Jonn @NewStatesman: Bits and bobs

A couple of recent political bits from over at the Statesman.

Back in March, I wrote this, on why Michael Gove’s tendency to dismiss everyone who disagrees with him as a bunch of cackling Trots is coming back to bite him. Starts thusly:

You know who I hate? Children. Little bastards, with their snot and their questions and their boundless curiosity about the world. You know what I’d do, if it were up to me? I’d thwart them. Seriously, I’d thwart the bloody lot of them. I’d deprive them of vital general knowledge, not teach them to add up or spell, and we’ll see who’s laughing then, eh?

You can read the rest here.

More recently, I wrote this, on why the Tories’ refusal to countenance even the slightest criticism of Margaret Thatcher are going to shaft them come 2015.

The Clause 4 moment that everyone was waiting for, the thing that would show that the party had really changed, was a proper assessment of its last government’s record: one that admitted that parts of the country had been lain waste, and showed that the new leadership had learnt from its predecessor’s mistakes. But David Cameron never did that. Until someone does, it’s hard to see how the party could ever win a majority.

If that isn’t enough to convince you (and why wouldn’t it be?), you can see my reasoning here.

Jonn @Londonist: Er, lots of things

Am going to be upping the frequency of my contributions to Londonist, on the grounds that they’ve kindly let me into the semi-mythical inner sanctum of the editorial team.

Said contributions are likely to be frequent enough, in fact, that I’m not going to bother posting links to all of them. But a sample from recent weeks:

• On where the cycle hire scheme will end
• On why average house price figures are misleading
• ASBOs all round: what other anti-social behaviour should we be fining into oblivion?

And for those of you who can’t get enough Jonn*, you can keep an eye on this page for all future Londonist goodness.

*Please note treatments for such psychopathies are now available on the NHS.

Jonn @IndyVoices: The expert problem

An *exciting* development you may have missed: last week I made my Independent Voices debut, expounding part of my Grand Unified Theory of Why Nothing Works (or GUTWNW, for short).

The part of the GUTWNW in question is the Expert Problem. Most of the people who want to change things don’t know enough to do it; while most of the people who have that knowledge don’t want to change a thing.

You can read the thing here.

Jonn @NewStatesman: On lost presents and high visibility jackets

Over at the New Statesman the other week, I attempted to answer a question for the ages: why are private delivery firms so totally f$*%ing useless?

Last summer, a friend living in Palestine wanted to send us a wedding present. She placed an order on a florist’s website, the florist gave the flowers to a private delivery firm, the delivery firm gave them to a driver, and the driver got them as far as our front door. No one was in. So he put them back in his van and took them back to the depot, where they promptly died. Three days later, after waiting in specially, I took delivery of a large and expensive box of compost. Thanks to the magic of the internet, it is now possible to send flowers in London all the way from Gaza, yet delivery companies remain flummoxed by the impenetrable barrier of a locked front door.

Earlier this year, a different delivery firm was bringing me a new phone and, not wanting to go through this rigmarole again, I asked for it to be delivered to my office. It wasn’t. At the appointed hour, the whizzy online tracking service unilaterally decided I’d rejected the delivery. That evening found me in a windswept industrial estate car park wearing a high visibility jacket, attempting to explain that the reason I didn’t have a utility bill proving I lived at the delivery address was because I don’t live in my office.

“Don’t antagonise them,” whispered the man in the queue behind me. He was clearly an old hand: he’d brought his own high-visibility jacket.

You can read the rest of it here.

Jonn @NewStatesman: Why Starbucks can’t just dump its tax bill on the rest of us

Quick blast of festive anger: on the annoying libertarian meme I keep hearing, which says that any attempt to levy corporation taxes will just mean more expensive coffee for the rest of us.

Includes an entrepreneur calling Starbucks “bastards” in an official press releases, and the news that god has returned to Earth and is seeking corporate sponsorship. You can read the rest here.

Happy Winterval, by the way.

 

 

Jonn @GuardianEdu: The British Council – Friend or Foe?

On the surprisingly widespread disdain for a much-loved institution.

A few years ago, when the CfBT Education Trust, a non-profit organisation that runs schools and education services, was looking to expand its operations in Malaysia, its chief executive, Neil McIntosh, arranged a meeting with the local high commissioner. When he got there, though, he was disappointed to see that the commissioner had brought along a representative of one of CfBT’s main competitors. “He was a bit put out that I should see the British Council in that light…”

You can read the rest here.

Jonn @ Londonist: Reinventing London’s boroughs

For those who missed it on Friday, the latest instalment in the long-running “Jonn has too much time on his hands” series. London’s boroughs are precisely the wrong size – so I invented some new ones.

Check it out – there’s a map and everything.

Jonn @NewStatesman: The US election is Bush/Kerry in reverse

…or so I hope:

So here’s the situation. The sitting US president is an incredibly divisive figure. The challenger is pushing a single big policy issue, in which he believes he’s at an unassailable advantage. And the opposition are so fired up with loathing for the president that they’ve convinced themselves they can nominate a gaffe-prone plank of wood from Massachusetts and still walk home to a win.

If all this is starting to feel eerily familiar to you, it might be because we’ve been here before…

You can read the rest here.

Jonn @GuardianEdu: On Gove’s original sin

Throwing rocks at Michael Gove again, this time for last Tuesday’s Guardian. (Why yes, that is a flatteringly photo-shopped photograph of my face they ran with the article. How kind of you to notice.)

This time I’m asking ”Will Gove’s legacy be parents petrified they won’t find a primary school for their child?”

Incidentally, “For goodness sake don’t tempt fate by saying you’ve identified MG’s worst cock-up!” may be the best comment posted under anything I’ve ever written.

You can read the piece here.

Jonn @GuardianEdu: Flat-pack universities for sale

On David Willetts’ plans to help British universities sell their wares to developing countries:

…UKES won’t just push overseas campuses: everything from technology to accreditation is also in its sights. But it could also market a sort of flat-pack higher education system, with campus construction, academic expertise and the finance to pay for it all in a single package. Governments in a hurry to create a new university could use Britain as a one-stop shop…

You can read the rest of it here.