There’s an amusing fellow on YouTube called Lee Doren. He’s of the flavour of politics that sees Barack Obama as a socialist and/or fascist. His channel on YouTube is called ‘How the World Works’ – a singularly inappropriate title.
I have a webcam for Skype calls, so I thought I’d use it to make a response [...]

Donal Blaney writes about a sort of division within the Conservative Party. In short, Mr Blaney objects to a large part of David Cameron’s repositioning of his party as progressive conservatives. The bulk of his argument is that liberalism and fascism both descend from progressivism, and so are alike. I may well pick up a [...]

I’ve spent a very pleasant evening in the company of the Sceptics in the Pub London, where the speaker was Dr. Aubrey de Gray, Chief Scientific Officer with the SENS Foundation. In brief, de Gray (Wikipedia article) set out the work of the SENS foundation which, as I understand it, looks at ageing as a [...]

Over at the OpenLeft website, various worthies are asked the question “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?”. Various others have weighed in; I’d like to go through some of the comments people made and then have a go myself.
Polly Toynbee
Sunder Katwala
Jon Cruddas
James Purnell
Dave Cole

Yesterday saw the Progressive London Conference at Congress House in London. All in all, I thought it was pretty good. There seemed to be very few nutty lefties there and I was pleased that there were a few people there I knew and recognised from my CLP, from blogging, from uni and around and about [...]

A friend and former teacher of mine from LSE, Leda Glyptis, has set up a blog over at tsikitsiki.blogspot.com. Tsiki tsiki is, I am told, the Greek annoying, onomatopoeic expression of an annoying names.
In a post on the Hellenic Republic, Leda talks about the recent riots and the threat, in Weberian terms, that they pose [...]

Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics.
1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled [...]

I think there are three points that come out of this.
Firstly, I will be interested to see how Mr Davis, now re-elected, keeps the issue in the public eye. I dislike single-issue elections as Mr Davis will represent his constituency on the whole range of public issues. Although David Davis (according to ConservativeHome) has said [...]

In order to counter the remarkable batting of the Australian Don Bradman, the English Ashes team of 1932-3 decided to bowl directly at the batsman rather than trying to hit the stumps. Bowling ‘in the line of the body’ quickly became Bodyline. It was a effective tactic – England won four of the five games [...]

Foreign Policy’s list of one hundred leading, public intellectuals is causing some controversy. We should be grateful that this list has been compiled and that the competition is being promoted by Foreign Policy rather than one of the TV networks. Graham Norton or – heaven forfend! – Jimmy Carr would have been Channel Four’s preferred [...]