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Teach the Future has a template letter to be sent the Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Skills, etc, Bridget Phillipson.  It nicely sets out the arguments for the Labour Party to do what TtF would like it to do,...

It’s time to cheer the Environment Agency.  At a moment when it would have been easy for its senior leadership to be distracted by a deluge of public criticism over huge sewage discharges into rivers and onto beaches, reports of...

Today, February 1st, is the first significant day of 2024, in Earth terms at least.  It is Imbloc (pronounced emolc) also called St Brigit's Day (pronounced Breed).  This is the mid-point (more or less) between the Winter Solstice (when the...

You'll likely have read that Tata Steel is closing two blast furnaces in Port Talbot before it has built the taxpayer subsidised electric arc furnaces to replace them in 2027.  By the end of the year there will be no...

2023 was a very good year for identifying plants in the wild although I did not spend enough time doing it.  I'm determined that 2024 will be better.  This is a good January resolution. Common centaury is my plant of...

I learned French at school, but not very well.  I now wish I'd tried much harder.  The school had two French teachers and one German teacher and so it all depended which form (determined by the 11+ results) you fetched...

When I used to travel to the USA regularly, I was often accused of cynicism by academic colleagues.  In response, I usually said that I was merely being sceptical, pointing out that this was an Enlightenment virtue much needed if...

Did you see the news of the UK's becoming the first G20 economy to halve its greenhouse gas emissions with the average household using less energy than in the mid-1990s – even when you factor in imports?  The UK's output...

As I noted before Christmas, a recent workshop on activism which I listened to was disappointing.  It might have begun by exploring what activism entails (what it is and isn’t) as a prelude to the discussion, but it didn't, and...

In our house, Mrs Thatcher gets a reasonably balanced obituary.  One persistent negative feature is regret that her policy of selling council houses – which we welcomed — was not balanced by an equivalent house-building programme to ensure a continuity...