Out of 2077-inspired curiosity I picked up the Cyberpunk 2020 Bundle of Holding, which is why I find myself reading a sourcebook from 1994 called the Rough Guide to the U.K. Its ‘brief recent history’ begins thus: The United Kingdom has been going through some turbulent times recently.

Everyone’s a post-election haruspex, and the pundits have it that Corbyn drew the ‘youth vote’.

What a sad day it is when someone high up in the government makes illiberal pronouncements about technology policy without even knowing a hash from a hashtag, provoking jaded sighs from the better informed.

Despite our both having links to Durham’s Philosophy Dept. I’ve never met Thom Brooks, who I think came to Durham shortly before I stopped being physically there. Occasionally he makes waves I notice: once some students contacted me hoping I could advise on getting a critical response published to something he’d written (they were into polyamory …

Backward-looking, reactionary, left behind by the pace of change and resenting the modern world. But enough of those demanding a rerun...

It’s a good thing polling day is nearly upon us; things are getting too meta even for me. I think we’re now onto critcisms of the tone of accusations of lowering the tone of the debate.

Consider for example the difference between their opening video and ours. Theirs focuses on the contribution Britain makes to the EU budget but fails to reference the benefits our membership brings [...]. It’s fundamentally dishonest. [...] Our opening video, by contrast, features a range of people speaking from experience about the benefits of being in Europe. …

Note to those seeking to shift debate through changing language: the time to try to replace a term is not after your own government has sponsored legislation using and defining that term.

...Euroscepticism hardly needs enemies.

What on Earth is Liberal Democrat Artwork?

Normally I’m wary of importing market-esque thinking into non-commercial policy spheres, but in the case of the interminable ‘Why aren’t younger people more inclined to vote?’ debate I wish more thought were given to the simple economic possibility that if you want people to buy, you have to be selling things they want. (Even an ‘entrepreneur’ …

Until now, you might have had the impression that identity politics was one of the leading obsessions of British political life. ‘Community leaders’, ‘ethnic arts’, multiculturalism versus integration... and of course the Saltire-waving crescendo of a nationalist campaign to chop off Scotland.

Commentary on the Scottish bid to tear a country apart – that country, of course, being Scotland – is already settling down to some precriminations about the result, whatever it may turn out to be. Whatever happens, most of the comedy will surely come from Alex Salmond’s task of forging national unity; though if his promise …

It is of course traditional for people to call for the dismantling of the D.C.M.S. even in weeks when the Secretary of State has not been forcibly replaced: on this occasion the Spectator is doing the honours. Yet last June the Telegraph carried suggestions that the Department was too small...

Here’s a hypothesis about the moral psychology involved in deciding priorities in the politics of child safety: it must create a huge sense of responsibility, mustn’t it? The kind where you’d lie awake at night, wondering whether children had been left endangered because you chose a wasteful use of resources? The kind where you’d want to …