The rise and fall of Occupy London

No, you're not

One night last week the BBC news ran an item about the Tobin Tax on financial transactions. An economist bobbed his head up and down speaking rather earnestly about why it would be damaging. Then something extraordinary happened; the report cut to a rather nondescript person standing at the Occupy LSX camp outside St Pauls Cathedral who maintained that it definitely would be a good idea.

Why, I wondered, were they giving a few dozen oiks* like this a national platform? Why not drag someone out of the Dog and Duck and ask them? I felt like Jacobin Mugatu in Zoolander when confronted with Blue Steel; “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”.

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* Substituted by the editor for the original 'drug addicts'

Public sector strikes: Unaffordable and unfair

Hands off my wages

And so the world keeps turning. An estimated two million public sector workers have gone on strike and the nation has kept ticking along.

The false argument about public sector pensions is put rather well by this which is going round on Facebook

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The late, occasionally great, Ken Russell

The 1960s ‘Harry Palmer’ spy films starring Michael Caine were intended as the antithesis of James Bond. They were downbeat, gritty, and realistic. The first in the series, ‘The Ipcress File’ (1965), opened with Palmer fumbling for his horn rimmed specs and sleepily making coffee. Then Ken Russell, who died yesterday aged 84, was hired to direct the third instalment, ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ (1967).

Perhaps the producers were attracted by Russell’s intellectual cache and documentary film background. He made his name with a string of films he produced in the 1960s for ‘Monitor’, the BBC’s arts show. In themes he would return to in his films Russell’s finest television work focused on artists. His documentary on Edward Elgar (1962) was more than a simple biography with some musical clips. By setting up shots and scenes and using Elgar’s symphonies almost as incidental music Russell placed the composer squarely in his time and setting. It was as much an evocation of the high noon of Imperial Britain as a documentary about Elgar.

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