(i) My childhood newspaper hero Johann Hari (it went Robert Fisk, Johann Hari, Howard Jacobsen and then I started reading the internet instead) always used to go on about how it was really awful to claim (and many political horserace type journalists and people with radical politics did and still do) that there is no significant difference between the mainstream political parties when one party's focus is eliminating child poverty while the other's is cutting rich peoples' taxes.
Today I read that this was borne out in results: Labour reduced child poverty by nearly two-million compared to how high it would have been if they hadn't spent loads of money on it, while the Conservative party is dropping Labour's child poverty target on the grounds that, er, current measures of poverty aren't tracking wellbeing or something and anyway shouldn't we be forcing poor people to work for no pay rather than giving them stuff? Meanwhile child poverty is rising rapidly due to their policies and income tax for rich people has just gone down. Also according this literature review into housing benefit by the government department for work and pensions there is "no consistent evidence of cultures of worklessness in deprived areas." Basically this shows that Johann Hari was right: it is really bad to ignore the difference between different kinds of mainstream politics.
(ii) In Our Time was about Ulysses today and it was ok and made me maybe want to read it again. One of the panellists said it was like the Odyssey in being a 'great novel of peace'. I think that is fair in the 'not war' sense of 'peace' but it would probably be better to say or 'hospitality' or 'domesticity' or 'peacetime' or 'not-exceptional-in-the-grand-sweep-of-history times' or something like that as both books have loads of non-war conflict. I have these things to add: (a) it is the best thing ever for self-importance and not coincidentally (b) I agree with James Joyce about politics almost 100%.
(iii) Loads of stuff going on in football at the moment. If things go right I might even get passionate about Spurs again in a year or so.
