If you go down to the town today, you’re in for a big surprise, at least in certain areas. Walk to the end of the Workstation. Don’t cross the road into the Rutland pub, but go through the door of a building with very quirky bars on the windows. This is Access Space, and there isn’t much like it anywhere else in this country. It calls itself a free, open-source… [...]
June 30, 2011
If you go down to the town today, you’re in for a big surprise, at least in certain areas. Walk to the end of the Workstation. Don’t cross the road into the Rutland pub, but go through the door of a building with very quirky bars on the windows. This is Access Space, and there isn’t much like it anywhere else in this country. It calls itself a free, open-source… [...]
June 29, 2011
The left hand map shows the proportion of people in Sheffield on income support. The right hand map shows the rate of people dying. What we see is almost a carbon copy. Across the city, where there is poverty, there are lower life expectancies, higher rates of mental health problems, still-births and teenage pregnancy.
Why, in a relatively rich country, do the poor still suffer more from almost every… [...]
June 28, 2011
On 2nd June the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a report which began with the words “The global war on drugs has failed”.
Whenever I consider the failure of drug policies I think of fetid bodies and dead flesh. If you want to know what drug abuse smells like, ask a homeless heroin user to show you his legs. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a tennis ball… [...]
June 27, 2011
Don’t Scare The Hare, the BBC’s newest Saturday night gameshow, is the first programme to be created at the new MediaCityUK complex in Salford, Manchester. The Beeb are investing £1 billion in their new flagship Northern headquarters, so you may think the first show they’ve chosen to make there is an innovation in the field of light entertainment, a watershed moment in broadcasting history. You may think that, but you’d… [...]