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It’s time to get your entries in for the 2025 PB Predictions Competition if you haven’t already.  All entries must be in by midnight tonight on Friday 31st January! To enter you simply need to post your answers to the following 14 questions before the end of January 2025, to this or whichever thread is currently open.  If you can put the word ‘competition’ in your post it will help me collate entries.  Alternatively you can PM me your entries…

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Misinformation online has become commonplace. It has fuelled riots and disorder and maybe propelled a few people into office. But is misinformation just a random process, or is it driven by particular actors? Is it seen on both the left and right of politics? Petter Törnberg and Juliana Chueri sought to answer this in a research paper just published in The International Journal of Press/Politics. They analysed 32 million tweets from parliamentarians in 26 different countries (including the UK, US, Ireland, France,…

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It’s time to get your entries in for the 2025 PB Predictions Competition if you haven’t already.  All entries must be in by midnight on Friday 31st January! To enter you simply need to post your answers to the following 14 questions before the end of January 2025, to this or whichever thread is currently open.  If you can put the word ‘competition’ in your post it will help me collate entries.  Alternatively you can PM me your entries (but…

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Let me start this article with a question. What is this building in the picture above’s age? The answer depends on your perspective. The building is called The House of the Blackheads and is in Riga, Latvia. It was originally built in 1334 as a warehouse, while Riga was part of the Hanseatic League. During WW2, Latvia was first invaded by the Soviets after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then by the Germans and finally by the Soviets again. This led to…

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Many years ago the late Charles Stallard, father of the current Bishop of Llandaff and much the wisest man I have ever known, said to me that while a loyal Liberal Democrat he would probably vote for any party that agreed to do nothing in education or health for ten years. His logic was that every time you meddle, you create work, waste time and lose money. It would be better to have a prolonged period of calm to allow…

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In my previous header, I referred to teacher shortages, and noted they are about to get much worse. This is an explanation of that remark and why I think it’s Phillipson’s fault. At this moment, the National Curriculum is an optional thing for academy schools and trusts. This is actually good news. The reason I say that is because the last review of the curriculum was so content-heavy that it was literally impossible to deliver it properly, as I noted…

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So we move into the New Year with a blazing row about some fool of a Cabinet Minister shooting her mouth off over an educational policy they don’t understand and are dogmatically devoted to. I can’t help but feel I could have written that at any time over the last 80 years and I wouldn’t have been wrong except for sometimes having to change the pronoun. This year it is the turn of Bridget Phillipson and Rachel Reeves, who have…

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…so said Niels Bohr.  Or Karl Kristian Steincke, or a Danish proverb – take your pick.  In any event, PB posters found it rather tough to make accurate predictions this year.  In January 2024 we launched a PB Prediction Competition with 10 questions and a scoring scheme that generally allocated 20 points for a correct answer and 10 points for a near-miss.  We had 82 entrants.  Here are the questions with their answers and some commentary where appropriate:    1….

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