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| Columnists |
| Issue 1370 |
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| With Bio-Waste Spreader: "Concerned about the decline in British food production, the ‘big four’ UK supermarkets had tried to give farmers a slightly better deal at the farm gate. But the rise of discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl has now provoked Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA and Morrisons to launch a price war, and farmers are already feeling the impact…” |
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| With M.D.: "Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s plan to name and shame GPs who fail to spot cancer by placing a red flag next to their practice on the NHS website has been rightly slammed. However, M.D. is strongly in favour of patients and relatives rating their NHS care, and encourages his to do so. There is good evidence that people who have a good experience of NHS care, and feel listened to and included in decisions about their care, get better results…”
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| With Dr B Ching: "Chancellor George Osborne’s proposed east-west ‘high-speed rail link’ through the Pennines has again widened the gap between reality and rhetoric in northern England. Regions which would receive the £6bn to £7bn of investment in Osborne’s high-speed line have only just been told that the next Northern rail franchise must do ‘more with less’, as the government reckons that the current franchise gets too much subsidy. Cue higher fares and service cuts. Osborne’s ‘Northern powerhouse’ vision needs northern cities and towns to be ‘radically more connected from east to west’. But his government’s shambolic rail-franchising system means that nine TransPennine trains will move south next year to Chiltern Railways, radically worsening east-west transport…”
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With Remote Controller: "Although the telly bosses of today are obliged to sound excited about streaming and time-delay viewing – and all the other methods that allow viewers to watch shows at a time of their own choosing, rather than when Radio Times tells them they can – most of the blokes (as most of them still are) at the BBC and ITV still feel happiest printing out nice grids in which the shows begin and end at dictated times. So, for them, the last week of June and first week of July 2014 were a nightmare…
[Review of Summer schedules, all channels]…”
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| With Old Sparky: "The 2013 Energy Act gives ministers the power to intervene in the electricity industry pretty much as they choose – and the world can now see how disastrous that is in practice. As ministers churn out new regulations, schemes and subsidies with scant regard for value for money or rationale, government watchdogs can’t keep up, power plant developers are making a killing and the electricity consumer who pays the bill is being shafted…” |
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| With Piloti: "As passengers on trains running in and out of Victoria trundle pass the great brick bulk of Battersea Power Station, they are now treated to a huge sign which reads: SPOT THE DIFFERENCE… WE’RE REBUILDING THE CHIMNEYS, along with identical drawings purporting to show those great reinforced concrete columns before and after rebuilding. So the long-awaited restoration of that Cathedral of Power, discussed for three decades, seems finally to be about to begin. Or is it?…”
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| With Lunchtime O’Boulez: "TV viewers used to seeing actor/director Simon McBurney playing the chicly circumspect archdeacon in Rev, would have been taken aback to see him last week in a baseball cap, berating a French opera audience about his ‘passionate’ support for part-time workers in the French arts. It was the opening night of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, where McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute, previously seen at the English National Opera, was the hot ticket. But it nearly didn’t happen, thanks to threatened strikes by backstage unions… [But] perhaps McBurney should turn his attention to ENO…” |
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| With Bookworm: "As part of the promotional drive for her biography of Eleanor Marx, Rachel Holmes recently named her top 10 feminist books in the Guardian… a list headed by Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges-revisited memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?... with Susie Orbach’s ‘ground-breaking’ 1970s offering, Fat Is A Feminist Issue, just behind in second place. For anyone who chanced to look at the Amazon reviews of Holmes’s book, this made for a pleasing coincidence, as the top two feminist authors of all time can both be found there enthusing: ‘Superb... this brilliant biography with a rare combination of pace, verve and scholarship,’ raves Winterson (writing in the Daily Telegraph); while Orbach claims that ‘I got to the end of Rachel Holmes’s Eleanor Marx and wanted to start all over again.’ This expertly performed log-rolling threesome is by no means the first time the trio has collaborated …” |
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| With Slicker: "Even though the chief executives of mutual banks and building societies operate in a very different climate from those running City banks – domestic rather than international, mainly low-risk residential mortgages rather than high-risk casino banking, no stock market-linked share awards – their rewards in salaries and bonuses have marched ever upwards in annual double digits. Meanwhile the returns to those who provide most of their working capital – members and/or depositors – have gone backwards towards zero allowing for inflation. The Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society (motto: ‘Our only focus is you’), and its chief executive Graham Beale exemplify this trend…” |
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Letter from Instanbul
From Our Own Correspondent: " The world’s attention may have drifted away as the dust settled after May’s mining catastrophe in Soma, but we are still kicking over the traces. People have been killed by police in Istanbul and elsewhere in continuing anti-government demonstrations; and, true to form, our exalted prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has responded by attacking the media for not considering the safety of our security forces, whose injuries, he said, were never reported…” |
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To read all these columnists and more in full, you can buy the latest edition of Private Eye - or subscribe here and have the magazine delivered to your home every fortnight.
Next issue on sale:
22nd July 2014. |
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Only In The Magazine
Lady Macbeth Cleared On All Charges… 24-Hour Rolling Paedo News… Putting the Hate Into Caliphate: A Message From Your New Caliph… ‘Great Summer of War’ Gets Underway… That Sensational Text From David Cameron to Rebekah Brooks… Theatre News: ‘12 Stupid People’ Courtroom Drama Finally Closes… My Favourite Monty Python Sketch, as told to Craig Brown
And also...
- What Rebekah Did: Six-page special report by the Eye’s man in court, Adam Macqueen
- Extra Dry Sharia: The Law Society’s fight against discrimination is… discriminatory
- PLUS: Extra cartoons, Summer Gnomemart & more – still only £1.50!
For all these stories you can buy the magazine or subscribe here and get delivery direct to your home every fortnight.
Next issue on sale: 22nd July 2014. |
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