Carnival of the Britblog Roundup # 28

Yes, it’s the Britblog Roundup, this week named as a Carnival in honour of a slow Bank Holiday weekend. Your collection of those pieces people have nominated as must see posts of the week from British and Irish bloggers. Keep the nominations coming in folks, send them for next week to britblog AT gmail DOT com.

Britblog Roundup can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's Ubercarnival

First up is a must read piece from Musings from Middle England. If you thought our asylum system was cocked you’d be right but you probably still don’t know quite how cocked. Yes, we send people back to countries where they will be hung simply for their sexuality. Screaming in rage at your MP would be an appropriate response.

Gary Monro (you may remember him from A Very British Insurgency) with his, from a conservative standpoint, objections to the war in Iraq. Long and thoughful, whatever your own views on the subject.

Nosemonkey wants us all to know that he’s back from the colonies and blogging again. Here he is being worthy about the German election. You should also look around a bit for his piece on the piss up party for emergency workers. He’s collected enough money from donations to pack a pub out to say thank you. It’s this coming week.

The Religious Policeman is working from London at the moment so we can include him. Thanks to Francis who nominated him, he’s hilarious. Cricket, soccer and this excellent line:

Don't children blow up quickly these days?

The Parking Attendant is less than impressed with the SWP and like minded "Communist Workers". "Mardy teenagers" is a wonderful description.

Philobiblon raises the tone around here by bringing us a theatre review. Youth, energy and Cornish Independence. I’ll support all three of those....and as Natalie says, her blog review is only the second in any format of this excellent production.

Shell at Across the Atlantic comments on the animal rights crowd and guinea pigs. Starts with scumbags and gets more accurate from there. In the comments there’s a lovely piece of hypocrisy from a PETA activist about why she will accept medical treatment based on animal studies while campaigning to ban them.

The New Economist gives us the skinny on those E European migrant workers.Out of some 230,000 there have been 55 applications for benefits. As others have said this is an import of human capital and a good thing.

Make My Vote Count subjects Our Toneness to the Machiavelli test. Never quite sure whether it is a good thing or not for politicians to pass that. As he does.

Stumbling and Mumbling on the absurdity of the UK tax system. The two parent two kid family on 200 quid a week gets a 50% pay rise to 300. After tax and benefits withdrawal, their actual increase in disposable income? 8.52. This is simply insane (and no, that is not cherry picking the most invidious numbers). It’s also from the Govt’s own released numbers, not something cooked up by someone wanting the system to look bad.

Perfect.co.uk poses a multiple choice paper on GSCE exam results. I’m afraid I failed it as I thought satellite photogrammetry would work as well as anything else.

Mike’s Books on two different murders and the different level of publicity afforded to each.

Owen Barder offers his plan for the Lords reform. It involves voting for vocational constituencies, something that as far as I know has only been tried in Hong Kong and the City of London. Interesting idea though.

Brian Barder responds with further questions.

I’m reluctant to risk appearing to pick holes in such a welcome attempt to approach the problem from a wholly new angle, but it does necessarily prompt (not, please, ‘beg’) a number of questions, to which its ingenious author can no doubt provide convincing answers.

BB is an ex-Ambassador so we should read that as diplo-speak....he’s also Owen’s father. Bet the conversations over the breakfast table in that household were interesting.

Talk Politics pulls the ears of and jumps on the trunk of Charlie the Safety Elephant. Quite rightly too, man wouldn’t know a Human Right if it bit him on the arse.

Liberal England is far too kind to Polly Toynbee. He actually takes one of her arguments seriously. He rather demolishes her entire style actually.

JamieK at The Sharpener on realism in politics. If you can’t trust a Government at home why would you trust them abroad?

Jarndyce on walking through Tavistock Square. Yes, they’ve cleaned up the mess and blood but some will still remember.

Let’s be Sensible on a most unsensible plan. Engraving the Gospels on diamonds and sending them into interstellar space. The planners appear to completely miss the point that any alien craft out there is unlikely to be amused by being struck by a bit of (however engraved) rock moving at an appreciable fraction of light speed.

Don Paskini is less than approving of the pro-war left. Nick Cohen in particular. He’s also running a little competition for the best article on the subject.

And that’s it, the end of this week’s Britblog Roundup. Just one thing left before we all go out to enjoy the last sunshine of the year (Remember! All back to work next week ’till Christmas!).

I’m building a mini-network using BlogAds. Trying to get UK sites signed up to the system and then aggregating those sites to make it more attractive for UK advertisers to identify a UK audience. We’re currently ofering 250,000 impressions a week to advertisers and it looks like those signing up this week will take it to 500,000. I want to try and double this again in September as that’s about the number that has been identified, 3-4 million a month, that will actually bring the advertisers in.

So, if you’ve got a blog aimed at a UK readership and are doing 3,000 pages (pages, not visits) a week, drop me a line and I’ll send you an invite to BlogAds. Might as well earn some beer money out of what we’re already doing, eh? And if we can get the system up to that size, perhaps rather better than beer money.