This is a response to my friend Sarah’s blog post on the Ryan Giggs super-injunction.
In all honesty, 9/10 of super-injunction cases wouldn’t even be an issue if the press didn’t concern themselves with personal business. I don’t agree with super-injunctions, but I’d rather see them obselete and unneccesary than anything else. (more…)
It’s been a year now since the Tory/Liberal coalition came to power in the UK. That also means nearly a year since George Osbourne’s emergency budget, which instantiated massive, broad-sweeping cuts across the public sector. In reality, it’s taken this year for the cuts to take effect. The effects are starting to bite, hitting the vunerable groups the worst. Despite this, the government maintains its line that it is “making the hard decisions” and “doing what is necessary”.
The problem is, just as the easiest option isn’t always the right one, neither is the “hardest” one. The government has decided to cut hard rather than cutting smart. It’s taken a chainsaw to a situation that required pruning scissors. That’s not to say cuts weren’t necessary, or even to decry the overall scale, but it’s the bluntness of approach that is the problem, the reason that not only will this hit hard, it won’t even work in the long run.
I’m not going to launch into a tirade about how I detest the Royal Family and would rather push splinters under my fingernails than watch the gross exercise of PR indulgence that we called the “Wedding”. I’ve made my feelings there pretty clear in the past and that last sentence alone probably sums it up. I will however, provide a quick illustration for any who are still confused, so we can move on to my actual point:
254 of the 440 counts are in. It’s not technically over yet, but the result is clear: the campaign for AV has failed. It’s a result that many of us will find disappointing, yet also unsurprising. For myself and many other progressive evangelicals, this campaign has felt like a losing battle. Many of us even lacked conviction in the cause, but even once we decided AV was, though far from perfect, a step in the direction of reform, explaining the benefits to others was often met with the parroting of näive catchphrases of the “No” campaign, such as “Under AV, the winner can lose”.
So why did the AV campaign fail so miserably? (more…)