Comment and Analysis

I write Comment and Analysis pieces on a wide range of topical subjects. Past examples have included:

Since 2021, these articles have all been published on the Irregular Thoughts website. Earlier pieces were published here and are available in the archive listing below. This website also has links to selected articles published in the national press and professional journals.

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Posted on 12 September 2009 under

Change of RSS feed

After two years of running the Comment and Analysis page on this website in parallel with my Substack, I am going to post future pieces only on Substack. Anyone who has been following this page through its RSS feed should switch to my RSS feed on Substack. Alternatively, you can subscribe for email notifications.

Archives (pre-March 2021)

Posted on 1 April 2023

Predicting the past: Can Trump win again?

[I wrote this piece on Election Day 2020, before the vote-counting started. Less than 24 hours later, it was looking like not a single one of my insights would be borne out by events.]

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Posted on 3 November 2020 under

I learned to write

I have been rather quiet on these pages, lately. I have been working on another writing project.

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Is this the way to maintain public faith in the lockdown?

Yesterday, the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps led the daily Downing Street press conference with news of new transport infrastructure to help us in the current crisis and beyond. But the mainstream media used up all of their questions to ask about the decision by the Prime Minister’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, to isolate himself and his family in Durham, rather than in London, when his wife fell ill with Covid-19.

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Preventing social media harm – an idea

There are widespread calls to regulate social media. Hardly a day goes by without some new outrage which eclipses what we have seen already. One of the great problems for anyone wishing to put a stop to the abuse is that social media users can easily make themselves anonymous. If they are ejected from a platform, they can re-enrol under a new identity. All it takes to open an account on a platform is an email address. And all it takes to get an email address is … absolutely nothing at all.   

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Invitation to a duel

A few weeks ago, I spoke at an international conference on regulation. One of my fellow panellists told me, as we took our seats, that he was against regulation. I rubbed my hands with glee in anticipation that sparks would soon begin to fly. Sadly, the only sparks were the evidence of us getting on like a house on fire. He wasn’t against regulation; it was just bad regulation that he couldn’t tolerate. Me too.

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We disagree … so you must be lying?

From working as an independent expert witness, I know only too well that it is not unusual to find one’s client acting as though nothing the opposing party says can ever be believed. As a mediator, I have seen this attitude taken by both sides simultaneously. Sometimes in a dispute, both sides are inveterate liars. But quite often I would see two parties who were both incapable of seeing that their opponent’s point of view was not built (entirely) on falsehood. It seems that is where we are now with Brexit.

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