Threatening public service pensions
A government threat to stop an erring public servant’s pension might prove to be bluff, but few of us could afford to risk challenging it [More >>>]
Category: Politics
The Telegraph on the gagging of ex-diplomats by the Foreign Office
The Daily Telegraph (10/10/07) reports the FCO gag on retired diplomats. Read here my comment, of which a lightly edited version is on the Telegraph website [More >>>]
Snap election? Put a stopper in all the ‘bottling’ (with update 22:00 6 Oct)
The current cliché of the commentariat invariably describes a decision by Brown not to call an early election “bottling it”, apparently meaning chickening out, whereas actually it will require courage, not cowardice. Decision not to call election brave and right, but overall a damaging week for Brown [More >>>]
David Cameron’s tour de force: thanks, but no, thanks
David Cameron’s conference speech: dazzling presentation, the usual reactionary substance. Examples. [More >>>]
Government gags retired diplomats
A retired former British high commissioner has revealed that the Foreign Office is now preventing its diplomats from publicly expressing personal political views after retirement, a gag for life, in apparent breach of the Human Rights Act and Convention [More >>>]
Jottings after an absence
Random comments after three weeks away on: Gordon Brown’s conference speech, meritocracy and equality of outcomes, the election date fever, the new flawed case for the attack on Iraq, Blair’s limited new job, and the latest folly of the Foreign Office censors [More >>>]
Take a pay cut and go to jail
Gordon Brown and Jack Straw impose a pay cut on prison officers (“pay discipline”) while vastly increasing their work burden, and refusing to act to curb the massive increases in income and wealth that city financiers are awarding themselves: a disgusting mess [More >>>]
Some media jottings
Some comments on a few good and rather more less good things collected recently from the print media [More >>>]
Indeterminate sentences: the double scandal
Indeterminate sentences are an abominable breach of natural justice, and not just because of the Kafkaesque situation in which prisoners who have served their tariffs can’t be released because the prison courses which are a condition of release aren’t made available to them [More >>>]
A hospital diary, June-July 2007
Six cheers at least for the National Health Service whose guest I have been at a big teaching hospital for a week with an infected leg. Massive improvements since last NHS hospital experience some years ago: impeccable medical and nursing care and exhaustive tests revealing new and unsuspected conditions [More >>>]