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By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 31ST, 2016
AFTER 2016, who’d be a soothsayer for 2017? Today I’m going to take refuge in events coming next year that are cast-iron and certain – that is, significant anniversaries.
They’re standard furniture for the media, but I like them more and more as I get older. They jolt you back into a past that must, by definition, still have its grip on you – whether 20, 100 or 500 years ago.
By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 24TH, 2016
‘LIBRARIES gave us power”, goes the opening line of the Manic Street Preachers’ A Design For Life. Do they still? With supercomputers in our pockets connecting us to galaxies of knowledge? What do libraries give us now?
The answers are crucial, as they feed into debates about funding and supporting public libraries, caught up in this wretched trap of austerity.
Continue reading "PK column in The National: The legacy of our libraries is too precious to lose" »
By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 17TH, 2016
They go trudging into Trump Tower, hit the elevator button, then pop out of the gold-plated doors – there to meet the Sun God, or at least the Suntan God. Our innards took enough of a lurch seeing Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks smear themselves across the marble floors, barely hours after his victory.
But this week, the world’s most dangerous reality TV show – centred around Trump’s big corporate table on the 22nd floor, with chosen family members as a creepy consiglieri – had some notable new contestants.
By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 10TH, 2016
A FEW weekends ago, Michael Gove MP, a notable friend of this mighty organ, took the chance to clarify his famous “the people have had enough of experts” statement from the Brexit campaign.
“The point I make is that not all experts are wrong, that’s manifestly nonsense. [There’s] expert engineers, expert doctors, expert physicists,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. “But there are a sub-class of experts, particularly economists, pollsters, social scientists, who really do have to reflect on some of the mistakes that they’ve made.”
By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 3RD, 2016
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That’s what the thuggish Dick proposes in Shakespeare’s Henry VI as a means of improving society. And perhaps one way to hasten their end is the sight of lawyers making a killing.
This week in Scotland has provided quite a spectacle of all that. The new Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Gordon Jackson QC, suggested that independence might allow Scots lawyers to “grab some of that [legal] practice cake” from London, which usually secures the major litigations.