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Saturday, November 21, 2009 

Weekend links.

Not a lot around this weekend, so I'll keep this relatively short and sweet. Paul Linford thinks the Queen's speech was another missed opportunity for Brown, 5CC discovers, incredibly, that carol singers haven't been banned, Sim-O has a look at the BNP's view of the equality act, Anton Vowl imagines that Rupert Murdoch is completely benign, and also takes a gander at the comment of both Peter Hobbins and the red ink brigade in the Mail's section, the Heresiarch notes the EU's unelectoral politics while Sunder Katwala has a fascinating early history of ethnic minority candidates and representatives, circa the turn of the last century.

In the papers, or at least their sites, Matthew Parris doesn't think much of the Queen's speech, Janice Turner is not very convincing on how a small band of warriors turned away the scourge of modern life which is lap dancing, Andrew Grice has some background to how out of nowhere, Baroness Ashton became the EU's foreign minister, Christina Patterson notes what we have to learn from the Sikh who might become the BNP's first non-white electoral candidate and Peter Oborne thinks Blair looks haunted and has a lot to be haunted by.

As for worst tabloid article, the only real contender is Karol Sikora, who denounces NICE as a "Stalinist quango", denying cancer drugs which are available elsewhere in Europe. Clearly instead we should leave such decisions to elected ministers, who can't even begin to make a cost-effective analysis and are completely open to political pressure, from both campaigners and drug companies alike. This would also be the Mail that loathes taxes wanting even more money to be spent on drugs that give only the slightest amount of extra, often painful, life. Why not go the whole hog and call it a death panel, as the right in America seem to think the NHS is all about?

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