns ever since it became fashionable in about 2004. I associate the phrase “unpopular populism” with Jamie Kenny or possibly Daniel Davies, but Google…
Read More There is no post-liberal future; there is only a post-liberal presentHere’s a role for a blogger that I don’t think anyone covers. The Whitehall blog. It’s a truism about British journalism, going back to Anthony Sampson if memory serves, that the newspapers cover Westminster politics obsessively but they hardly cover Whitehall at all. When they do, their service is even more conventionalised and less penetrating…
Read More Request for blogYour 3 favourite Nokia devices. Easy enough – the 2001-looking 6230. The 6230i put in a better camera but let carriers cover it in placky silver gubbins, when it was a piece of classic European product design. The N73, intended as a smartphone but which was at its best as a camera. Mine had the…
Read More 3 favourite NokiasOur long national nightmare of bifurcation is over! Thanks to this guy for fixing the WordPress Blogger importer, the Ranter is moving. Our new home is here – you’re looking at it. Comments please in the new blog. I’d like to recommend Suffusion, not so much a WP theme as an HTML5-based design toolkit. To-do…
Read More Admin: The move is here, at lastRemember that thumbsucker I did on the Great Firewall? Well, here’s some data, via this post (thanks, Jamie). It seems that Fang Binxing, China’s Chief Bellhead, boss of the Beijing University of Post & Telecoms, and king of the great firewall, really is in trouble due to his special relationship with Bo Xilai. He briefly…
Read More not at all defangedSo I did Land of Kings last weekend. First point: this post of JWZ’s, written about Homeless WiFi Fest….sorry, sorry…SXSW, has quite a bit of general validity. The points about not sticking to the schedule, not sticking around if someone is late, and not chasing the party, are all gold dust. I worked this out…
Read More Land of Kings report backDoes anyone else see a parallel between the Murdoch e-mail timeline and some of the recent new information? For example, the meetings with Cameron regarding the Sun coming out for him seem to have happened not long before the new policy of “eliminating in a consistent manner across NI…emails that could be unhelpful”. More tellingly,…
Read More Your inbox is over its size limitRalph Musgrave‘s economics blog makes a case for a program of time-limited payments to companies who hire the unemployed, although I’m not sure if Musgrave is thinking of it as a permanent feature of the welfare state rather than an emergency response to depression. I might quibble with a couple of aspects – for example,…
Read More an original idea? the archive is full of ‘em