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.
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 Rhetoric which was counterproductive, unhelpful, and outdated two decades ago may be a poor choice for this particular diagnosis.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…
Philosophical Differences
When pressed for a reason why it’s worth bothering to vote, you’d find it hard to do better than the response and aftermath of the emerging COVID crisis. If there was ever a cure to the mass apathy and voter lethargy brought on by successive elections then it could be easily found in contrasting responses to the 2020 pandemic. “They’re all as bad as each other” and “it doesn’t matter which one you vote for” are sentiments being proven false…
End Game
The world is a terrifying and dangerous place, at least so the saying goes. There are those who would have us believe that daily life is more dangerous today than it has ever been in living history. None of it’s true, of course, and those who would try to convince us it is are almost universally selling right-wing ideology, religion, or newspapers. Occasionally all three. Those selling as if it were, don’t really need it to be true either. A…
Woeful Response
It would be useful to know how close to home a lesson has to be to learn anything from it at all. Does a near-crash prevent you from speeding in the future? What if it happens to the car in front or the one behind? Does near-death illness prevent drinking, smoking, or drugs? We now know China is too far from home, too remote, and too different to apply lessons learnt from the outbreak to our reaction here. With over…
The Week In Campaigning: Electile Dysfunction
One week into a long old six week election season. Disaster and scandal on a soap opera scale, a sign of things to come?
And They’re Off!
One of the most voluntarily dysfunctional parliaments of all time will suspend itself on Wednesday, just weeks after it opened. Since the current Prime Minister took office, the house has briefly returned from summer recess, very briefly prorogued itself in a way which turned out to be illegal, and broke again for a semi-serious Queen’s speech shortly after. It’s a wonder Conservative government has had the time to lose as many votes as they have in the brief intervals in…