What We Saved For With Austerity Cuts
With the near certainty With austerity the hot topic of a ‘new’ Conservative government, lets look at what cuts bought us first time round and the way it impacts people on a day-to-day basis
A Frozen Game of Politics
UK politics is badly broken today. How many new leaders, ministers, and party members does it take to fix the system?
Why Yes #2
Looking at one more reason to vote yes for Scottish Independence at the next available opportunity. An escape from incompetent corruption and a chance for forward progress.
Roe V Wade is Far From a Distant Battle
The rollback of personal freedoms and government intrusion into healthcare that fell on the U.S in June was watched with regret and condemnation worldwide, but it’s not a battle being fought solely within the United States.
Spotify’s Misinformation Dilemma
In the wake of high-profile departures and heated discussion, Spotify have now announced their plans to combat misinformation on their streaming platform. On Monday, the company announced the addition of advisory labels on programming that discusses topics of health, policy, and science with some controversial viewpoints. Arriving late to the party—Spotify are far from the first platform to have to deal with the issue. Amongst the many problems of the pandemic, one of its more arguably positive benefits has been…
Lies, Damn Lies, and Advertising
Getting away with blatantly bad advertising is harder than you’d think. Car mileage, credit cards, and vacuum cleaners flagrantly twist the rules into knots, but their facts and figures are rarely made up out of nothing. More often than not, their fine print is thick with disclaimers and messages which give the ‘real’ numbers underneath. The reason that these companies stick so close to the real-life numbers isn’t because of their outstanding morals or ethics, it’s the law. There are…
The Things We can(‘t) Afford
The economy is a bizarre thing. The word alone is as useful as a magic spell is to a movie franchise superhero. It’s brought into action by politicians and pundits to justify everything from the atrocious to the strange. Stick on a channel, any channel, and you’ll very often hear—we simply can’t afford adequate (one week) foodbank stocks right now. We just don’t have the money. Healthcare, justice, policing, and education have been wrung-dry for over the last decade for…
Several Ways to Defeat a Pandemic
The language we use in talking about COVID is difficult to get right. Do we borrow the military dictionary—already co-opted for medical use in cancer treatments and unrelated illnesses—describing our efforts as a ‘battle’ against an invisible ‘enemy’? Rhetoric which was counterproductive, unhelpful, and outdated two decades ago may be a poor choice for this particular diagnosis. The pandemic might be more accurately described as a natural disaster instead. Fitting more appropriately in a list which includes hurricanes such as…
A New Model
During a particularly strange period of unusual and unprecedented measures, perhaps the strangest of all is the shift of the newspaper industry to begin self-censoring its data. The industry dedicated to frequent fact publishing very suddenly decided to stop. In an era that should be defined by transparent and open media, the centuries-old institution has gone suddenly coy on its own facts and figures. In the final weeks of 2019, the last published figures revealed a freefall in distribution numbers….
Late Decisions
If we’ve learnt anything at all from modern news coverage, it’s that we’re unable, or at least unwilling to engage with anything at all unless it’s compressed and simplified into the format of dull sports journalism. At least that is the commonly held belief of every major media outlet and political commentator in the country today. Leave vs Remain, Left Vs Right, Cummings Vs Sense, Masks Vs Freedom, Lockdown Vs the herd. Even a biological pandemic is a political hot…