Kester Brewin

Nick Clegg – Deputy Prime Minister – has travelled to Pakistan to ‘see for himself’ the horrific destruction that the recent flooding has caused. It annoys me that politicians always feel the need to do this, especially when environmental issues are involved. Everyone has to fly off and see the melting polar ice caps for [...]

The report into the horrific bombings in the village of Claudy in 1972 – in which 9 people were killed – has been published today. It appears to make sickening reading: The Police Ombudsman found talks between the Catholic Church, the police and the government led to a priest suspected of involvement in the attack [...]

Extraordinary story on the BBC site today. An armed robber who raided a mobile phone shop in Florida was talked down from his robbery by a shop assistant who ‘spoke to him about Jesus.’ The man said he was a Christian and was “embarrassed” to be doing what he was doing but that he needed [...]

One of the sources I quote a number of times in Other is The Spirit Level – Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The thrust of their thesis is very simple: by collating hundreds of studies over a long period of time they have concluded that the [...]

Looks like it could be an interesting day in Parliament Square today. Having been encamped by the Houses of Parliament since May, peace protestors have been served with an eviction order – meaning they have to leave the site by 4pm today. Rather than try to argue their democratic right to protest, the Mayor of [...]

(Brown writes his letter wishing David Cameron well – from a great set of photos on his last hours here) The waiting is over. We have a new government, what some are calling the ‘ConDems’. My feelings are mixed. They range from huge disappointment and concern at the return of a Conservative administration, to relief [...]

Change is the word you’ll have heard most around this election. It’s actually become a fetish – something that people are obsessed with, without rationally thinking exactly what the kind of change it is that they want – as I blogged about in a series of posts beginning here, and as Bill Bailey has put [...]

Now the Electorate was out in Middle England, and Sky News and other members of the Media brought Gordon Brown to them. They made him stand before the group and said to the Electorate, ‘Voters, this man was caught in the act of speaking rashly in private. He left his microphone on, and it caught [...]

Fascinating, if frightening, piece in The Independent today about the crumbling of support for the moderate Republican Charlie Crist in Florida’s senate election. His opposition, gaining more and more support: Marco Rubio, a man with ‘demigod’ status in the Tea Party movement who at a recent conservative gathering in Washington “declared his love for Guantanamo [...]

Interesting piece on the Today programme this morning, re-visiting the constituency of Smethwick – a safe seat in which was notoriously won by the vile Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths in 1964 following his campaign which ran under the slogan ‘If You Want A Nigger For  A Neighbour, Vote Labour.” Smethwick reacted to chuck out the [...]