Westminster needs to stop looking at any 50p tax abolition as a tax cut and start looking at it as the end of a tax hike. At 40% high earners would still be paying a higher proportion of their income than everyone else and it is to Osborne's shame that he's never put it in these terms.
George Osborne is extremely wealthy and yet does not suffer from the 50% rate as his wealth is derived from family rather than current earnings - and yet he uses his enormous wealth as an excuse to bash the aspirational. He is a petty little man and a weak Chancellor.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
10 O'Clock Live
Just out of mindless curiosity I filled in a survey about Channel 4's new satirical offering, 10 O'Clock Live. (The survey at one point includes a revealing list of the show's regular contents, evidently cribbed from the run-sheet.) Unsurprisingly I got a bit carried away with the "additional feedback" form, which apparently is shared with Channel 4 executives. Given they are likely to balk at the ridiculous length of my critique, I share it here in the hope that at least SOMEONE will find it of enough interest to actually read and give feedback....
Top-tier talent wasted on dreadful writing. The jokes are rarely funny and never imaginative. The presenters work best in their off-the-cuff moments, reacting to things. Jimmy Carr is a brilliant talent who tells hysterically funny jokes in his stand-up work - perhaps he needs to work with the writing team more closely. (Perhaps you need a different writing team.)
Usually the bit that makes me laugh the most is the newspaper headlines at the end - usually just Charlie Brooker reading out the funniest headline. That doesn't reflect well on the writers, who unlike headline-writers are paid to come up with things designed to make us laugh.
It's all way too left-leaning - the guest discussions usually have a balanced panel but always hijacked by David Mitchell's Guardian-skewed viewpoint. This is just as prominent in his interviews: the first one, with David Willetts, was a relentless grilling, but actually shed some light on the subject that had got lost under all the broken promises, mindless slogans, smashed windows and poked Duchesses in other media coverage - despite Mitchell's attempts to create his own soundbites for the "case against". The second week, he didn't ask Alastair Campbell anything he hadn't already been asked a million times over (Iraq, Iraq, Iraq), giving him a pretty easy ride overall - due to Mitchell's predictable anti-war slant. And the Caroline Lucas interview was a bit of a love-in, Mitchell agreeing with her on virtually everything.
Also it's just plain weird seeing Mitchell without Webb, as an anchor at least...
I have no idea what Lauren Laverne is doing there. She doesn't add anything to the programme and her presence is a rather patronising (false) suggestion that there aren't any good female comedians out there. Some tension between the cast would be welcome too - they spend most of the programme looking at the camera rather than each other, usually saying very similar sorts of things, which can create a disturbing impression of a hive mind. A more stylistically and ideologically diverse cast would solve a lot of these problems - Mitchell, Brooker and Laverne are essentially cut of the same cloth, and this does not make for good chemistry (the Two Ronnies for example didn't share much in common beyond the same first name!).
"This Week" is on BBC One half an hour later and has for the past three weeks been a bit funnier and a lot more informative. That is what you are competing with.
Top-tier talent wasted on dreadful writing. The jokes are rarely funny and never imaginative. The presenters work best in their off-the-cuff moments, reacting to things. Jimmy Carr is a brilliant talent who tells hysterically funny jokes in his stand-up work - perhaps he needs to work with the writing team more closely. (Perhaps you need a different writing team.)
Usually the bit that makes me laugh the most is the newspaper headlines at the end - usually just Charlie Brooker reading out the funniest headline. That doesn't reflect well on the writers, who unlike headline-writers are paid to come up with things designed to make us laugh.
It's all way too left-leaning - the guest discussions usually have a balanced panel but always hijacked by David Mitchell's Guardian-skewed viewpoint. This is just as prominent in his interviews: the first one, with David Willetts, was a relentless grilling, but actually shed some light on the subject that had got lost under all the broken promises, mindless slogans, smashed windows and poked Duchesses in other media coverage - despite Mitchell's attempts to create his own soundbites for the "case against". The second week, he didn't ask Alastair Campbell anything he hadn't already been asked a million times over (Iraq, Iraq, Iraq), giving him a pretty easy ride overall - due to Mitchell's predictable anti-war slant. And the Caroline Lucas interview was a bit of a love-in, Mitchell agreeing with her on virtually everything.
Also it's just plain weird seeing Mitchell without Webb, as an anchor at least...
I have no idea what Lauren Laverne is doing there. She doesn't add anything to the programme and her presence is a rather patronising (false) suggestion that there aren't any good female comedians out there. Some tension between the cast would be welcome too - they spend most of the programme looking at the camera rather than each other, usually saying very similar sorts of things, which can create a disturbing impression of a hive mind. A more stylistically and ideologically diverse cast would solve a lot of these problems - Mitchell, Brooker and Laverne are essentially cut of the same cloth, and this does not make for good chemistry (the Two Ronnies for example didn't share much in common beyond the same first name!).
