Category: Current Affairs

From his website.

The Mayor of London’s statement yesterday – very dignified and right.

I can’t agree with Will Davies’s take on the PR effort around today’s attacks. He’s right that the Government has become much more aware of the PR aspect of terrorism, and that there has been a lot of expectation management over the last few years.

However, he closes with:

Government is effectively reneging on its responsibility to keep us actually safe, and [has] retreated to a responsibility to respond efficiently when the enemy does strike?

which is surely wrong.

The Government has been playing a good PR game, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been working behind the scenes to prevent attacks. There has been some public action: the anti-terror laws and arrests around the country, for all they were controversial.

Anti-terror activities are never going to be telegraphed across the front of the papers. I don’t hold a particular brief for the Government, but its getting a clue on managing reactions doesn’t mean it’s losing its grip elsewhere.

Salon’s War Room says:

Londoners […] are suddenly feeling the kind of shock and vulnerability that the residents of New York and Madrid know all too well.

Well, up to a point. I’m certainly not feeling some completely new and terrifying vulnerability, like New Yorkers seem to have after September 11th. As people have been saying on the news, we survived the IRA, we can survive this. The Guardian
has a list of terrorist attacks on the UK mainland.

Paul Skidmore from Demos points out the benefits of hierarchy and Government at times like this.

The handling of the London bombings so far seems to be admirable. Truly disgusting, however, are some of the comments on Free Republic. I knew it was a right-wing site, I didn’t appreciate how much.

Deep Impact hit comet Tempel-1 today, with good results and a huge plume of debris, brightening the comet by a factor of 11. One excited scientist quoted by the Register said:

“We’ll really be able to constrain our models with the new data.”

Yeah, baby! I shouldn’t be sarcastic. It sounds dull – but it may actually be quite exciting.

It’s going to be really interesting to see how this turns out.

Much artificial outrage in the tabs today at a train driver who asked his passengers for sticky tape to fix his train. What is the world coming to, is the Mail’s view.

Of course, aficionados of the Thomas the Tank Engine oeuvre, as my son and I are, will remember that James’s driver used one Mr Jobling’s bootlace to repair a brake pipe after James had treated his carriages roughly one day. “The passengers told the Driver, the Fireman and the Guard what a Bad Railway it was,” wrote W. Awdry in 1948.

Well, indeed. Even now.

Prince William graduated from university today (MA in geography, for what it’s worth), and the press hoopla around it reminded me of how cruel fate is to make people Royal.

Not only are the general public (and a fair sprinkling of nutters) constantly speculating about your love life, but it’s a life sentence, whether you like it or not.

I feel deeply sorry for Prince William and Kate Middleton, who appear to be perfectly normal undergrads, if perhaps a shade richer than the average (an article from the Mirror, linked above, described Ms Middleton’s family home as ‘a £500,000 mansion in Berkshire’. I know Berkshire, and £500,000 don’t buy you no mansion).

Perhaps it’s a mark of civilisation that monarchies have stopped oppressing the people and started oppressing themselves. But couldn’t Republic (or at least Amnesty) move away from the bone dry arguments about heads of state, and start a Human Rights case?