There have been some frankly unhelpful comments following the launch this week of the UK Space Agency. Some people have even suggested that it is little more than another pointless government initiative – Planet Quango, a less-than-heavenly body, mainly consisting...
Read moreThe door to the children’s room, to be found on the home page of this site, can now be opened. It leads to pages relating to my children’s books – pages which have been so superlatively designed by Joyce Serrano,...
Read moreWith Mr and Mrs Cameron, Mr and Mrs Clegg and Mr and Mrs Brown lining up with their kiddies as competing models of perfect, well-scrubbed domestic contentment, it has been a good moment to receive a sharp lesson in reality...
Read moreFollowing the great debate about the deployment of the word “retard” by Vinnie Jones on Celebrity Big Brother, more words seem about to appear on the list of words which must not be used in respectable company. In this week’s...
Read more"Simplistic" was the word used by the Advertising Standards Authority to describe an ill-fated government campaign to raise awareness of climate change. It was a polite way of describing the smoothing out of inconvenient truths in order to deliver a...
Read moreOfficial policy statements from Whitehall tend to be bland and full of sincere-sounding generalities, but just now and then something important, perhaps even revolutionary, can be glimpsed in their pages. So it is with the latest paper from Defra (the...
Read moreIt seems that I am in trouble with that estimable organization Mencap. We have fallen out over the tricky question of offensive language on TV after I had written in the Independent in support of an Ofcom ruling which had...
Read moreThe phrase “community consultation” has a warm and friendly feel to it. Politicians of all parties agree that local communities represent all that is good, noble and unsung about modern Britain. As for consultation, it is of course an essential...
Read moreFor the first and I very much hope the last time, I share a problem with the celebrity hardman Vinnie Jones. We have both recently laid ourselves open to the charge of what is now known as "ableism". Jones was...
Read moreThis week I spent a day in prison, thanks to the good offices of the writers’ organization, English PEN. I was part of an ongoing programme aimed to get prisoners talking about their own writing and reading with professional authors....
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