I’ve been following the recent Irish general election quite closely (those of you who’ve suffered through my various tweets and posts can feel free to put in a: “No shit! Really?” here). It’s not news that Fianna Fáil suffered a disaster of epic proportions. But I thought it might be nice to knock up a [...]

Yesterday, I blogged that many in Ireland were calling for it to abandon its current Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system in favour of the Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) system used for the Scottish Parliament, among others. This makes me sad. I love STV. It has a purity and elegance against which MMP looks [...]

On 5th May 2011, the British people will be asked by referendum if they wish to change the way they elect the members of their parliament, from the existing First Past The Post (FPTP) system to a system of Alternative Vote (AV). The “Yes to Fairer Votes” campaign list the following as some of AV’s [...]

The story of PC Mark Kennedy, a.k.a. eco-activist Mark “Flash” Stone, is like something out of a Hollywood movie: He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in [...]

A Tory councillor has been arrested over claims he suggested on Twitter that Yasmin Alibai-Brown, a female newspaper columnist, should be stoned to death. You’ve probably read this in the news. If not, you can read about it on the above link, or here, here, or here. But basically, a Conservative councillor, Gareth Compton, was [...]

There’s a lot of talk now about the coalition government move to raise the cap on university tuition fees. For what’s it’s worth, I don’t know what the solution to university funding is, although I do feel that the emphasis on getting 50% of the population to go to a university simply to do a [...]

It’s quite common now to read tweets, posts and status updates that are highly critical of the Liberal Democrats’ role in the UK’s coalition government, often stating that those who voted Lib Dem should now be regretting their choice and sometimes even suggesting that they should feel shame. But do such statements betray a misunderstanding [...]

These were the three thoughts that went through my mind when I read the following in a news report about Raoul Moat’s funeral in today’s Metro newspaper: One stranger was Theresa Bystram, 45, who travelled 480km (300 miles) from Weybridge, Surrey, on an overnight coach with three of her teenage sons to be at the [...]

Okay, I do at this point need to declare an interest. I’m an Apple fanboy. Not only have I got an iPad, an iPhone, a MacBook, and a MacBook Air, I have also in the past owned an iBook, a first-generation iMac, and even [drumroll please] a Newton. (Buying a Mustang or a Mondeo, say, [...]

Labour party supporters (not necessarily the Labour party itself) are currently slamming away at the Lib Dems for talking to the Tories about some sort of coalition, totally ignoring the fact that it wasn’t the Lib Dems who took this decision, but the British people themselves when a hell of a lot more of them [...]