Stop me if we’ve been through all this before…

Yes, its yet another article on the subject of the ‘gender pay gap’ on Comment is Free, this time marking the release a the TUC’s report predictably entitled ‘Closing the Gender Pay Gap‘ which is published on the eve of… guess what?

Yep, its the TUC Women’s Conference and this all comes down to nothing more than the usual ‘by the numbers’ exercise in which the existence of a gender pay and its cause – discrimination, naturally – is put forward as the unquestioned ‘given’ from which all else proceeds even though it blatantly obvious to anyone with the slightest inclination towards sceptical inquiry that there’s rather more to all this than its proponents seem either willing or capable of admitting to. (more…)

Hey guess what?

I’ve just received an e-mail from Gideon giving what might loosely be called his ‘thoughts’ on today’s budget…

This is a bad news Budget. Alistair Darling is kicking Britain’s families when they are down.

- Darling has added £110 a year to every family’s tax bill. The tax take will be £2.8bn a year higher by 2010 – and if benefits are

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It’s Budget Day and while even the Beeb’s news site is struggling to keep up with the server load, I find myself in something of an ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ mood… so I thought I’d top of my recent run of posts on the Tories and all thing web 2.0 by cast around for a bit more info on young Rohan Silva, Gideon George… - Continue Reading...

This last series of events/post set me to pondering the following question – just what significant contribution, if any, have conservatives made to the development of what might loosely be called ‘on-line culture’?

To hear ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron and Gideon George Osborne talk you’d think – if you didn’t know any better – that the natural place of the conservative lay right at the… - Continue Reading...

After digressions into the misreporting of a minister’s well-intentioned efforts to encourage a healthy debate and the fallacy of the Tory Party’s efforts to claim ownership of ‘open source politics’ and a few other things beside, I think its time to make a considered contribution to Tom’s discussion of the merits, or otherwise, of a Civil Service ‘Code of… - Continue Reading...

Having mentioned Nick Davis’s book ‘Flat Earth News’ and his concept of ‘churnalism’ – the verbatim or near verbatim reproduction of wire reports and press releases without referencing their source – one might also note than some bloggers are by no means averse to indulging is such practices. In fact there’s a particularly fine example of this over at Dizzy’s right now…

Tom Watson becomes

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