to Chris Grayling on the Today programme about Crime
Posts Tagged ‘Miserabilism’
26 Apr
Some wishful gossipping about whatifs
The Spectator: coalition government passes fewer bills. A Very Good Thing. Amol Rajan (in the Indie): Cameron failing could see Conservative Party Break Up. Financial Times: Fantasy coalition cabinets. The Tory chooses all Tories. The Labour chap doesn’t even try. A bit emblematic of their current campaigning styles … LeftFootForward: Tories still refusing to admit [...]
31 Mar
The TUC swipes away a miserabilist myth
And you know the myth I mean. You know, there is loads of ‘hidden unemployment‘ that reflects some sort of Labour fiddle, taking the gloss out of the frankly wonderful unemployment figures (certainly compared to the gleeful alarmism of the Conservative press last summer). Here is the TUC’s graph-strewn reply. Eight million economically inactive people [...]
10 Mar
Me, elsewhere, ducking below the parapet
In the Guardian – I think only online – is an adaptation of that blog post about falling murder rates in LA. As a self-confessed amateur of this topic, I have taken the opportunity of buying Chris Williams’ book on History and Crime. I have seen an earlier chapter on the difficulty of extrapolating from [...]
4 Mar
Los Angeles murder rate in vertiginous decline
… to only about 3 times’ the UK’s. Though that is not the angle taken in this excellent story (hattip Marginal Revolution) which marvels at it falling near to the level of some extraordinary city in Nebraska , Omaha. Los Angeles, a city of some 4 million inhabitants, is enjoying a blindingly good few years [...]
2 Mar
Cameron sticks with ‘broken Britain’
And why not? It gets a good clap from the sort of core Tories that go to Spring Conference. Die hard miserabilists. But as Philip Collins fisks, not necessarily a good idea: The trouble with “broken Britain” rhetorically is that it gives real fire to speeches now and ruins every speech three years into government. [...]
15 Feb
A mysterious silence on this one
Unless I have missed it – I don’t really read Guido, if read is the word – there seems to be a strange silence from the Conservative Blogosphere on their claim that in some areas 54% of Teenagers fall pregnant by the age of 18. Miserabilism is such a religion amongst some on the Right [...]
30 Dec
Simon Schama’s unconvincing miserabilism
Simon Schama gives some fairly unconvincing reasons to be miserable at tthe end of 2009.
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