Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

but SM is right insofar as fighting the deficit has somehow become the main agenda. so the fight is all about waste in public expenditure rather than about the city having crashed the economy.

Yeah I'd go with that. Also if you take out the money that was spent bailing out the banks, the budget deficit is I believe around the same as it was in 1996/97 - wish I could find the graph that illustrated that. I think I'm with Tombot on this ("who cares how much we spent, how much did we spend defeating one Hitler?") and actually the government would be better off focusing its efforts on fixing the broken banks on its books and getting them off the public balance sheet as soon as is sensibly possible.

Normally I would be contributing to this thread but I'm too depressed by the whole business to even finish this sentence adequately

This isn't relevant to the thread, but re higher education expecting cuts, further ed colleges all round the country have been fairly shafted by signing up to a government scheme to improve/expand their buildings and get the money back; plan has now been reneged on, leaving FE colleges having spent £££ on half-built sites they now can't afford to complete, in some cases having demolished the old buildings, some may have to shut down, etc

not that the great British public have ever been much moved to care about FE (not the universal button-push of primary+secondary ed nor the Our Future Boffins angle of HE), c.f. FE college A-level lecturers routinely getting abt a third less pay than those in school sixth forms, and left behind on every pay rise for schoolteachers

...that was just a rant I was reminded of and didn't have anywhere else to put, carry on

working for a local council I can add that anyone who's looking for money to do stuff has been told that they can fuck off on account of 10% cuts since, yeah, spring.

This'd all feel very nail in the coffin if there weren't already a thousand of them.

To what extent would significantly raising taxes on the financial sector harm the recovery? This would seem to be both fair and popular, and yet no one's mentioned it.

What do you mean by taxes on the financial sector?

i think the argument against goes: if you do this, all the entrepreneurial geniuses, who made the city the towering success it is, will flee the country for switzerland or ireland. which would be terrible, because who would we spend billions of pounds bailing out and paying bonuses to if they sodded off? i guess it's a non-starter motivated by the "politics of envy" :/

Also that the financial sector is pretty much all we've got left in Britain

Haha yeah that's the sticking point.

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

Ahem.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but why would the government want to gag that enough to put up with all this fuss? Does that report reflect on them in some way that I'm missing?

Am I reading this wrong or isn't this more about Carter Ruck "protecting" it's clients than the government "gagging" anyone?

Or rather isn't the Guardian, in it's usual roundabout way, highlighting a problem with the law as it stands that may well be used by law firms from now on to prevent the reporting of parliament? i.e. if this goes unchallenged. The fact that I've seen the question in question on at least three different websites in the last couple of minutes (including wiki) makes the whole thing a bit silly.

lol twitter flashmob 2.0

This is the first story on Guido and lol at his insane commenteers who start off with "THIS IS IT PEOPLE - WE ARE NOW IN ENDTIMES" and then start getting into the McCanns and how the BNP wouldn't let this type of thing happen.

Well, if it was Carter-Ruck's intention to keep what Trafigura are up to out of the press it has well and truly fucked up.

oh twitter

"The gag is generally considered in the Blogosphere to be…"

we are going to GAG THEM

You can't prevent reporting of parliament. It takes place in public and it's proceedings get published in Hansard the next day anyway. I guess parliament itself could prohibit reporting, but I'm not sure it's ever met in camera, even during the war.

I must say that I don't actually see why this is supposed to prevent reporting of parliament - from what I've read, it seems to be an order to keep the company's documents confidential. If they're private documents, I guess that might be possible. If Paul Farrely reads them out in parliament, which he's entitled to do, they'd become public that way and i'm pretty sure they could then be reported that way, regardless of any court order. I may have got it wrong, I haven't read much yet, but I don't see why the big fuss.

Needs new thread.
Let's have a thread about the gagging order on reporting parliament because everyone else has one, and we wouldn't want to be though of as shirking our internet responsibilities.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/leah-borromeo

not sure if this is good or bad.

It's not really objectionable but it's just stating a slice of the obvious plus vague claims about what the world "needs" with no sense of how she thinks that might happen. Who'd've thought big business wd try and muscle in on the action, eh?

"Hardcore with a haircut, she has a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time."

If she had all those proper jobs how come she's blogging for the Graun?

yeah no i meant the profile, not the article.

what is it to be "hardcore with a haircut"?

"regularly contributes to hipster rags like Juxtapoz and Who's Jack."

are these things?

I thought we was talking about the Copenhagen article. Which on second reading is a bit objectionable anyway. I put the profile into my bulging "Loldon" file.

Didn't understand what she was arguing for in the Copenhagen article. She's in favour of "grass roots movements that tackle tangible goals" like "fair rights" and "proper justice", and "not semantic abstract concepts" like CO2 reductions. WTF?

What age group is the Guardian aimed at?

Why is there no full stop at the end of the profile blurb?

xpost

What's the age group for mid-life crises?

Juxtapoz is the art mag for those who like their art to be an oil painting of a naked woman sitting on a taco. Dunno about the other mag.

Who’s Jack magazine began in Sept 06. Out in both print and online formats. We cater to a demanding, trendsetting, ‘people of the future’ crowd that love anything new and home grown. Essentially we bring together the cogs behind what makes London’s trends, scenes, and interests change, adapt and essentially tick.

self facilitating media nodes then yeah?

Translation: 'we are a clique of early adapters with bad web skillz, please send us to parties and pay us in goodie bags'.

is the name a snide reference to failed james brown magazine jack, i wonder.

This guy looks to be the literary answer to Bobby G, haircut, literary style and all:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/dec/22/tonight-rocknroll-scribe

oops double use of the word "literary" there, my bad!

I'd like to think that one crucial difference between a literary editor and a newspaper sub is that only one of them would allow a writer to start a piece with the words "face-crunchingly cringeworthy"

^^ ot fucking m. saying the same thing with two words. very overwritten in a student paper stylee. so rightat home at the guardian.

Sometimes I get myself in a right pickle.

vernacular! he ought to cut his hair.

He's a writer playing at journalism, which results in a. the writer ignoring the conventions of journalism because he can (and likely knows no better), and b. the editor/sub cutting the writer some (possibly undue) slack because the writer has presumably been given the commission on account of his "style", such as it is.

Nothing to get too het up about, and mildly diverting to boot.

guy is 33 and says trainspotting is the book that made him want to be a writer, which would have made him, what, 17? yeah, he's not going to be much of a stylist.

argh, ignore that, got his date of birth wrong. he's barely older than max gogarty.

HIs first book, Apples, is one of those that isn't bad for being written by a teenager. He's now 25.

kind of sad that the supposed voice of youth's cultural touchstones are irvine welsh and the stone roses. that's the voice of my youth, and i'm old.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/blog/2009/dec/29/unnecessary-999-calls

This is almost entirely unremarkable as per the URL but cheap lols can be extracted from the line "Greater Manchester police said it received almost 1.4m calls between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day" and, as suggested below the article,

The BBC reported "Between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, GMP said it received 1,377 999 calls, but only a fraction were genuine emergencies."

Grauniad Journo reads this as 1,377,999 & rounds it up.

Simples!

cheap lol

It took me embarrassingly long to get that

i read my mother's copy of the mail yesterday - you know, when they excerpted the columnist calling for the death penalty on the front - and, you know, the guardian might be annoying sometimes but, like, they're fine really, you know

Wasn't very impressed with Michael White's thoughts on the China execution

Send him on a philosophy/critical thinking course.