The Government has announced it’s new plans for NHS reform, the draft of which was leaked a week or 2 ago. Fuck is a strong word for a headline, but I am afraid that’s what is about to happen. The Lansley reforms of the NHS will be reversed, along with almost all of the internal … Read more
Maureen Colquhoun died this week aged 92. She was the first openly gay MP in the modern era. This might come as a surprise to a lot of people who believed that the first MPs to come out were Chris Smith for Labour and Matthew Parris for the Conservatives, in the 1980s. Maureen Colquhhoun was … Read more
Did Brexit help Britain succeed at Vaccinations? Did it help us do better than the EU? No. Britain’s success on vaccination has nothing to do with Brexit, not matter how many flags people wave Britain performed catastrophically badly on Covid in 2020 because the Government put their mates in charge of it, who outsourced it … Read more
Last summer my son was the victim of a racist incident. Not an attack or anything violent. But racist behaviour by a public official. Britain has come a long way on race, and we are noticeably less racist than we were a generation ago, but over the last few years things have started going … Read more
With Trump finally leaving office I asked some Trump fans to write with their view on his Presidency. None took up the offer, so I thought I would write something myself, a sequel to my blog on Nightmare Trump Art: There are lots of ways you can categorise politicians; left and right, liberal or … Read more
2020 was so awful that if we had found Godzilla tearing apart our local branch of Sainsbury’s our first thought would be to loot the ruins for toilet paper and pasta. Brexit will be a shambles, starting with the failure to recruit customs officers or build them anywhere to work. The Government and the press … Read more
Another year in which pop music shifted even further away from skinny white boys with guitars. The most interesting music came at the intersection of soul, r’n’b, jazz and hip-hop, particularly against the background of Black Lives Matters. African pop also continues to produce a steady stream of exciting new stuff. Brittany Howard. OK, so … Read more
After 12 days of quiz action this is…..
I did actually make it to the cinema a few times this year, and even with lots of big releases delayed there were still a few things worth talking about: Armando Ianucci’s David Copperfield is by far and away the greatest Dickens adaptation ever, beating David Lean’s Great Expectations, and A Muppet Christmas Carol. Best … Read more