As we see a change of Poet Laureate, the panel on last week’s Any Questions - including the outgoing Laureate, Andrew Motion - were asked to explain the point of the role.

Just like the way the government has decided on the sites of new nuclear power stations despite the consultation process not having finished yet, so - despite the consultation on Heathrow’s third runway still taking place - Business Secretary John Hutton seems to have already decided that it will go ahead.

Jill Saward is a feminist candidate standing against David Davis in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, on the grounds that putting everyone on a DNA database would be awesome because it’d improve rape conviction rates.
Now, if the problem in getting rape convictions was that there were plenty of cases where DNA samples were taken but [...]

There’s a lot of debate in left-wing-commentaryland at the moment about electricity and gas prices, ‘fuel poverty’, and how these relate to the profits made by energy companies.
The problem is, the debate is nonsense: UK utilities are losing out from high energy prices - and utility bills are currently far too low in any case. [...]

The mysteriously popular Coppersblog has a piece up claiming - in line with its general tabloid nonsense agenda - that crime statistics are nonsense, that crime is rocketing, and that we’ll probably all be stabbed by the end of the week.
Reasonably disgustingly, it uses the murder of Arsema Dawit as a “OMG, evil teen stabbings” [...]

So Labour have lost the Crewe and Natwich election, the Tories winning their first by-election in 26 years. Huzzah.
At last Labour seem to be getting the kind of kicking they’ve long deserved - a kicking I’m hoping might finally shake them out of the complacency that’s seen a supposedly left-wing, pro-EU government with no viable [...]

So, the 10p tax rate fuss is resolved. Instead of a million or so people losing money equivalent to a bag of chips a week with a couple of million gaining money equivalent to half a bag of chips, the government is going to borrow enough money for an extra half a bag of chips [...]

The latest crime figures are out [PDF]: they show a fall in recorded crime, and flat crime according to the British Crime Survey [*].
This isn’t surprising - it just highlights that the rest of the country is actually doing the same ‘crime probably down a bit and certainly not up‘ thing as London, and that [...]

Did you know that crime in London fell by 6% last year? Weird, considering the hysterical paranoia in broadsheet papers and tabloid blogs alike.
Yes, I know that reported crime figures are seldom accurate, which is why people who claim things like “Rape offences have increased ELEVENFOLD” are being dishonest (this is because women now feel [...]

To be on Incapacity Benefit you have to have been deemed unfit for work by your GP. Then, after several months on Income Support, you move on to Incapacity Benefit.
In case anyone needs reminding, your GP is a qualified doctor with your full medical history in front of them. Hard to think of anyone better [...]

In the wake of the HMRC benefit disc loss furore, I repeatedly made an important point that most commentators overlooked: the information provided on those discs was completely useless to carry out any kind of serious fraud, theft or scam.
Jeremy Clarkson, to his credit, shared this view. Unlike me, he had the cojones to back [...]

It appears The People, or at least that subset of The People that post on acrimonious talk boards and read tabloid newspapers, are getting annoyed by immigration.
This comment from this Commentisfree thread is a typical summary, directed at the kind of woolly liberals who think that offering a home to the poor and the persecuted [...]

If you name a teddy bear Mohammed in Sudan, you face barbaric and draconian punishment. But if you avoid going to Sudan in the first place, which is a good idea, then you are at no risk of such lunacy.
America is different. Its laws are just as mad (under a system where your sentence is [...]

The War Against Terror has reached a new high-point:
A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court. The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. It is alleged he had a copy [...]