No geek
is an island

Just spent the weekend at LDYS Conference in Bristol. Speakers included party president Simon Hughes and fellow blogger Peter Black. We were amused to find as we arrived that we had been condemned in Friday’s Daily Mirror. There were some painfully close elections, lots of policy debate and some great karaoke last night.

Via Anders, I bring you BetLiberal - a website encouraging people to vote LibDem in order to make an absolute killing at the bookies when we win the General Election. It’s certainly a novel idea and I really do wish them all the best with it. Don’t think I’ll be having a flutter though.

Reviewing Saw is tricky because I don’t want to give too much away.

It’s a well-paced, tense thriller with more than a few nods towards 1995’s Se7en. Two men wake up in a room together with a blood-drenched body on the floor between them and soon realise, through the power of flashbacks, that they are the victims of a serial killer.

The cast are uniformly excellent and the direction suitably sharp. But for a film that is so much about the plot, it’s astoundingly good. There are just the right number of hints to let you think you’ve got the whole thing worked out and apparent goofs which turn out to be clues.

If you like a clever thriller, I heartily recommend Saw.

Thank you for the good luck wishes for the job - I got it

I’m phone blogging from my latest job interview. The first candidate is in at the moment and I’ve got half an hour to kill before I go in. The building is a very swanky new development funded, like so many university expansions recently, by the business school. Very good views from here which, thanks to my new camera phone, I can capture.

So the Daily Mail the other day proclaimed from its front page that it was disgusting that in a ‘civilised’ (their punctuation) such as ours, it is “disgusting to even think about raising the retirement age”. It went on to insist on “dignity in retirement”.

I agree with the second point, but why should retirement begin at 65 and not later? But the Mail would go ballistic if taxes went up to pay for its pensions demands (the Express complained about drastic tax rises to pay for pensions rather than about the retirement age on its front page).

When Beveridge’s contributory state pension was introduced, the life expectancy for men was 63 - two years younger than his male retirement age of 65. Now average life expectancy is pushing 80 and will be higher in the future (when the critical pensions will need to be drawn). In the Mail’s world (and I know I should just ignore it), you should be entitled to 30 years retirement on a good income for working maybe 40 years previously. Is it surprising that that attitude has caused a crisis?

And now the PM is suggesting using incapacity benefit funds to pay for pensions. While I’m sure there are some claimants who could be helped into work, it sounds suspiciously like robbing Peter to pay Paul.