I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons the "London isn't safe" propaganda has gained such a hold is that the city has changed so much in recent decades. I hardly recognise the skyline from the days when I worked there in the 1980s. But maybe London has always been like that. Go back another 40 years from when I knew it well and you would find a very different cityscape of bombsites and ruins. Still, a lot of "the old London" remains. In fact, I was surprised how much of it John Rogers found on this walk. Here's his ...
Embed from Getty ImagesSomeone once asked Max Clifford: "Max, if you're so brilliant at public relations, why does everyone think you're a cunt?" Similarly, I would like to ask Peter Mandelson why, if he's such a master of the dark arts, he's always being found out. Perhaps the answer is to be found in this character sketch by John Crace: Betrayal is Mandelson's lifeblood. It's there in his treatment of Wes Streeting. Poor trusting Wes. A man more used to stabbing others in the back. Wes looked up to Mandy. Treated him as a mentor. How did Peter repay him? ...
AI use is seeping out of business and science writing and into the world of literature. And that, says Malin Hay in a post on the London Review of Books blog, is a problem, because literary editors may be the worst equipped to spot text generated by it: Experimenters in the US last year showed nine subjects a series of articles, half written by humans and half generated by ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models. Asked to guess which of the texts were human, the four subjects who rarely or never used ChatGPT in their daily lives scored "at ...
The latest edition of my email newsletter about work in Parliament, A Lord's Eye View, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: The government is right to want to protect our democracy from being flooded by dodgy foreign money. But as I've highlighted before, their plans leave far too many loopholes. So I took the chance today to raise this topic again, this time using Donald Trump as an example. Did someone share this with ...
On Saturday I travelled down to London to attend the Compass and Progressive Economy Forum's Change: NOW! Conference, which brought together around 700 people from across the progressive spectrum for what felt like a serious and timely conversation about the future of politics in Britain. In an age of deep political fragmentation, rising populism and the growing threat posed by Nigel Farage and Reform UK there was something very refreshing about spending a day at an event where people were prepared to engage with those beyond their own political tribe. Speakers included Caroline Lucas, Vince Cable, Zack Polanski, Clive Lewis ...
Another week another undeliverable scheme comes from Mayor Rotherham and the Merseyside Combined Authority. This time it was a reaffirmation of the Central Station plan which had been announced at the start of the year. And this is not the only Mayoral fantasy. The other is the Mersey Barrage which has been discussed ever since I first became a councillor 51 years ago (I had 8 years off for good behaviour, so I have only completed 43 years so far!) And how could I forget the third 'back of a fag packet' offering from Mr Mayor which is making the ...
The Independent reports on warnings by a leading think tank that the UK is facing a "democratic emergency", after new polling revealed around 16.5 million UK adults saw political deepfakes in the month before the local elections. The paper says the poll found that almost one in three (30 per cent) voters said they had seen a deepfake or AI-generated video, audio clip or image about an election candidate or politician online in the lead-up to this month's elections: The polling of 2,005 adults was conducted by Opinium for the cross-party think tank Demos between 30 April and 6 May ...
