Archive for category Politics

On What Planet Does Our Equalities Chief Reside?

‘For someone from my background, parliament is like a foreign institution and that needs to be changed…. We need to stop discriminating in favour of… white middle-class lawyers… Parliament is 20 per cent Oxbridge PPE graduates who come out of the City and law… [We] should require decision-makers to explain and publish information. We can crack this by talking about it and being transparent about the numbers…’

Thus reportedly said equalities tsar Trevor Phillips recently about what he claims to be the unduly narrow and unrepresentative character of the House of Commons in terms of race and class.

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Crime data a Gray area?

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has pertinently illustrated the pitfalls of interpreting crime figures.

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Some Looney Tunes Cartoons Are Not So Loony

Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently announced that, under the rubric of the new Personal, Social, Health and Economic curriculum to be introduced from September 2011, children as young as five will be given lessons on how to save.

Editorial columns have greeted the announcement with derision, rightly commenting on the irony involved.

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Who Might Well Have Good Reason to Want to Put Back the Hands of Time

According to statistics published by the DCSF last week, the group of 11 year olds  doing least well at school in England are white boys of British heritage from low-income homes that render them eligible for free school-meals.  In 2009, while nearly three quarters of 11 year olds met target levels of attainment in English and maths, a figure which includes over half of ‘Black’ boys eligible for free school meals, fewer than half of their white British counterparts did. Moreover, whereas the attainment level of ‘Black’ boys eligible for free school meals increased, that of their white British counterparts fell.

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Was Alan Johnson Right to Call for Professor Nutt’s Resignation?

Many prominent scientists are currently up in arms over the Home Secretary’s call for Professor David Nutt to resign as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) for having publicly criticised the Government for not accepting its advice that cannabis should not be up-graded from a class C to a class B drug.

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One Small Step for a Convicted Terrorist, One Giant Blunder for a Country

Last week’s release on ‘compassionate grounds’ from Scottish jail of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdul Ali al-Megrahi must surely go down as one of the most disgusting acts of political ineptitude ever perpetrated by anyone to hold any kind of ministerial office in Britain.

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