My views on the Liberal Democrats in government

I was asked a question in the comments to the previous post by an “anonymous fan“. (A fan? Wowser.) What do you make of the Lib Dems being in government and to what extent do you still support them? I thought the question would be of wider interest, so I have decided to respond in […]

Tentative thumbs-up for the Conservative—Lib Dem coalition

A few days ago I wrote optimistically about the prospect of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Now that we have a coalition for real, I feel even more cheered. Part of my argument in my earlier post was that there needs to be cultural change in politics. When I listened to […]

Remember remember… Woolies would be 100 today

As regular readers may know, I worked for Woolworths until it closed down in January this year. You can read the series of articles I wrote in the aftermath of its closure. In one of my articles, I wrote about the poster that appeared in the staff area this time last year. It announced: Remember […]

Sayonara Toyota

The day after Bridgestone announced that they would be leaving Formula 1, it emerged that Toyota were poised to do the same. This was not as much of a shock as Bridgestone’s exit, but it is nonetheless major news. Toyota are the third major manufacturer to leave F1 in just twelve months, and now rumours […]

My name is Duncan, and I am a motorsport fan

This the accompanying article to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion. Here you can find videos and links if you want to delve further into the topic. As you may guess from the title, this article is about motorsport. I do not normally write about motorsport on this website. That is […]

The value of GDP

There was an interesting blog post over at the Telegraph by Geoffrey Lean over the weekend. He asked if GDP is “past its sell by date”, noting that “the EU is due to publish a paper which will conclude that GDP is too limited a measurement.” I agree with the view that GDP doesn’t tell […]

Where is our referendum on face-slapping?

Last week the SNP set out its legislative plan. The headline grabber was the long-promised independence referendum bill. Today I saw Caron’s post asking, “why bother with a referendum?” She has a good point. It is widely recognised that the result of any referendum would almost certainly reject the SNP’s favoured proposals. “Ah, but!”, say […]

Patrick Hannan — A Useful Fiction

Have you noticed that there is a lot of introspection about devolution just now? I suppose it underlines the fact that devolution is a process rather than a settlement that everyone is still looking at how to tweak it. Maybe it is just the newness of it. The Scottish Parliament is very young as these […]

The FIA shuts its ears

This week in F1 has mostly been about the FIA’s diarrhoea of the press release. Rather than looking for a compromise, they have instead gone on the attack, launching press release after press release and slamming the door shut on Fota’s suggestions (oh, and saying goodbye to Lola — good work, Max!) This week the […]

European Parliamentary Election literature: small parties

BNP Needless to say, the BNP is a pathetic party of mindless xenophobes with moronic policies. Their election leaflet has come in for a ton of criticism too, and rightly so. My dad picked up on their use of a Spitfire at the very top of the leaflet: The Spitfire was used in a war […]