"This Week" is on BBC One half an hour later and has for the past three weeks been a bit funnier and a lot more informative. That is what you are competing with.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Dire Straights
The Coalition government has appointed Simon Hughes to be its "Advocate for Access to Higher Education". This entails selling the recent tuition fees reforms to young people in order to encourage them to attend university.
Simon Hughes is, of course, a man who couldn't even persuade himself that these reforms are worthwhile enough to vote for them. He abstained.
This is surely the coalition's single most ridiculous appointment yet. Next they'll be inviting Ed Balls to be their Spending Cuts Advocate.
Norfolk Blogger has a similarly critical Lib Dem perspective on this here.
Simon Hughes is, of course, a man who couldn't even persuade himself that these reforms are worthwhile enough to vote for them. He abstained.
This is surely the coalition's single most ridiculous appointment yet. Next they'll be inviting Ed Balls to be their Spending Cuts Advocate.
Norfolk Blogger has a similarly critical Lib Dem perspective on this here.
Monday, December 13, 2010
EMA protests kick off
Good grief. Educational Maintenance Allowance was only introduced a couple of years ago. And now it's seemingly introduced teenagers to welfare dependency. These protesters need to get a grip. Bribing these youngsters won't educate them, if they had any interest in further study they would just go anyway. Anyone who's attending college purely to receive EMA is just having their time wasted by the state when they could be entering employment or training.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Demo-lition!
It's been fascinating to watch the news all day. We saw people smashing up windows and the reception area to the 30 Millbank building (or was it Millbank Tower, the journalists couldn't quite make their minds up) - all in the name of protesting against increased student fees (although oddly I don't recall anyone doing anything like this when Labour introduced them in the first place, nor when they hiked them by a factor of three in 2005).
Strangest of all has been the reaction of the NUS (whose staff, wearing reflective jackets, were prominently on the scene when those windows were being smashed in). It is currently saying on its web site:
Strange then that this afternoon, clicking on the "WE WILL MARCH" banner produced the following, at http://www.demo2010.org.uk/
With "DEMO-LITION" emblazoned all over it (as well on the NUS' official placards and t-shirts), it seems to me not so much a condemnation of violence as an incitement to it.
Of course during the course of the afternoon all trace of this site has mysteriously disappeared and the URL currently links straight through to nus.org.uk. Funny that. There's still a couple of "DEMO-LITION" badges tucked away on its front page though.
Pity the media hasn't made a point of this, they don't seem to like reporting on union hypocrisy very much for some reason...
On a related note, credit to the BBC who managed to find the perfect candidate to interview for the Six O'Clock News (long before the watershed): a man with "FUCK" scrawled all over his face. Very prominent on the analogue set I watched it on...
Update: they just showed him again on the News at Ten.
Strangest of all has been the reaction of the NUS (whose staff, wearing reflective jackets, were prominently on the scene when those windows were being smashed in). It is currently saying on its web site:
NUS has condemned the violent actions of "rogue protestors" who have undermined an otherwise peaceful protest with NUS President Aaron Porter calling the scenes "despicable".
Strange then that this afternoon, clicking on the "WE WILL MARCH" banner produced the following, at http://www.demo2010.org.uk/
With "DEMO-LITION" emblazoned all over it (as well on the NUS' official placards and t-shirts), it seems to me not so much a condemnation of violence as an incitement to it.
Of course during the course of the afternoon all trace of this site has mysteriously disappeared and the URL currently links straight through to nus.org.uk. Funny that. There's still a couple of "DEMO-LITION" badges tucked away on its front page though.
Pity the media hasn't made a point of this, they don't seem to like reporting on union hypocrisy very much for some reason...
On a related note, credit to the BBC who managed to find the perfect candidate to interview for the Six O'Clock News (long before the watershed): a man with "FUCK" scrawled all over his face. Very prominent on the analogue set I watched it on...
Update: they just showed him again on the News at Ten.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Do you want comics? Here be comics.
I have 525 comics I want to sell. But I can't be arsed with eBay, as it won't let me do what I want it to, and charges me for the privilege. If you want the lot, you can have it for three hundred quid. If you want a particular comic, or some of them, make me an offer and I'll consider it (and probably take you up on it). Contact me in the comments, which are completely open, or on Twitter. They're all in good nick, I'd call most of them NM but I haven't got a clue about those classifications really, what the comics are good for is reading. The full list appears after the jump (if people stake individual bits I'll update accordingly):
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