My erstwhile colleague Jessica Prendergrast has just published a fascinating post on the problems of social mobility in coastal towns and rural areas. Its a response to the Social Mobility Commission’s fifth ‘State of the Nation’ report. As one of the directors of the Onion Collective in Watchet, Somerset, Jess has been deeply involved in the development of community projects and social enterprises for many years.
Here’s an idea a bold government could implement: Continue reading
Category: Diary (Page 29 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Across the pond, the Washington Post has exposed an attempted sting on its investigative journalism team. A right-wing group named Project Veritas sought to hoax the paper into printing false allegations about the sexual predator and GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore. Here’s the Washington Post story (its behind a paywall) and the Guardian US rehash.
A few notes on this. First, it’s emblematic of how profoundly damaged American democracy has become. Newspapers were always supposed to be, if not entirely neutral, then at least reliable arbiters of truth. This attempt by Project Veritas seeks to undermine that reliability. Had they succeeded, power and influence would have accrued to Donald Trump and those who enable him. Continue reading
Writing in the Guardian last week, Carole Cadwalladr lamented the way in which Twitter catalyses and facilitates global bullying. This prompted a short exchange between me David Heinemann from Index on Censorship. We noted the betrayed promise of free speech for all that social media offers, and what—or rather, who—might solve the problem.
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Earlier this week, Ratko Mladic was found guilty of war crimes.
It seems astonishing that, even after the Holocaust of the 1930s-40s, there could have been further genocides. Is it that people fail to recognise the warning signs that lead to such atrocities? Or that they lack the power and protection to stop the descent into barbarity?
A compelling new video from RightsInfo uses the testimony of three survivors of genocide to describe how these crimes against humanity came to happen.
The lesson is that human rights must be defended early and often. We should and we must defend our rights against even the tiniest encroachment. If we do not, whoever has violated those rights will surely return to erode them further.
See also: my interview with Anjan Sundaram, author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship.
As well as debating politics, human rights and free speech, this blog is also interested in spreadsheets. Regular readers may recall my triumphant post about UK Postcode Areas, or the deeply honest and uncompromising account of the Excel spreadsheet function VLOOKUP.
As part of my job I’ve recently had cause to look up the bank name and address for a given set of sort codes. To begin with, I simply Googled each sort code and then copied-and-pasted whatever information was revealed.
This is extremely tiresome, so I’ve made myself a spreadsheet. I scraped the web for the information, and have put it in a handy Google Sheets file.
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