2014

There’s a lot that could be said about this weekend’s political entertainment, but the bit that stays with me is that I fear we’re losing the best thing about Ed Miliband, which was calm, sitzfleisch, and the ability to wait out stupid media bullshit. This really is something you want in a leader, and we…

Read More A bad sign

Con trick. £30bn extra cuts. That lower immigration thing is no longer operative. Voting on the European Arrest Warrant or maybe not. They get precisely nothing from their “renegotiation” and then the courts take the whole point away. Miliband goes to the CBI and the members hiss a journalist for talking leadership crisis. The Libyan…

Read More Still the Omnishambles government

A bit more Guardian journamalism. Here’s Nicholas Watt having at “Ed Miliband’s supporters”. You might not notice that he managed to report one of the two “plotters” backing out of the plot, but buried the lede right down to the very last par. The internal critics agreed. But they took issue with the leadership’s response…

Read More Never give up.

Here’s an astonishing piece of journalism from last weekend’s Labour mini-crisis. Daniel Boffy, The Obscurer‘s policy editor tells us: Even more significantly, this newspaper has learned that 20 Labour frontbenchers have indicated they are “actively considering Ed Miliband’s future”. The information came from a senior Labour MP who last week canvassed the parliamentary Labour party…

Read More Forget letters from 20 MPs. Remember Scotland

The sheer mendacity of the USS management, or rather, the Employers’ Pension Forum, has been breathtaking. The outrage ought to be greater. Dennis Leach of Warwick is doing a great job calling out the bullshit. For example, the EPF’s Q&A document supposedly explaining changes to the scheme gave the increase in life expectancy since 1974…

Read More a brief collection of the EPF’s lies on #uss

Why are a lot of professors going on strike? Or rather, on a marking boycott? The answer ought to worry anyone who is a member of a pension scheme, of any kind, in the UK. To start with, we’ve got the USS, the pension fund for the universities as they were before 1992. All the…

Read More #solidarity with the UCU: if you have a pension you want to read this