Congratulations, Cormac! This is excellent news, and richly deserved!!
06.03.2026 14:58
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Congratulations, Cormac! This is excellent news, and richly deserved!!
🚨Grateful to be a recipient of the 2026 Tenacious Journalism Award from @publicinterestnews.org.uk . Putting the money toward an incredibly exciting investigative project with @petergeoghegan.bsky.social at Democracy for Sale🚨
Stay tuned & all that
www.publicinterestnews.org.uk/blog/announc...
And if you'd like to know what my son would recommend his peers to read, I'm happy to report that this article reveals him to be one of the country's finest book critics.
observer.co.uk/news/columni...
And if you'd like to know what my son would recommend his peers to read, I'm happy to report that this article reveals him to be one of the country's finest book critics.
observer.co.uk/news/columni...
When I wrote a piece about my son's love of reading in January, I included this bit because I refuse to hear lectures about literacy rates from the selfsame ghouls and vandals who've cheered on as the UK's apparatus for childhood reading has been stripped to the wiring and sold off for scrap.
I'm reminded of the BBC summarizing the 2019 general election as "Labour lost the working class but won the woke" (verbatim quote), and then also seeing polls showing that every working-age demographic voted majority Labour. However, when there's 11 billion pensioners, and 10.999 billion vote Tory,
Shared this to pals because, well, just look at it. A full hour later I realise Luis Suarez is one of the guys chortling behind him.
I actually think I would be fine getting interviewed by Isaac Chotiner. If anything we’d probably become friends afterwards
Text from the Fermanagh Herald, October 1989: Margaret Dundas celebrated her 106th birthday on Saturday - and revealed her secret for long life. No drinking, no smoking - and stay away from men. Margaret (pictured with her sons), still alert, giggled loudly as she told her family and friends of her magic recipe for longevity. Family and friends gathered at her home on Derrygonnelly for a birthday celebration on Saturday and among the many birthday greetings was Margaret's seventh telegram from the Queen. "She forgot to put in a few quid," Margaret joked, "isn't it a pity to be poor." She has lived in her present house since her son Patrick was born in 1913, and how shares it with him and her oldest son Joey, who is 83.
A word from my great aunt Maggie Dundas who, in 1989, celebrated her 106th birthday by calling out the Queen in the local press.
My favourite Barry Cryer story is his account of Nicholas Parsons asking Ross Noble who his favourite comedian was. "Richard Pryor" Noble replied, "Genius! So sad he set himself on fire while freebasing crack cocaine".
Parsons, visibly upset, asked Barry later: "did you hear about Richard Briers?"
Every trans person is like "I knew something was up before I had the words to describe it and had to fight for this for years" and every transphobe is like "one conversation with a doctor could have convinced me to get the walrus surgery from the movie 'The Walrus'"
The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.
As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.
If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.
The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.
We should all welcome the renewed attention being paid to the UK's student loan crisis. But we must remember it's a scandal the Tories created, and which they deserve no praise for cynically, and incoherently, adopting as their cause.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
A round of community funding from the council just went out in Belfast and every single group got their funding cut, causing job losses and jobs being downgraded.
Every single organisation.
So if you want to tell your friends about House to Astonish, the ninth longest running comics podcast in the world, second longest running in the UK and longest running in Scotland, this would be a really good time to do it!
(When I say we changed hosts, I mean hosting services. I don't mean we killed the original Paul and Al and replaced them with clones. We didn't do that! We definitely didn't do that)
Here's a thing right, House to Astonish has been running now for seventeen and a bit years, and we changed hosts after the first few years, so I don't know exactly how many downloads we got when we were with podomatic, but we're pretty flippin close to a big round number of downloads
Years ago I wrote a piece for the NYT about how my 78yo dad and I bond over our shared love of Enya. I said he was occasionally brought to tears by her music, so THEY RANG MY OWN DAD TO CHECK.
I could have saved them the long distance charges by saying he was forcibly transitioned by Enya's music.
