I know, but I don’t know.

October 30, 2011 in Blair

I am reliably informed that an individual who was a member of Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street staff, and then one of the Tony Blair foundations (I’m not sure which one – the Faith, or the Sports, or just the Tony Blair Associates commercial version?), is now a scriptwriter for Simon Cowell on the American [...]

non-Thursday music link

October 30, 2011 in music

By special recommendation from the other author of this blog.

What these people need is a national biometric identity register

October 30, 2011 in biometrics, ID

The creation of a database containing all 9 million Israelis’ demographic, family, and medical information plus identifying biometrics has not necessarily developed to their advantage. Bonus points for use of the phrase “Hasidic criminal underworld”. They’ll make you an offer it takes years of painstaking theological scholarship to understand.

G3 Good Governance: what is it?

October 30, 2011 in Tories

Following up on last week’s pull the records post on Foxitty and tasers and stuff, what if “G3″ really refers to G3 Good Governance Group? Here’s the data, on LevelBusiness, which is even better than CompaniesintheUK. There are four names involved, two of which – Hugh Petre and Andries Pienaar – quit the board at [...]

it flies! well, that’s what it was bloody well designed to do

October 30, 2011 in lobbying, networks, Python, special relationships, Tories

The question isn’t so much “did Eric Pickles eat all the pies?”, it’s “who paid for the pies, and how many did he declare in the register of members’ interests?”. TBIJ is on an absolute tear on Tory lobbying stories at the moment, and the combination of photo and caption for the Eric Pickles one [...]

Why not foundation courts?

October 30, 2011 in Afghanistan, banter, Blair, British Army, civil service, economics, funny ha ha, Home Office, managerialism

Thinking about the political castration of Ken Clarke and the fact that not even the Treasury in its most R.G. Hawtrey-esque mood seems to be able to stop the expansion of the prison industry, it struck me that the political class’s attitude towards the public service known as justice is fundamentally different to its attitude [...]

Don’t faze me, sorry, tase me, bro!

October 20, 2011 in Tories

OK, so the report by Gus O’Donnell into Liam Fox and Adam “I can’t believe he’s not Mike Ledeen” Werritty specified some companies as donors to the various odd parallel structures that supported Fox and Werritty. One of these is given in the report as G3 Ltd. This has been described in the papers as [...]

non-Thursday music link

October 16, 2011 in music

I think you’d have to be a perfesser to miss this point (h/t Jamie Kenny’s twitter feed). But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner [...]

Moving swiftly on

October 16, 2011 in Tories

So yer Djanogly and his legal aid bill and his insurance companies. Something I’d love to know more about is his rather odd statement that his kids had “non-interest bearing non-voting shares” in these companies and that they were “of no value”. This is of course another case of the principle that lawyering a statement [...]

Adventures in radial graph visualisation – Sindy edition

October 16, 2011 in networks

The Independent on Sunday has another really excellent piece on Liam Fox including a very good network visualisation. See the power of the radial graph paradigm, and understand why I want Lobster to look like that! kc claffy wasn’t wrong.