Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 109

Why computer science graduates cant talk themselves into jobs | Simon Jenkins

Maths and science graduates are victims of a dirigiste British education policy that fails both labour market and individual

Graduates in computer science are so inarticulate as to be unemployable. So says a consortium of prospective employers. The Higher Education Statistics Agency agrees. This week it put computing top for unemployability, along with maths, engineering and media studies. Students should switch from geek to chic.

Not a week passes without business complaining about the educati...

1914: the Great War has become a nightly pornography of violence | Simon Jenkins

The centenary has been seized as a military propaganda opportunity. So-called lessons learned have been ignored or forgotten

Britains commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion. It has become a media theme park, an indigestible cross between Downton Abbey and a horror movie. I cannot walk down the street or turn on the television without being bombarded by Great War diaries, poems, scrapbooks and songs. The BBC has gone war mad. We have Great War plays, Great War proms, Gr...

To mock President Putins pride and test his paranoia is folly | Simon Jenkins

The downing of flight MH17 was clearly an accident. This tragedy should not be used as an excuse to punish Russia.

Why does foreign policy default to stupid? From the moment that we heard of the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine it was clearly an accident. Whoevers finger was on the trigger, the tragedy cannot have been meant. This was not another 9/11. It was cock-up, not conspiracy.

Yet foreign policy craves conspiracy. Vladimir Putin blamed the Ukrainian government. Ukraine blamed th...

Tony Blair sees his millions as modest only in the world of the super rich | Simon Jenkins

The Blairs seem to crave money because it is there. As the gap between the wealthy few and the rest widens, their fortune is hard to justify

Blair embodies corruption and war, writes Seumas Milne

How rich is Tony Blair? What are the needs of an ex-prime minister with grown-up children, a working wife, £25m in property and bodyguards costing the state £1m a year? Blair protested yesterday that he is not worth £100m, not half of that, a third of that, a quarter of that, a fifth...

Blanket digital surveillance is a start. But how about a camera in every bathroom? | Simon Jenkins

The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act needs strengthening. Only terrorists and paedophiles can object. The House stands ready to act

Parliament this week passed a law allowing the bulk collection by the government of all internet traffic in the United Kingdom. It was the fifth addition to state surveillance powers since the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa). The following is an extract from Hansard for 1 April next year.

Secretary of state for the Home Department: Mr...

William Hagues foreign office era: subdued and subservient | Simon Jenkins

The departing foreign secretary was a former Tory star who descended into empty cliche and belligerence

The progressive collapse of the Libyan regime is the epitaph on William Hagues era as foreign secretary. It has been an age without a theme, rhetoric without content. When he took office he boasted that Britain would have a new global reach and influence. He left as the emblem of that reach, a new Libya, fell into anarchy.

Hague was a Yorkshire outsider whose star shone in the 1990s, not unli...

How should we understand the teenage jihadists' mind? | Simon Jenkins

Their threat is exaggerated, but even in liberal Britain many youngsters seem to be lured by the most authoritarian edicts of the Qur'an

A friend of mine once gazed at her wayward teenagers and told me she could handle the usual drugs and sex. The one thing she couldn't deal with was them "getting religion". How awful must the agony be of parents who find their offspring vanished "to fight jihad" in the Middle East.

What could have induced two teenage boys from Cardiff and t...

This Grand Inquisition won't find 'the truth' of child sex abuse | Simon Jenkins

Theresa May's effort to deflect accusations of a cover-up over child sex crimes will do little to deter abusers or help victims

What is a public inquiry? Is it an impartial investigation of past error or a lynch mob? Is it a prelude to an apology or a kangaroo court? Theresa May's two inquiries into child abuse are either "responding to reasonable concerns" or are pandering to media hysteria over anything to do with sex.

Just two things are clear. One is that the abuse of minors...

Stealth bombs? Killer plagues? Don't panic, just follow the money | Simon Jenkins

Politicians and scientists have a vested interest in propagating panic: it's the one superbug there's no known antidote for

Now it is planes falling from the sky. On Tuesday it was "superbugs threaten return to dark ages". At the weekend it was internet thought-control menace. Last week we had killer fruit juice. The edifice of fear knows no limits, its apparatchiks know no shame.

Had the Guardian leaked yesterday's story from the US about a "stealth bomb alert" at worl...

Northern cities need more than 'powerhouse' rhetoric | Simon Jenkins

Half-hearted localism won't help. Big business, arts and the media must move out of the capital to rebalance the economy

Send the Guardian back north. That should be Labour's policy for provincial cities. Everything else is 1980s re-tread. What is needed is a real shift in the nation's cultural focus, out of London to points north and west. If the BBC can go to the quays of Salford, the Guardian can return to Manchester.

A start might be made next door in the Liverpool neighbourhood of Welsh St...