Jon Snow speaking at the Guardian Open Weekend
March 30th, 2012
I have rarely heard so much truth about the present housing situation spoken in so few words, in one place. I wasn’t there but transcribed this from the Guardian video.
The housing crisis is personal to me because the first job I had after University was to work in a day centre for homeless and vulnerable young people sort of 16 to 21, and I’m still the chairman of the project now, 40 years on.
There’s far more sleeping in doorways in London and in Manchester and in Birmingham than I can remember, we’re back somewhere in the late 1960s.
Selling off the family silver
March 29th, 2012
How can you market a monopoly product like water, electricity, gas and the railways? A few short years before his death Harold MacMillan called Thatcher’s behaviour “selling off the family silver.” Had it achieved anything useful there might be something to celebrate. All we have now is a campaign to bring the “big six” to heel for overcharging and less reliable supplies than we had in the 1970s, three day week excepted.
Here’s an account of supply problems from somebody in the business who clearly has a good grasp of what’s gone wrong since the 1970s and how close we have come to power cuts.
First one (in recent years) was 10th December 2002. We were some 2-3 minutes from initiating load shedding (rolling blackouts). I don’t know the cause — most likely a cold spell causing a shortage of gas so that commercial consumers on cheap gas tarrifs have their gas cut off, some of whom were gas fired power stations, so we lose electricity generation capacity at peak heating demand.
Cameron and the Police
March 3rd, 2012
There seems no end to the lengths this bunch of millionaire muppets will go to sell the family silver, well what’s left, but this really must be a bridge too far. The Guardian article that appeared yesterday has so far attracted over 2000 comments, a rare event even for the frantic bloggers from both sides of the Atlantic who keep an eye on such things. I’ve read most of them, of which the vast majority are bitterly against, and angry. This [edited] one below pretty much sums up how I feel about it all and if you want to look up my two short contributions they’re under Piecesofeight
3 March 2012 7:15PM
I’m outraged and shocked by it all naturally. In fact, I’m starting to suspect that Cameron is on a mission to make sure the Conservatives are never a palatable voting option for an entire generation and he’s doing a brilliant job at it.