Public opinion is fickle. Opinion polls regarding the major parties swing wildly from week to week, in entirely whimsical and unpredictable ways. Labour are doing considerably better now than they were a while ago. The only cause, as far as I can tell, is that David Cameron has been getting a lot of media coverage [...]
Filed under: health, ideas, jonathanbirch on February 1st, 2010 | No Comments »
With today’s resolution to Debbie Purdy’s court battle to have the law on assisted suicide clarified, there is now an inescapable feeling that matters are coming to a head regarding the issue in this country. A tide of opinion polls, news stories and incessant letters in newspapers show that this debate just won’t go away [...]
Filed under: humanrights, ideas, jonathanbirch, society on July 30th, 2009 | No Comments »
Two signs of the times this week. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt comes out in favour of assisted suicide; and a seriously ill baby, “Baby OT”, dies after the High Court orders an end to its assisted breathing. Behind both developments, an underlying intuition that death is preferable to a painful life.
I worry where this utilitarian [...]
Filed under: ideas, jonathanbirch, religion on March 21st, 2009 | No Comments »
…this guy would be dead by now. Of course, if Bush were Saddam, he’d never have tried his luck. But he knew his action would be interpreted as an act of political dissent — in a country where dissent is now allowed. He may serve a jail term, but it seems far more likely that [...]
Filed under: afghanistan, al qaeda, clarepoliticsnews, democracy, humanrights, ideas, iraq, jonathanbirch, society, uspolitics on December 15th, 2008 | No Comments »
There’s an interesting post over at Marginal Revolution (which is probably the most consistently interesting blog on the planet, so if you don’t read it, start now) about why so many US politicians are lawyers. The phenomenon is not quite as great in the UK though Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Ming Campbell were all [...]
Filed under: education, ideas, ukpolitics on January 24th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
This is the question put to some of the world’s most eminent intellectuals (such as Steven Pinker, pictured) on this fascinating page, which I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. Responses range from climate change to Wikipedia, incorporating science, politics, philosophy and maths. There’s (arguably) some more veiled sexism from Simon “Not Borat” [...]
Filed under: climatechange, culture, ideas, jonathanbirch on January 20th, 2008 | No Comments »
Jamie Oliver has a new campaign. This time it’s against battery chickens. His last one changed government policy on school dinners, so this is something to watch with interest. I think it’s great to see this stuff in the news again. Many of us seem to have an intuition that some nebulous pleasure experience, no [...]
Filed under: ideas, jonathanbirch on January 7th, 2008 | No Comments »
Compare:
“So, making education for skilled work our first priority, we need to provide new incentives and new obligations to train; we need to transfer resources from welfare to education and move claimants from passive recipients of welfare benefit to active job and skill seekers; far-reaching reforms of our welfare state and education system to put [...]
Filed under: conservatives, gordonbrown, ideas, labour, mattclifford, tonyblair on November 28th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
