Any regular readers of this blog, and I guess there must be a couple of you, may have noticed that I have cleverly managed to avoid writing about the Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press. This is not so much because of a lack of interest on my part, although at times the saturation coverage was tedious in the extreme, but because I genuinely had no idea what I thought about it all.
Read more...Education is a wonderful thing. Yes, at school you have to do fractions and you might have to go out on a wet and cold day to play hockey, but you also get to learn amazing things about the growth of volcanoes and Henry VIII’s appalling record on relationships and try your hand at writing poetry in French and making pretty pictures with iron filings. You might also, ahem, get a snog behind the bike sheds.
Read more...Sometimes I just don’t know where to start. It is Monday and I do have a heavy cold, but this is not why it has taken me so long to start writing this post. Rather, my inertia is born out of an utter bewilderment, bordering on disbelief, as I watch a democratically elected government quite brazenly trash the rule of law, the main thing (some might say the only thing) separating it from a totalitarian state.
Read more...People are not always entirely rational. Of course we’re not. We have a right brain as well as a left brain, or at least most of us do, and for some of us the emotional part seems to dominate quite a lot of the time. Nonetheless, sometimes our actions appear to make little sense whichever part of the brain is in charge.
Read more...Thanks to Nick Clegg (yes really), this month we are all a bit more free. You may not feel any different, although the result of the US election has definitely lightened the mood somewhat, but some quite exciting things happened at the end of October as key provisions in the Protection of Freedoms Act came into force.
Read more...Poor old health and safety, it gets a bit of a bum rap. It should be lauded as one of the great achievements of the 20th century, protecting millions of workers from death and injury at work because of careless or unscrupulous employers. We should cherish it for not only making work a safer place to be but for ensuring that when things do go wrong guilty bosses have to pay up.
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