Have a look at my new piece - on BBC2's Oxbridge Young Tories Docu, up on left futures.

And just for the shits and giggles here's the always amusing video of a young William Hague at the 1977 Tory Party conference:

Fare dodging in 2012

  Amaan Ali

 In the Olympic Summer of 2012  many tourists will notice the ticket inspectors that work across the Tube, Overground and Buses while travelling between hotels, sites and Stratford. The inspectors' presence will disturb them only in that they will have to register the fact that they are meant to take out their commemorative Olympic Oysters and make contact with the card reader. The role of hopping on and off the tubes, buses and trains of the London transport network to catch fare-dodgers and deter others from attempting is covered by the noble job title of ‘Revenue Protection Officer’. There are currently somewhere in the region of 350 of these RPOs on the Bus Network, alone; with a recruitment drive starting in September according to the one I last encountered. On this occasion, I was not required to try to imagine up a fake name & D.O.B and attach it to a fake address as a job has made a £19.90 weekly bus pass viable recently and hopefully put my faredodging days to rest. The RPO, when quizzed on numbers and payscales, was filled with glee at such a positive response, so unusual in her line of work; and was keen to stress how easy the job was for the rate of pay, before rushing off when she needed to regroup with the officer covering downstairs, to hop on the next bus of the afternoon. The rate of pay that she mentioned was somewhere in the region of £40k, having not needed any qualifications and not having paid for any specialist training course. The last wisdom that she bestowed on me and my fellow £6.08/h colleague was that there was a fresh recruitment drive slated for September.

celebrities talking about mental illness is great but there's more to this than dropping into the Priory

On Ruby Wax's Mad Confessions (as usual for me, several days after this was actually on tv, but like anyone watches things on actual televisions at the time programmes are actually on any more)


It's good that mental illness is being discussed on television and at Ruby Wax's shows, especially as it still carries a huge amount of stigma. The show's treatment of such a delicate issue was wonderfully refreshing, as was the bravery of the three people who spoke, for the first time, to their co-workers and employees about their mental health.

So far so good, but it all left me wondering how realistic or usual Ruby Wax's set up was. Would there have been the same response without the cameras rolling? That all involved were wealthy and white was problematic. Not to say that those with privilege don't suffer from mental illness, but that the image is successful white celebrities discussing their struggle has shifted the discourse around mental health problems in a troubling way.