It all started with a wooden crocodile, as is so often the case.
PR, not PM. The UK has a golden opportunity for Electoral Reform
While the Tory party seems to be fixated on finding a Prime Minister with a longer-dated “Best Before” label than Liz Truss, both they and the Labour party appear to have missed a more important point, which is that there’s never been a better time to effect electoral reform for the UK, but neither Party seems to have noticed, being too obsessed with the cult of premiership.
Recent events have shown that the current two party system is even more broken than Liz Truss’ economic vision, and whoever wins the current Prime Ministerial beauty parade is in for a stormy ride, but nobody seems to ask why it’s all going wrong, and what can be done about it.
Hack me – I’m Hackney
Last October, Hackney Council in London suffered a major cyber-attack, which took many of its customer-facing services offline. Three months on, many of those are still not available. The council has been coy about exactly what happened, but has just released a statement telling Hackney residents that some of the data which was stolen in the data breach has now been released by the hackers.
Don’t let your Children do a Startup, Mrs Worthington…
Noel Coward, the English playwright and actor, described the motivation behind writing his most famous song as: “Some years ago when I was returning from the Far East on a very large ship, I was pursued around the decks every day by a very large lady. She showed me some photographs of her daughter – a repellent-looking girl, and seemed convinced that she was destined for a great stage career. Finally, in sheer self-preservation, I locked myself in my cabin and wrote this song – “Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington”.
I know how he felt. As I spend more and more time in meetups, startup conferences, incubators, co-working spaces and accelerators, it feels that our industry has adopted the same rose-tinted spectacles in the belief that every Tom, Dick and Harriet can be trained to be an entrepreneur. Hence the following update:
Don’t let your Children do a Startup, Mrs Worthington.
Trident – is Theresa May a better deterrent?
One of the first decisions Theresa May made on becoming Prime Minister after the Brexit referendum was to approve the manufacture of four replacement submarines for our Trident nuclear weapons system. She argued that it would be an “act of gross irresponsibility” for the UK to abandon the continuous-at-sea weapons system, continuing the logic that a submarine which cannot be traced is an invisible force for retribution which would deter an aggressor.
I’ll pass on the issue of whether or not we should have nuclear weapons. That’s a different and important point to argue. What I’d like to highlight here is that whilst the concept that a nuclear submarine was undetectable may have been valid in the 1960s, it’s no longer the case. The countries that signed up to the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction now have the technology to know exactly where each other’s submarines are. So what is Trident meant to be protecting us from?
Brexit – a Tragedy of Shakespearean Proportions
Last Friday, many of us in the UK woke up to discover that our world had changed. Despite every poll indication to the contrary, the country had voted to leave the EU. There’s an irony in that vote – Tory ministers repeatedly berate our education system for not putting enough emphasis on Shakespeare. The result showed that they have no room to talk, for as Coriolanus would have told them, the people have resoundingly spoken with the yea and no of general ignorance.
The question is, what now? It has been a particularly nasty campaign, devoid of facts and based on the basest of emotions as rhetoric sank to the lowest common denominator, dividing friends and family in a manner which I have never seen before. Truth has been a casualty, as has Jo Cox. There is no question that many, assured by the polls that the result would be a vote to remain, took the opportunity to vote against the Government, attempting to bloody the eye of what is almost universally seen as a disconnected posh elite. They were shocked to find that rather than pecking the eagles, the crows had ripped out their own eyes on Friday morning.
So what now?