Gordon Brown, Member of Parliament for Dunfermline East, is now Prime Minister of England. As this post carries with it responsibility for some few matters applying to the rest of the UK, he will be known formally as Prime Minister of the UK.
Upon entering No 10, Brown said:
I have listened and I have learnt […]
It happened as I watched BBC News 24 showing a wobbly aerial view of the train crash in Cumbria. The screen flickered and changed to show a different report, with presenters unfamiliar to me.
A headline scrolled across the bottom of the screen: Elderly woman dies in road accident
The camera cut to a reporter standing […]
Being in touch with the spirit of the times, as I am, I created an online petition at 10 Downing Street’s website (you may have heard about another, far less important, petition in the news of late). I am petitioning the Prime Minister to do something about the light pollution that fouls our night sky.
I […]
Ruth Kelly, the Minister for Communities and Local Govenment, has created a Commission on Integration and Cohesion. She says, in her speech launching the new commission:
I believe … we have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism, to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is […]
Yesterday, I complained that my MP hadn’t replied to a letter I sent him regarding the Police and Justice Bill. However, this very afternoon, I received a lovely polite email from someone in his office apologising for the tardiness of the reply. I wonder if that means he reads my blog (or, perhaps someone in […]
Forgive me, because I need to rant about something…
I am getting sick of the complete fucking incompetance of our government when it comes to matters of technology. Two contemporary issues highlight this for me.
Firstly we have the new Police and Justice Bill, which contains a handful of clauses amending the Computer Misuse Act of […]
From the department of interesting facts: The UK Government does not collect statistics on dismemberment. ref
I bet you didn’t know that.
I think we need more poets in government. I’ve been trying to read a number of government documents lately and use of English is rather poor, to say the least.
The Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs sponsors something called the Darwin Initiative. It involves giving grants to small conservation projects around the world, […]
It is Valentine’s Day tomorrow. I am amazed at how a minor, if rather sweet, saint’s day has suddenly exploded into a huge commercial event. I think I first noticed the shops really plugging valentine products last year, but in 2006 it’s gone mad. Every shop in town has devoted swathes of floor space to […]
From the Guardian of 1826, complaining about the driving of the horse-drawn London Mail Cart:
“The speed at which it was going could not, we think, be less than fourteen or fifteen miles per hour, which, in a crowded thoroughfare, is absolutely intolerable.”
Quite right. Lord forfend that traffic, be it motorised or otherwise, should reach such […]