This made my day. Absolutely hilarious.
Firstly, this:
Dear all,
I am writing to you concerning the general election campaign in Cambridge. I hope this is not inappropriate, but this list seems to get the best way to get in touch with everyone.
I am currently helping to campaign for the Conservatives in Cambridge and I am writing to you with some information about our policies and our candidate. I would welcome any queries you may have concerning the Conservatives in Cambridge, which I would pass on directly to the candidate – Nick Hillman.
[etc. etc.]
Thank you for taking the time to read this email.
Yours faithfully,
**** *****
Conservatism at King’s! We can’t have that.
Response:
Dear ****,
I am afraid it IS inappropriate to use this email list for canvassing as a part of a political campaign. I am moreover disturbed to think that you are not aware that such practice violates the principles of political and religious neutrality upheld by educational institutions in this country.
Kingsfolk – please accept my apologies for replying to the whole list – this is the first I’ve done this in all my time at Kings (and I hope it will be my last).
**** *****
Why is this so amusing? Well, it just so happens that the bar at King’s College has a Soviet flag on the wall. Nothing discrete about this, just a big flippin’ Soviet flag presumably designed to remind all the Eastern Europeans and other former citizens of the Soviet Empire that the ideology that fed their nations’ suppression hasn’t gone away just yet.
I mean seriously, if you were a Ukrainian whose great grandparents had died during the communist terror famines or a Hungarian or Czech whose grandparents had seen the Russian tanks roll in, how would you feel about having a bloody (in both ways) great Soviet flag on the wall? If that’s political neutrality then I’m a beetroot.
This type of politics is annoying:
The Conservatives said the government had allowed the problem [dangerous dogs] to get worse, with the number of people convicted for allowing their dogs to cause injury more than doubling in the past decade.
Well yes, but some things should be allowed to get worse before the something must be done mentality is allowed to run riot and paint fresh red lines on the legislative canvas. Sometimes things get worse and then get better by themselves. By banking a cheap political bonus in this way the Conservatives reinforce the idea that the solution to every problem is more government.
From the Beeb:
The government target of getting 50% of people under 30 into higher education should be scrapped, the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) has said. What do you think?
The AGR also wants a phased increase in student top-up fees by 2020, with safeguards for disadvantaged families. AGR’s chief executive Carl Gilleard said the proposals would help “reaffirm the value of a degree”.
The lecturers’ University and College Union said it was disappointed by the recommendations. Its general secretary Sally Hunt said: “The future for the UK is at the forefront of a high-skilled knowledge economy and we won’t get there with less graduates.”
Criminalisation of soliciting is also racist. It’s frequently used, for example, to arrest migrant sex workers/prostitutes and deport them. Victims of trafficking deserve our protection; they should have the legal right to choose to live in the UK for as long as they want, and they should not face deportation back to countries where they run the risk of being re-trafficked by those who trafficked them here in the first place.
So, the argument goes that we should not arrest (illegal) migrant prostitutes because if we deport them back to where they came from they might come back here and wind up doing exactly the same thing which they are presently doing and for which they should not be arrested. Clear?
A fantastic photo essay here.
True, this is an inevitable downside to industrial development and wealth creation, but one wonders how much this is exacerbated by weak property rights and inadequate governance.
There seem to be a whole bunch of blogs whose titles are taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. I thought I’d list some, just for fun:
The Burial of the Dead
A Game of Chess
The Fire Sermon
Death by Water
What the Thunder Said
David Thompson points out some of his old posts on topics of conformity in art, racism and feminism.
…as the Guardian sees fit to publish an attempted hatchet job that focuses on the Conservative Party’s links with…..a conservative organization!
I don’t think I can comment on this any better than Dizzy has already:
I wish to offer a summary of this morning’s Guardian splash that’s trying to create a “Tories are secret extremists and you’re all going to be wearing jack boots if they win unless Cameron disowns some people in which case it’s a massive division at the heart of the Tory Party” story. So instead of reading their piece here’s a better version of it.
It is truly shocking isn’t it that a British organisation would take some youngsters to America and let them shoot legal guns on a firing range in Virginia? After all, we don’t do guns in the UK, we’re a pacifist nation, we don’t get involved in wars EVER and we never shoot things.
What’s more, one of these people had the audacity to say that the NHS in its current incarnation was, well, you know, a bit crap. How dare they have a view that deviates from the orthodoxy that the NHS is a sacred cow and by far the best structural success in history! As for climate change, would you believe that one of these “radicals” has sceptical views in line with over 50% of the country? Outrageous isn’t it?
In the aftermath of Michael Foot’s death, Charles Moore gives Oleg Gordievsky’s story of former Labour Party leader Foot’s role as a Soviet agent:
This week, Gordievsky gave me his full account. At the end of the 1940s, he said, when Foot was editor and managing director of the Left-wing paper Tribune (he continued in the latter role until 1974), the KGB decided that he was “progressive”. By this they meant that he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, at that time run by the mass-murderer Joseph Stalin. Their officers in London, describing themselves as diplomats, approached Foot. He readily agreed to see them in Tribune’s offices. There they chatted to him and praised the paper, which was always short of money. They left a £10 note (about £250 in today’s values) in his jacket pocket.
For nearly 20 years, these meetings continued, roughly monthly. Foot did not conceal them, exactly, but they were not publicly known. He accepted the money, which was slipped into his pocket in a way which allowed him to ignore it, each time the KGB came. Foot freely disclosed information about the Labour movement to them. He told them which politicians and trade union leaders were pro-Soviet, even suggesting which union bosses should be given the present of Soviet-funded holidays on the Black Sea.
A leading supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Foot also passed on what he knew about debates over nuclear weapons. In return, the KGB gave him drafts of articles encouraging British disarmament which he could then edit and publish, unattributed to their real source, in Tribune. There was no protest by Foot to the KGB over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and he quite often visited the Soviet Union to a top-level welcome. The KGB classified him as an agent, codenamed BOOT.
In 1968, Foot expressed disquiet at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and wanted to meet the KGB less regularly. They reclassified him as a “confidential contact”, and this he remained when a Cabinet minister in the governments of the 1970s. The link seems to have been broken off, however, before he became leader of the Labour Party in 1980, and never resumed (although the KGB asked Gordievsky to revive it in 1985, months before he defected).
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