The Guardian… All dogs are to be compulsorily microchipped so that their owners can be more easily traced under a crackdown on dangerous dogs to be unveiled today. How the fuck is that going to help fucking anything? The only thing it’ll do is help trace the owner of a stray dog. If a dog

It’s unusual for The Guardian and The Spectator to agree on anything, but Seamus Milne and our own John R Bradley are sceptical about these Syrian rebels whom we’re being invited to support. Bradley was alone in predicting the Egyptian revolution, and argues in today’s magazine that the conventional wisdom is once again wrong. Who’s backing the rebels? The Qataris, keen to ...

It’s unusual for The Guardian and The Spectator to agree on anything, but Seamus Milne and our own John R Bradley are sceptical about these Syrian rebels whom we’re being invited to support. Bradley was alone in predicting the Egyptian revolution, and argues in today’s magazine that the conventional wisdom is once again wrong. Who’s backing the rebels? The Qataris, keen to ...

A nimble two-step from The Guardian: 1. Polly Toynbee sends tweet encouraging all and sundry to take part in an open-access online poll being run by the BMJ. 2. The Guardian reports result of said BMJ poll. Then only thing missing, alas, is: 3. The Guardian then realises that reporting a voodoo poll which its

The Guardian reported yesterday that Sky News has told its journalists not to re-tweet information from non-Sky Twitter users. That immediately sparked a barrage of criticism from Reuters, Charlie Beckett, GigaOM and lots of people on Twitter. But from a political perspective I can see why they’re doing it. I want to briefly address this

I have an article on the Guardian site today on why it's important to continue banker bashing. Bankers are the biggest recipients of government handouts of our time. They also have extraordinary powers over our lives. Why isn't either of this being adequately challenged? But there are more reasons too.

The Guardian reports: Seven hospital trusts struggling with crippling private finance initiative debts are to receive £1.5bn in emergency funding from the government to help them avoid cutting patient services to pay their bills. The Department of Health is making the £1.5bn available – in grants, not loans – to the seven hospital trusts in

Seems they’re just as good with numbers over there as they are with numbers here.

Blanche Berryman, who has died aged 91, was an extraordinarily gifted teacher who made history into everyone's best-loved subject at our stuffy grammar school, Tiffin in Surrey, in the 1950s and 1960s. Never boring, never condescending, sometimes attractively risque, she was the only teacher who kept perfect order in her classroom purely by her inspiration and personality, without the heavy w...

The Daisey thing has got picked up by The Guardian and I’m mentioned in it. It’s really rather fun in the comments: we’ve even got someone flat out insisting that UK GDP per capita in 1600, or Chinese in 1978, could not possibly be only $950 a year because it’s impossible to survive on £2