Politoblog

When I was 11, my English teacher gave us all a newspaper clipping to teach us about persuasive writing. The article was about High Speed 2 (HS2), the UK’s proposal for a new highspeed railway line. The line will cut through people's homes and carve up ancient woodlands, destroying both livelihoods and ecosystems in its wake. I remember asking my teacher if “this was actually going to happen”. Nine years later, and it's worse than I ever could have imagined. After a last review of the costs, HS2 was definitively approved this year, 11 years after it was first proposed. Construction was given the greenlight in April. Britain might need to update its rail network – most of it dates back to the Victorian era, while most of Western Europe is already well-connected with highspeed rail links. Before we built HS1, which connects London to the Channel Tunnel, you could feel trains crossing the Channel from Paris slow down as they reached the British border. Highspeed rail might be nece...

Let's talk about a story that's been getting a lot of media attention lately, namely: ZOOM: @realDonaldTrump appears to be signing his name to a blank sheet of paper in this photo. pic.twitter.com/xlNX24CXn4 — Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 4, 2020 When I was 16, I was invited into school to take a photo with the Headteacher pretending to open my exam results. I was handed a blank piece of paper, which me and my headteacher grinned and pointed at as the cameras snapped away. Obviously, these weren’t my exam results. I had opened them online at 6am that morning – no one at my school got a letter with a list of their grades on it. The photo was an illusion, and no one cared. When you watch the evening news, do you actually think that the newsreader is reading from the sheets of paper in front of them? No, of course they aren’t. They are reading from a teleprompter, as newsreaders have been doing for decades. The paper is just there because that is the image the news ...