Surreal Politics Better than you could do
A-Level candidates should expect to be treated like consumers by their universities
By Ethan and Anna Those receiving their A-level results today may well enjoy university, but they’re getting a bad deal. Universities are ripping their students off. Some of the most prestigious establishments in the country are getting away with an amateurish effort at education. My fellow students were probably too busy getting pissed to notice that, in [...]
You can’t always get what you want
By Anna ‘Of the people, by the people, for the people,’ said Abe. Everyone has their own ideas on how things should be done. But it’s tricky to decide who’s right. Well, luckily we’ve got Dave, and E-petitions. Britain, formerly Great, has existed as a liberal democracy for some time now. MPs are elected to [...]
Osborne’s a laggard, not a Lagarde
John West Fans of my article yesterday, in which I warned George Osborne’s slash-and-burn approach to deficit reduction leaves no room for manoeuvre in addressing social problems thrown into focus by the riots, will have been delighted by the latest intervention from new IMF boss Christine Lagarde. As I argued, Osborne ‘could have taken a [...]
Riots! Revenge! Responsibility?
John West A victory on points for Ed Miliband, then, after speeches yesterday from both the PM and the Leader of the Opposition. Where Cameron laid into the dole scum from the safety of his plush Oxfordshire constituency, Miliband ploughed his politically rich furrow attacking irresponsibility at the top and the bottom – ‘from bonuses [...]
We don’t really know what we’re talking about
Many people in the media have sounded off at what caused the riots inLondon over the weekend. I’ll be honest, I’ve got no certain idea. Which makes the next 500 words very hard to fill. It also makes it weird that everyone else having a go at explaining it seems so ruddy sure of themselves. [...]
Fuck the Yoot, Fuck the Police
By Anna This is what happens when people don’t give a shit. Groups of teenagers are gathering on street corners, as they do every night; normally we call this antisocial behaviour, but at the moment we’re calling it a riot. ‘Social networking’ (as it’s known by those over thirty) is no longer the hero, as [...]
Calling rioters opportunists is the easy answer – too easy
By Ethan “People should be in no doubt that we are on the side of the law-abiding.” These were the words of our Prime Minister this morning and I think he has it wrong. There are some stories – quite a few stories – in which choosing a side is just too much of an [...]
London’s riots – we will want to know how and why
John West When it all kicked off in Hackney yesterday it was unpleasant as hell but, though not predicted, felt inevitable. I’m not one for skinny jeans or innovative hair gel use, still less am I an aficionado of sculpted facial hair, but I am a university-educated former working class bloke who reads the Guardian [...]
Love of competition is the enemy, not the phone hackers.
For a while it was a new victim of phone hacking every day; now it’s a new suspicion over who was involved. The phrase – phone hacking – has already been repeated so often that it has begun to lose all meaning. We shouldn’t let ourselves forget that it denotes a nasty invasion into people’s [...]
What Sooty’s attack tells us about yellow furry puppet bears
By Geckeg Zait There are times to hope and times to dream. There are times of joy and times of pain. This was a time to duck. Only in the aftermath of Sooty’s savage pizza assault on septuagenarian star Paul Daniels can we begin to survey what this might mean for us as human beings [...]