Years ago I wrote a piece for the NYT about how my 78yo dad and I bond over our shared love of Enya. I said he was occasionally brought to tears by her music, so THEY RANG MY OWN DAD TO CHECK.
I could have saved them the long distance charges by saying he was forcibly transitioned by Enya's music.
What's wild about all the TRANS CONTAGION pieces is that, outside of Op Eds, the editing process at these publications make it *almkat impossible* to make even basic factual statements without rigorous fact checking.
A rule that is just shredded, pulped, and thrown out the window for transphobia.
I've also been told - but perhaps someone can correct me in the replies if I have this wrong - that many Oxbridge colleges (especially Cambridge) so adamantly discourage part-time work that it's, de facto, forbidden.
The enormous unfairness in the current system is demonstrated by the modeling done by the IFS here.
Many medical students have loans of £70-100k and won't actually start paying down their loans for many years
ifs.org.uk/articles/how...
Worth adding that £27,000 (now £28,500 for a three year degree) is the cost of tuition fees alone. Add the maintenance loan, and it can go well above £50,000 of original debt. This means those whose parents earn less owe substantially more. I also did an MA and now owe over £70,000
From 1990, Igor Majstrovsky’s movie poster for the first official release of 1977’s Star Wars in the USSR.
Is that Darth Vader? I assume it is, and very splendidly evil he looks too.
What. The. Fuck.
I graduated before some of you were born.
I still owe three grand.
The Conservatives are, after all, well placed to know a lot about this morass, since they introduced it. In 2012, the coalition government launched the Plan 2 system of student loans and raised university fees across Britain to £9,000 per annum. To put Plan 2 in simple terms, loan repayments were laid out via a seemingly innocuous series of calculations. The first to consider is the threshold at which repayments begin. If you left education with, say, £27,000 worth of debt, you would only start paying it back once you met a predetermined salary. On its face, this might not seem like a particularly onerous demand. “Low-earning” graduates would avoid being saddled with repayments before they were financially able to begin making them, while their “high earning” peers could start chipping away at their debt, and provide an income stream for the state.
As any of my fellow literature or history graduates will tell you, however, the devil is in the details. For one thing, the threshold at which someone becomes a high earner was never particularly high and, following years of inflation, is now preposterously low. Rachel Reeves’ announcement that the government are freezing the threshold at April 2026 levels (£29,385) for a further three years only makes this worse. The real living wage for London is currently calculated at £28,860, which means that any London-based graduate making just £40 more per month than the minimum needed to live there will automatically begin paying their debt. In real terms, this means practically any graduate in any form of full-time work will be paying as much as 9 per cent of their income to the state, and for a very, very long time. Worse still, the amount owed by those graduates below the threshold does not remain static – it accrues interest, year on year, whether you’re working for low wages, volunteering, taking a career break or on maternity leave, ensuring that if you do pass the threshold some time later, you will be returning to find your original £27,000 much enlarged.
If the state’s attitude to what constitutes “high earnings” makes you think it’s oblivious to the concept of inflation, let me put your mind at ease. When it comes to the calculation of student loan interest, they are very conscious of inflation indeed. Each year, the interest charged on student loans is calculated by two components. The first is the Retail Price Index (RPI), which generally records a higher number than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Governments prefer the latter, lower figure for many of their other calculations, just not when it comes to adding extra debt to every graduate in the country. To this is added a second component, a percentage tied to each graduate’s earnings, meaning that as your salary increases so too does the interest you’re paying on the loan you took out. If you think this seems like a predatory and punitive way to bilk students for as much money, and over as long a period of time, as possible, then you’re just about up to speed on this scandal, which amounts to a regressive stealth tax on every graduate in the UK. One which, it’s calculated, you would need to be earning £66,000 per year to pay off in anything like a timely fashion.
The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.
We should all welcome the renewed attention being paid to the UK's student loan crisis. But we must remember it's a scandal the Tories created, and which they deserve no praise for cynically, and incoherently, adopting as their cause.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
I miss this hero every day