This week has seen an outpouring of jubilation from Number 10 on par with the birth of baby Jesus, or that moment when Georgie boy realised he’d got away with selling RBS shares to to all his hedge fund pals for a £1 billion loss to the taxpayer. And why is this, I hear you ask – is the Queen celebrating her continued gig as the head of society’s most exceptional farce? Nay, merely the arrival of President Xi Jinpeng.
I am writing this, quite fittingly, on the train. My train – our train. After three weeks catching the 7.13 I began to feel like we were bonding: the old MD’s resplendent with panamas and briefcases, young-gun salesmen in their loafers, middle-aged men and women sporting technical outerwear and a hiking backpack with collapsible umbrella stowed safely in a side pocket, prepared for the unpredictable London monsoon season and rough terrain.
The death sentence is tricky ground, and for ill-informed, loud-mouthed bloggers like myself it can be particularly treacherous. Therefore, I am largely avoiding the moral quagmire which surrounds the matter, and instead, will merely consider the effectiveness of the punishment recently handed out to ‘Boston Bomber’, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Talk of the deficit is very much in vogue, and the opposition leaders are fighting like toddlers in a ball pit in an attempt to air their own plans to cut the country’s deficit. Meanwhile, Dave and fellow toff George Osbourne look so chuffed about cutting the deficit by only taking money from people who were never going to vote for them in the first place, that they risk bursting into an unholy Eton mess.
Golden sunflowers blur alongside barley crops which sway lazily in the summer breeze. Around you the gently rolling hills are ablaze with colour, and intermittent natural woodland breaks up the expanse. Journey down from the higher ground towards the nearest settlement, the small river-side town of Le Bugue, and you are accompanied by the smell of wild lavender and the faint chiming of church bells.
Just as it does for many pupils, Gordon’s came to define me. As a boarder you don’t simply attend lessons – you become woven into the fabric of the school and it in turn shapes your outlook for years to come. To this day my friends still refer to themselves in the collective as ‘Camels’…and this is five years on! Life has a funny way of coming full circle.
I like Ed Miliband. And I think, whether or not you agree with his party’s political stance, you would be hard pressed not to. The geeky, second-generation immigrant trod the well-worn path of PPE and Oxford, and progressed into the depths of the Labour Party soon after. He later surfaced as MP for Doncaster North and subsequently entered the cabinet as secretary of state for energy and climate change. Diane Abbot once described Ed as a “genuinely nice and principled person”, and I find little reason to disagree with this. When he talks about his developing vision for the country, and a desire to help those most in need, I believe him.
The General Election has snuck up on us like an elephant clothed in luminous pink underwear, and with it, a sad emphasis on the highly negative nature of current UK politics. It has been seven years since Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ campaign captured the imagination of not just an America in turmoil, but many in the western world. It was a campaign centred around change, but more importantly, change for the better. Being the cynical bunch that we British are, any UK candidate who campaigned under the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, would probably be laughed off stage. And whilst I agree that it is rather more ‘American Dream’ than Grimsby by-election, this does not mean that we couldn’t learn […]
The repetition and extensive media coverage that began months before the general election means that most people are all too aware of the electoral ‘battleground’, and how the NHS features amongst this. Labour have made the NHS the central tenet of their election campaign, claiming that the very ‘future of our NHS is at stake in this general election’. This is predominantly a response to scare-mongering claims that the Coalition government is hell-bent on selling off ‘our’ NHS to the highest private bidder.
Talk of the deficit is very much in vogue, and the opposition leaders are fighting like toddlers in a ball pit in an attempt to air their own plans to cut the country’s deficit. Meanwhile, Dave and fellow toff George Osbourne look so chuffed about cutting the deficit by only taking money from people who were never going to vote for them in the first place, that they risk bursting into an unholy Eton mess.