John Ranson
The Canary
United Kingdom
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Past articles by John:
As Grayling comes second in a one horse race, Johnson's authority is in tatters
It may seem like no more than a classic Westminster soap opera. But the hoo-ha over Chris Grayling’s failure to win a parliamentary committee chair says everything about Boris Johnson’s cack-handed attempts to run the country. In effect, Johnson attempted to rig a process that was already stacked in his favour and still failed to get the result he wanted. Jobs for the boys The select committee… → Read More
Long-Bailey sacked by Starmer supposedly over antisemitism
Rebecca Long-Bailey has been dramatically sacked from Labour’s shadow cabinet after sharing an article supposedly containing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Tweet Party leader Keir Starmer took action after shadow education secretary Long-Bailey tweeted a link to an interview with the actress Maxine Peake. Among many points covered in the interview in the Independent, Peake referred to the… → Read More
Court backlog of criminal cases tops half a million but it's not just Covid
Courts face a backlog of more than half a million criminal cases, official estimates show. Some of the rise comes as a result of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. But a critic of the government’s approach has said the bulk of the problem has nothing to do with the pandemic. And the critic has cautioned against reducing the use of juries to clear the backlog. The number of cases waiting to be… → Read More
At this rate, Boris Johnson will end up all alone as the prime minister of nowhere
It’s fair to say that being PM isn’t the celebratory cakewalk to Brexit that Boris Johnson was expecting. No, it’s actually a real pain in the arse. It’s really hard work and everything’s going wrong all the time. To use a sporting turn of phrase, as there’s no sport to use them on at the moment, Johnson was hoping for an easy home fixture, on comfortingly familiar territory. Instead, he’s… → Read More
Sunak 'starving workers back to work' as he looks to cut the rate of furlough pay
McDonnell accuses Sunak of adopting "a time old policy" → Read More
Why I won’t be celebrating Britain on VE Day
Enough of this pathetic pretending that we’re better than everyone else → Read More
Why the government acts like it’s doing amazingly
Three reasons. Also, spoiler: it’s not doing amazingly. → Read More
‘Fake nurse’ Twitter account researcher responds to ‘fake news’ claims
On 21 April, The Canary’s Tom Coburg reported on claims of a raft of fake Twitter accounts purporting to be NHS workers. These accounts, which are no longer active, allegedly supported the government’s position on the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. It was claimed that 128 accounts had been controlled by a single person, with links to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The DHSC… → Read More
Scotland and Wales are furious with the UK government’s apparent England-first PPE for carers
The UK government stands accused of pursuing an ‘England-first’ approach to the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) for care workers. Senior figures in Scotland and Wales have highlighted the problem. And despite denials from the government in Westminster, the evidence appears to show suppliers having to turn down orders from outside England. The social care crisis Responding to… → Read More
Is coronavirus the end of everything or the start of something new?
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is really horrible. It’s frightening, disorientating, confusing and, yes, unprecedented in recent history. None of us would wish to go through this if we had any choice in the matter. But in the words of Gandalf: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us”. In the past, pandemics and other… → Read More
Priti Patel isn’t just quiet. She’s missing.
As much as many of us would like to see Priti Patel nowhere near frontline politics, people are growing increasingly puzzled as to why she currently seems to be, er, nowhere near frontline politics. > Powerful point here from Peter Allen. Here's the French interior minister being grilled today in the National Assembly. At Westminster the Home Secretary's gone missing. Allen rightly calls this… → Read More
The Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News are closing down
Dogged by operating losses, libel costs and coronavirus → Read More
There’s a big catch in the government’s plan to help businesses through coronavirus
The government is gradually announcing measures to help the country cope with the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. One plan, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), is the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS). But questions have already arisen over just how helpful this scheme will actually be. Government support for SMEs? The government describes its assistance as:… → Read More
After months of delay, the government is hurriedly publishing the Windrush report
Did they hope we wouldn’t notice? → Read More
As HS2 plans ‘despicable’ woodland destruction, opponents unite to 'Stand for the Trees'
Critics of the controversial HS2 high speed rail link will gather on Sunday 15 March in woodland threatened by the scheme. A press release for the event says local campaigners will join with supporters from StopHS2, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, Extinction Rebellion, Save Cubbington Woods, and Wildlife Rebellion “to defend ancient woodlands in Warwickshire, the first of over 100 set to be… → Read More
It turns out the ‘blue’ passport was just more Brexit bluster
In 2017 the UK government excitedly announced that the ‘iconic’ blue passport would be returning. Brexit talking head Nigel Farage declared: “In the 2016 referendum, we wanted our passports back. Now we’ve got them back!” Iconic? Blue? This writer was among many people of a certain age scratching their heads and trying to remember what blue passports had looked like. Surely they used to be… → Read More
The last seven Tory environment chiefs rated from worst to best on how they deal with floods
There are some surprises but most of them just haven’t got it at all → Read More
Why it's such a disaster that your car isn't plastered in dead insects anymore
I know it’s one of the nation’s favourite hobbies, but I’m not a fan of car washing. For one thing, there’s very little point. It’s not like when I was younger and most cars would fall to bits from rust if so much as a grain of road salt was left under a wheel arch. And it’s not like when I was younger and the front end was permanently covered in at least an inch of massacred and mangled insect… → Read More
Jeremy Hunt's new role 'holding the government to account' on health policy is a sick joke
Rather quietly, Jeremy Hunt has sidled back towards the political limelight, with a new role in parliament. But it’s one that says so much about the rot in our political system. In 2016, Hunt declared that being health secretary was likely to be his “last big job in politics”. Since then, he’s been foreign secretary and run for the Tory leadership (and the accompanying keys to Number 10).… → Read More
Zarah Sultana shows a bunch of Tories what solidarity looks like
“The dehumanising language we have heard should have no place in society or in the halls of power” → Read More