Free Belarus.
Free Hong Kong.
Free Taiwan.
Free Tibet.
Save Myanmar.
End the Uyghur genocide.
If any of this makes you uncomfortable, this isn't the account for you.
This is ethnic cleansing amounting to genocide being conducted by the Chinese state.
Muslim communities are murdered and their mosques destroyed. Their qurans burned and families torn apart.
Where are the marches? Where are the protests?
I asked a local councillor if the russian refinery here in Ireland should be sanctioned.
He said yes, if it was supplying Israel.
But Russia? No.
This is Ireland’s sanctions hypocrisy in 90 seconds.
This is splendid. Surely the most insidious quibble is the decline in all street furniture. See the new CIIIR postbox: formerly cast iron, now stamped and welded with an ugly glued-on cypher. A national icon demonstrating how little we care for the public realm.
Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice.
We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff.
Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year.
And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon.
Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket?
An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small.
We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail.
Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: https://t.co/gZiqqHbhIL
I cannot comprehend this mindset. Every time I visit Parliament, I have a visceral reaction of being in the same space as generations of politicians who led our country. I want our MPs to feel this every day. The weight of history on them & the sense of responsibility it confers.
Great moment from the 1964 election when viewers are simultaneously informed about Harold Wilson's victory followed by the news China had exploded an atomic bomb. All delivered with exactly the same lack of excitement.
Intensely depressing that the most mediocre group of MPs in history, almost all of whom will be eviscerated at the next election, were allowed to sweep away a millennia of history and pretend it somehow made life in the country they’re screwing up better.
The BBC’s silly and unnecessary editing mistake does not change the FACT that Trump encouraged and inspired the violence that led to death and devastation on Jan 6 after he LOST the election. That should be made clear in all communications to his Mafia style lawyers and to the public. He has zero case and that should be communicated with absolute confidence, with the full and voluble backing of 🇬🇧government. And all those who are encouraging and exhorting a foreign felon leader to take down one of Britain’s greatest institutions should never have the gall to call themselves patriots again. Thank you for your attention to this matter
We probably should have recognised Palestine back in 2014, when MPs voted for it. If it had to be now, though, we should’ve just done it unilaterally because we thought it was right, rather than making it conditional on Israeli behaviour & using it as a threat.