Chris Tryhorn asks how close would a British Grillo be to Charlie Brooker's dark fantasy.
Charlie Brooker's dystopian satire Black Mirror this week featured a foul-mouthed cartoon bear called Waldo who takes a by-election by storm. The bear - a video projection voiced by a comedian - goes around town hassling the Tory candidate with puerile insults, and then at a student Question Time event launches a vicious anti-politics tirade that goes viral on YouTube. After watching The Waldo Moment on Monday night, I went online to learn that the blogger-comedian Beppe Grillo had won m...
Jamie Bartlett explains the importance of social media in the Italian comedian's electoral success.
Over the weekend, I predicted that Beppe Grillo and his Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S - Five Star Movement) would outperform the polls by four to five percentage points in the Italian general election. I didn't, however, expect him to secure one in every four votes. What is going on? In general, polling organisations are getting more accurate, and on the whole, they get it right. Nate Silver correctly predicted all 50 states in the 2012 US presidential election. But an average of pol...
Jonathan Todd compares two interpretations of the global power shift since Copenhagen.
It is now more than three years since the Copenhagen climate conference. If it is remembered at all in the UK, it is not remembered fondly. For all the sleeplessness that it induced in the then Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband, it did not produce a great leap forward in our response to climate change. The earth keeps getting hotter; the ice caps persistently melt; and amid the wreckage of a deeper and more sustained GDP slump than the notoriously grim 1930s, it is not obvious that many of us c...
David Goodhart introduces his Analysis programme on ‘bad jobs’ and how to improve their status.
In tonight’s Analysis programme I investigate two related issues about low skilled jobs. How, on the one hand, these ‘bad jobs’ have not disappeared in Britain, as many economists predicted they would, and yet, on the other hand, how so many British people have been discouraged from taking them. The most basic discouragement flows from the fact that over recent years these jobs have become relatively less well paid and often more demanding. There is also the impact of...
Jamie Bartlett on Beppe Grillo, whose Five Star political movement is currently polling third in the upcoming Italian election.
As one of Italy's best-known comedians, Beppe Grillo had often exposed political and business scandals as part of his routines, but in 2005 he published his first post on his blog, which established him as a public figure focusing on political and societal issues. In the ensuing years, this became the most visited political blog in Italy and was the launching pad for other online and offline initiatives. Grillo is a genuine anti-establishment politician. He believes that the Italian...
Duncan O’Leary on Ed Miliband's intention to re-introduce the 10p tax band.
One Nation Labour desperately needed some definition, having drifted from a powerful slogan to a catch-all term for anything and everything. In his speech on the economy today, Ed Miliband has begun to give it some. The call to reinstate the 10p tax band, paid for by a levy on the wealthiest homes, ticks a lot of boxes. It helps put some distance between ‘One Nation’ Labour and one of the biggest political mistakes of the last government. Gordon Brown’s reputation never f...
Chris Tryhorn on how the upcoming byelection could be a test-case for the 2015 general election.
The forthcoming Eastleigh byelection triggered by the resignation of Chris Huhne pits the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives against each other in a proper gloves-off dust-up for the first time since the two parties formed a coalition government nearly three years ago. In this respect it promises to be an intriguing early rehearsal of one of the key issues of the 2015 general election: to what extent will the Liberal Democrat vote collapse, how many seats will the party lose as a result...
Accurately measuring the social value in CSR will help cement its importance to good business, writes Ally Paget.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR), whereby businesses have a positive impact on their employees and the wider community, is not a new idea. Britain’s industrial heritage is littered with examples of companies taking care of their employees and the local community. Many of these communities which have grown and thrived around private industry are now feeling the want of social capital where these industries have declined. What has changed is that CSR has a new focus: social investme...
By committing to so little, so far off, Claudia Wood asks if the Government is not taking the imminent social care crisis seriously enough?
There have been few policy announcements whose details were so widely trailed and discussed in advance as the social care funding settlement. When the plan was finally announced this afternoon – a new care cap of £75,000 (meaning once an individual spends this amount on their care, the state then pays); and a new means test of £123,000 for residential care - all of the details had already been thoroughly chewed over and responses issued by a range of charities and organisati...
Jamie Bartlett argues that mass social media monitoring must be regulated, limited and put on a legal footing.
The Guardian splashed this morning on ‘Google for Spies’ – software called ‘Rapid Information Overlay Technology’ built by a defence firm that mines social media data for insight. Three things are worth noting about this story. The first is that this is not really a story. Commercial companies, political risk firms, and hundreds of other organisations large and small are mining social media, writing algorithms and software for insight. The idea that the po...