Protest and survive?
“If we are to survive as a democracy, we need that right to protest. We will probably have to fight for it, and fight very hard.” Paul Bernal argues that the political class is both ignorant of and hostile to the right to protest.
Compassion in mental health reporting
Ask me about what I would change about societal attitutes towards mental health issues and I’d have a long, long list. However, pretty close to the top of the list would be addressing the attitude of the media towards mental health. Yesterday I was sat reading my Twitter feed when I saw the following from […]
What lies beneath
Often I am asked why I blog or tweet so much about race and misogyny. To be fair I write a lot about education, beliefs and politics too but hey let’s answer the question in hand. I write a lot about race and misogyny because I still think that a lot of people are afraid […]
The political class: journalists
In the third of our posts on the political class, we investigate senior journalists in the mainstream media, in particular the specialist correspondents on social policy.
It’s time for youth workers to make some NOISE!
Something that youth work has never been very good at is shouting, loud and proud, about its achievements. Schools do it endlessly, other voluntary sector organisations do it and businesses certainly do it, but in many youth provisions there seems to be a kind of cultural humbleness attached to what they do. I suspect there may […]
Yesterday’s Labour workfare massacre
This morning, like the night after Agincourt, lefties like me scan the bloody, burnt out social media #workfare battlefield in the hope of finding twitching Labour corpses. There are none. Like the French 600 years before, a few generals at the top of the pile made the fateful decision to crush the weak and exhausted. […]
Missing a trick – a UK perspective on police and social media for #poltwt
A brief history of breaking news Once upon a time, when Newspapers ruled the world, our news was fed to us the day after things had happened. Television, with its scheduled news bulletins, reduced that delay from days to hours. If an event was important enough, regular viewing would be interrupted with a NEWS FLASH. […]
“Yeah, you’re gonna need a licence for that tweeting dragon fairy of yours”
Summary Trying to work out what the proposed royal charter means for this blog – and for my tweeting dragon fairy I’m still trying to work out how the Exocet missile that was supposed to be heading towards the corporate print press guilty of a huge number of hacking-related crimes has ended up targeting social media world. […]
Stop press
“This is what policing is really about – ordinary officers, dealing with ordinary people, and making a positive difference to their lives, no matter how small and insignificant the encounter might be.” PC Bobby McPeel suggests that recent scandals involving the police should be put in the context of the positive contribution that officers make everyday.
Stigma and stigmatizers
“The benefits system is Britain is fundamentally flawed. The way it is designed means it guaranteed that people who claim benefits will be stigmatized.” Tom Neumark of Dream Housing responds to a new report from the University of Kent on benefit stigma in Britain.