The Nth Columnist

 I've been ruminating on making mistakes and owning up to them over the past week or so - perhaps it's a New Year thing: After all, Janus was the god of two faces, and it's always good (occasionally) to look back and reflect.  I was looking at mistakes in an educational context over on my teaching blog , but was also thinking about it in a wider social context. In particular, the UK government's seeming inability to 'fess up to anything whatsoever. Brexit is not exactly going well, as per EVERYBODY'S predictions; And 100,000+ deaths from Covid are not something to crow about. One things does appear to be going right, however, and that is the NHS rollout of the vaccine programme. Who would have thought that an organisation that was specifically designed to provide mass health care in precisely this sort of scenario would have coped so well? Not, apparently, the Conservative government, who are more than ready to take the credit for the vaccination programme, but ...

Autumn, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, when people of a certain bent turn their minds to party political conferences..... You don't - can't -  expect much sense from Conference season. After all, they're basically big freebie jamborees for the converted: It pretty much doesn't matter what you say from the podium, you'll get a cheer. Having said that, what has been emanating from the Conservative Party Conference would be genuinely jaw-dropping in the breadth of its inanity, asinine attitudes, and dementedly cheerful willing capacity to ignore basic truths, were it not for the fact that Brexit has inured us all to such lunacy. Look at what's been said: We will essentially cut the continent off from the mainland; Africa is, according to Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, a country; the future of the poor will be picking fruit for the rich; we can sell English Air to the Chinese; We'll train more doctors and kick the foreign ones out by ...

It's the biggest set of trade negotiations you've never heard of - and it will cost us all dear While our own UK politicians are getting their respective knickers in a twist over whether to stay in or get out of Europe, and claim and counter claim are flung about with gay abandon, there's something going on behind the scenes they really would rather prefer for us not to know all that much about. It's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP. It's been the subject of intense negotiations between the EU and the US for over a year now. OK, so you're probably thinking 'So what? It's just another trade thingy' However, this trade thingy has been discussed rather secretively. Incredibly secretively, in fact: The only information in  the public domain is that which has been uncovered through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. This is odd, as these negotiations will have a profound effect on everythhing you do, say, eat, drink a...