Ministry of Truth

Back in my own university days, pretty much the only attention that the Student Union paid to its various clubs and societies was to use them as a means of exercising their slightly perverse sense of humour during Fresher’s week. Fresher’s week, of course, meant the obligatory ‘Fresher’s […]

What follows is the full and unexpurgated text of the Foreign Office memo relating to renditions through UK territory and airspace that was leaked to, and published by, the New Statesman last week – now in a usable format, the scanned PDF having been put through OCR software […]

I did say in an earlier piece that I’d comment at greater length on Richard Dawkins’ two-part polemical documentary for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil? A few days on and I’m not so sure that there’s much about the two documentaries, themselves, that needs to be […]

Let’s take a quick head count here. So far we have John Hemming getting jiggy with a Birmingham City Councillor and broadening his extended family, both the former Leader of the Parliamentary party and the Leader in the House of Lords on the ten-step programme and now former […]

Spy Blog has picked up on a clear but often little regarded anomaly in the Freedon of Information Act after issuing an FOIA request for information to the Interception of Communications Commissioner regarding the Wilson Doctrine. This is one of those things I’ve known about for quite some […]

Mick Hume of Spiked (formerly Living Marxism) writing for the Times, today: The streamlined vetting and barring scheme for those working with children or “vulnerable adults

Ok. Well its seems the challenge for this evening – courtesy of Rob Newman in comments – is to take a more positive view of the issue of Child Support and suggest workable alternatives to the current system; or at least some sort of proactive approach to solving […]

THe BBC headline reads ‘Private firms to chase CSA debts‘ – it might as well read ‘Government try to polish turd’. The report seems straight forward enough; the latest master plan to try and turn around the Child Support Agency looks set to be to try using private […]

Bookdrunk does a first rate job of pulling to pieces the gross abuse of statistics behind the Daily Mail’s latest hyperventilating headline which claims that: Doctors ‘help’ 2 in 3 to die Which is, of course, a complete load of bollocks. Euthanasia is a difficult and emotive subject […]

Well, we seem to be heading for a showdown between the Lord and the Commons on the matter of the Terrorism Bill and the proposed new offence of ‘glorifying’ terrorism, which was removed from the Bill by a Lords amendment only yesterday. If, by any chance, you’ve been […]