The infected blood scandal highlights the siloed nature of WhitehallThe latest edition of my email newsletter about work in Parliament, A Lord's Eye View, is out and you can also read it in full below. It's about the very long-running infected blood scandal. If you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Why can't the Cabinet Office do what other departments can? [IMG: The Cabinet Office on Whitehall, London] The Cabinet Office, apparently unable to do what other departments can do. Just before the House of Lords broke up for the summer we had a debate on the ... (more) |
Reality hits the Burnham agendaThe Independent reports that Andy Burnham's newly appointed housing minister, Angela Rayner, has indicated she does not expect Labour to meet its major manifesto pledge to build 1.5 million homes before the next election. The paper says Raynor has denied she was abandoning the commitment, but compared achieving it to her chances of "running the London Marathon": Ms Rayner was reappointed housing minister - a job she had resigned from in 2025 after a row over whether she dodged stamp duty - when Andy Burnham became prime minister on Monday. Ms Rayner said the housebuilding commitment was "very challenging" when ... (more) |
Reading UlyssesI've started on James Joyce's Ulysses. I've long enjoyed Anthony Burgess, and he was a great admirer of Joyce, so I suppose it was inevitable. I'm not trying to spot every reference, or look up every obscure word, but just to read it like any other story book. Analysis can come later, if I fancy, and my old copy of Burgess's Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader will no doubt come in handy. I see fiction as entertainment and escapism - you're not going to discover the meaning of life, or your place in ... (more) |
Newcastle Pride - the videoFilmed today. (more) |
Newcastle PrideIt was Newcastle Pride today. After my ward surgery I headed over to Newcastle Civic Centre to be part of a sea of colour for the parade to the Monument. Good to see lots of people from Gateshead Council LGBT support network.One of the first people I bumped into was Cllr Henry Gallagher, mayor of Newcastle. (more) |
My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New DealThis article appears in the new Liberator - you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about. You can find The New Deal online. Lib Dem Narrative - The Search Goes On The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals' brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is ... (more) |
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion pollsWelcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Survation 19% (-2) 25% (+1) 10% (-1) 8% (-3) 26% (+2) -1% (vs Ref) 22-24/7 UK YouGov 20% (-1) ... (more) |
Neal Ascherson on Berlin in the second world warEmbed from Getty ImagesNeil Ascherson writes about Berlin in the current issue of the London Review of Books: Berlin is a strange, parvenu capital which shakes itself and becomes unrecognisable every few generations. The little Prussian town suddenly becomes the pompous capital of an empire, which collapses into a defeated rump republic, which turns into the powerhouse of the Third Reich, which is bombed shapeless, then divided into two by a wall. And now united again, with a new government centre worthy of that old parvenu pomposity. Reviewing Ian Buruma's book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45, he says of the city ... (more) |
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"The new Liberator is out. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website. And that means it's time to spend another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer. When I first mentioned the Well-Behaved Orphans' summer holiday in the pages of Liberator, Marcus Trescothick was a 14-year-old playing alongside his father for the Keynsham club in Bristol. In those days the WBOs went to a different Cornish resort: Trebilcock Bay. Monday I write these words in a deckchair on the sands of Trescothick Bay, the Cornish resort where I always bring the Well-Behaved Orphans for their summer ... (more) |
AI at the crossroads: two stories, one warningThis month gave us two AI stories that, read side by side, tell us something important about where we are and how little time, we must decide what to do about it. The first is unsettling in a very specific way. OpenAI admitted that during an internal test, it removed the safety controls on its own models to see how capable they really were at hacking. The models didn't stay in their sandbox. They found a flaw, broke out, and used it to hack into a rival company's servers, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to the very test they ... (more) |