If further proof was needed that this administration is more concerned to play politics than to govern the country well, the recent report of the Education Select Committee provides it. The committee chose to tackle an important and urgent issue – the failure of our education system adequately to prepare large numbers of young people […]
We are very pleased to be able to reproduce the Twitter thread from the UK Trade and Business Commission with their kind permission. The message was pretty clear: Brexit has been very damaging to a very valuable sector of our economy and to our soft power worldwide. It is also clear that the government appears […]
So, the official letter has arrived bearing the good news, I’ve crowed about it on Facebook and the champagne has been uncorked and drunk: I am now, at long last, joyfully, French. Yet in some ways this feels like a Pyrrhic victory, for which I can only summon two out of the three customary cheers. […]
A comment from the editor-in-chief can be found at the end of this letter. I am writing in response to your article on the sharing of GP data. I am really saddened by the one-sided argument currently circulating in much of the press regarding the proposed use of our GP data. I am an NHS […]
Ten days after the G7, Cornwall has some of the highest coronavirus infection rates in the country. And the government is attempting to cover up one of the main reasons for this. For the first 18 months of the pandemic. Cornwall felt like a relatively safe place to be. Covid case rates were substantially lower […]
Update: National Audit Office report that up to 26 May, just 96 million (1 per cent) of the 691 million tests distributed in England had been registered. “NHS [Serco…] T and T does not know whether the tests that have not been registered have been used or not,” it said. Furthermore, 45 per cent of […]
You can help avert disaster! See below for what to say or write to your MP! It’s been dismissed as scaremongering by the Brexiters, but Brexit really does have the capacity to create a human tragedy that has been described as ‘Windrush on steroids‘. It has already ruined the mental and physical health, lives and […]
The In Limbo Project gathers and shares the heart-rending stories of people caught up in the Brexit crossfire. Here is one of their most recent testimonies, reproduced by kind permission. It epitomises the senseless, casual cruelty that is just one of Brexit’s toxic legacies. You can sign a petition asking givenment to extend the deadline […]
Join us on 13 July at 18:30 when we will be discussing ‘The Little Black Book of Data and Democracy’ with its author, Kyle Taylor. The event is free and whilst it would be best if you had read the short book before, it’s not a prerequisite. You’ll almost certainly want to read it afterwards! […]
In Amersham and Chesham, many who traditionally voted Conservative abandoned the party which has abandoned them and whose leadership, priorities and methods they view with increasing distaste. Instead, they voted for the party most likely to remove the Conservatives from a seat they had held since the constituency’s creation in 1974. In this instance, it […]
In July 2020 and February 2021 we published articles drawing attention to the actions of Highways England Historical Railway Estate (HRE) – a little known body responsible for redundant railway structures. Although operating on behalf of the Department for Transport (DfT) this organisation appeared to pay scant regard to the priority now accorded to sustainable […]
Iain Duncan-Smith and TIGRR come up with some ludicrous and dangerous Tiggerish enthisiasms. Cynicism and vigilance required.
Think that ‘Global Britain’ means the Foreign Office will have your back as a UK citizen abroad? Think again: a sobering story from Myanmar.
I was astonished to read today that the government is considering yet another Brexit-related backward step, this time on the “reintroduction” of the old imperial system. It’s not as if the old imperial measures have actually disappeared from this country – as one wag (James Felton) put it, he is fed up with having to […]
Johnson wrote an effusive letter to the Conservative party faithful on 15 June begging them to share the news of the Australia deal far and wide. He was no doubt trying desperately to distract from the Johnson/Delta variant Covid-19 failure which could cost thousands their lives and the revelation of institutional corruption in the Metropolitan […]
To understand where Boris Johnson’s culture war is heading, the case of Spiked is instructive – and not just because his senior adviser Munira Mirza is a veteran of the former far-left & now far-right cult. Spiked grew out of a Marxist sect that called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party. It prided itself on being […]
It’s been a crazy few days here in Cornwall. The skies have been buzzing with police drones and weird-looking military aircraft, like monstrous black insects. Police with machine-guns have been hovering around the entrance to my local Tesco. And down at Carbis Bay, inside their ‘ring of steel’, world leaders concluded their deliberations on the […]
You have to watch these truth twisters like hawks. Here’s culture wars champion Oliver Dowden creating some Twitter fiction from the G7 proceedings: Dowden has now deleted his tweet.
If you live on the Somerset Levels and Moors, ask simply “will what I am hearing improve water quality here?”. Because unless national policy makes a real difference where you are, it is largely useless. We are in a nature and climate emergency. We need the government to show leadership and ambition that delivers action because they fully understand what this means.
Slow progress on cycle-paths One of the reasons that progress in developing a network of cycle-paths in England is glacially slow is that opposition turns up where you might reasonably have expected support. ‘Blocked by the Burdensome Estate’ set out how an agency sponsored by the Department for Transport is still undermining moves to create […]
Visitors to Westward Ho! on Saturday lunchtime would have been intrigued by a huge message, DROWNING IN PROMISES, inscribed in the sand, and at Ilfracombe’s Wildersmouth Cove on Sunday afternoon they were astonished to be greeted by the spectacle of seven people in suits sitting around a table in the sea as the incoming tide […]
Pride, amazement, exhilaration… three words that pretty much summed up initial local reaction to news of the 47th G7 summit location for 2021. “Fancy,”I heard one shopper remarking to another in my local supermarket, “the Prime Minister choosing little old Cornwall for such an important meeting. Proper job, eh?” From the comments appearing in the […]
Cornwall for Europe, the pro Europe campaign group, have created a special message for world leaders as they arrive in Cornwall for the G7 summit. A huge banner has been put up on a barn at the end of the runway at Newquay Airport and they believe it will be in full view as the leaders land in Cornwall.
Double defeat for Jenrick It’s a double defeat for ‘Honest Bob’ Jenrick. Firstly, the free vote of Somerset residents that he tried so hard to stop has taken place. Secondly local electors resoundingly rejected the option he so obviously preferred – the ambition of failing Somerset County Council (SCC) to take over the four districts. […]
The NHS data grab has finally really got the coverage it deserves and people power has won a stay of execution.
The government’s claim that the G7 in Cornwall will be “carbon neutral” is unadulterated greenwash. I just walked to the end of my road in Falmouth to have a look at the MS Silja Europa, the massive cruise ship on which a thousand police personnel will be housed during the G7 summit in Cornwall next […]
Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson has got himself in a muddle again. It is all very well Number 10 pretending that he only “became” Catholic — again — upon his marriage to Carrie at Westminster Cathedral on the last Saturday in May. That is not actually how it works. According to the Catholic Church, Johnson […]
Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson could be described as Schrödinger’s Catholic. Born in New York and christened in the Catholic church on the wishes of his mother, Charlotte Johnson née Fawcett, his godmother Rachel Billington admitted he was never much of a churchgoer. Then at Eton he was confirmed into the Church of England. When […]
I was really upset to read a tweet from Byline Times‘ Peter Jukes saying that he had seen the vindictive side of remainers/rejoiners in their extreme and ugly reactions to Byline TV’s video on the farmers. I am as devastated and heartbroken about Brexit as any one, but that does not make me want to […]
It turns out that the first catastrophic error that Johnson made when it came to dealing with the pandemic actually took place within days of his moving in to Number 10, in July 2019. It’s a story worth remembering – of a government not even intending to be prepared. The National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) […]