The Glass Box
Be your own radio critic! Tell us here, frankly, what you thought of tonight's programme. In the PM office we meet every night at 1800 in the Glass Box you see above. Add your comment here.
Jump to more content from this blog
About this blog
The blog for the afternoon news and current affairs programme presented by Eddie Mair.
Subscribe to PM
You can stay up to date with PM via these feeds.
PM Feed(RSS)
PM Feed(ATOM)
If you aren't sure what RSS is you'll find our beginner's guide to RSS useful.
Listen to PM
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~54~RS~)
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
What a forward-looking Glass Box today, Dr. Muir! Or is it playing a harp, perchance?
Complain about this comment
Now we know why Edgie is so at peace, today.
Nothing to do with generations of harpists.
(The Dimblebies still have the microphone their father gave them to practice on, the refuse collectors and council workers outside, the bins and brooms their fathers taught them with. (Though the technology has changed a little in all those cases).)
It's because Wall Street was closed today.
Suddenly London is calm (after it's initial climb in response to the rise in Sow after London closed yesterday).
The epic struggle is going on in America. London is a passive spectator.
Personally, I think this Labour government could take the whole economy in to public ownership, without the Americans raising a moan.
C'mon, Kim Howells, Roger Berry, Jack Straw, the brave radical young men of '68. Marxists and revolutionaries that you are.
Come good.
At last.
America, big brother herself, is otherwise occupied.
Take the banks into public ownership. And whilst you are at it, reverse every one of the Tory's privatisations.
And this time, Labour, don't bulk at the direction of labour. Anxieties about that were what brought the '45 - '51 revolution to a grinding halt. Even though a majority of hard working ordinary people saw it as the right thing to do. After all, it had worked in the war. With great social effect.
Complain about this comment
Less slanty now!
Complain about this comment
aka 2, I saw that Derek Hatton on TV today. From leftie leader of Liverpool to property developer on Cyprus with a villa. Marxist indeed!
Complain about this comment
Irish soldiers
Good grief, this isn't news, it's recruiting propaganda! Please try harder, we're not all stupid.
Complain about this comment
I think young men and woman who decide to fight a colonial war in Afghanistan should think more of their own history.
Music with a little more grit than PM usually sponsors, is to be found here.
The British, somehow, must have persuaded these sorry young men that war against a whole people is OK.
Complain about this comment
aka 6, A lot of these 'sorry young men' are in the armed forces because they can't find another job. They get paid, you know.
Complain about this comment
Regarding the child abuse referrals. I have recently had the opportunity to read a lifetime's worth of social work reports on an individual, obtained under FOI. There were at least 2 levels of report - 1. what the social worker wrote in the file, and 2, what the social worker presented to review panels / bosses. I am not a social worker, but it seemed to me that the level 1 reports were "emotional" in the sense that they recorded the SW's thoughts and feelings on the client at the time or shortly after a meeting. Level 2 were "professional" in the sense that they were more objective and concise. They were written at a distance from the actual client contact. Action was taken only on Level 2 reports, which frequently ommitted disturbing details about the client's behaviour and reasons for the behaviour. Easy to see why abuse cases fall through the net in this scenario.
Complain about this comment
I am not at all pleased : Neils has just old us that Latvia will have the deepest
recession.
Can`t us Brits lead the EU in anything ?
Complain about this comment
Eddie: Surely that should read
Slainte?
:o)
Oh, and cheers to you, too!
Complain about this comment
What brilliant journalism from Aravind Adiga in Mumbai. The best account on events there so far.
Complain about this comment
You, know, I think the balance on this blog should be changed.
We wind up today with photographs of harpists, but the coverage of the Manx decisions about huge financial losses for people here is shuffled off to a blog supporting another programme entirely.
Meanwhile, if the hosts of photographs you post don't illustrate a story, why post them?
When they do, the writing around them should be far less apologetic, far fuller. The way things are, posters, the usual suspects with the usual subprime senses of humour, make the photographs THEIRS. What they mean, why they were taken, what the photographer likes about them, all gets lost in blog discussions about whether one of crowd in the photos looks a bit like Peter Mandelson or more like Neil Kinnock.
Many of the sequences really belong on a light hearted magazine - type blog. Why not hive off the Beach and take Shatner, harpists, bits of video Edgie thinks funny, etc, etc, with it, to set up an independent interactive blog. The Relaxation Blog or whatever.
Meanwhile, a rule of thumb might be: If you can't announce it as a NEWS item on the programme, it really belongs to the Relaxation Blog.
Complain about this comment
You know, the name "Mumbai" really grates on my nerves. Wasn't it Hugh Sykes who told of speaking to people on the street in that city and finding that they pretty much all still called it "Bombay"?
Complain about this comment
2 and 4.
Well ,the Milibands could do with having a word with their dad, and Mandelson with the shade of his grand dad.
We didn't put their descendants in power to lecture us on how the world has changed and needs less equality these days.
The spirit of Ralph and Herbert is what we need.
Now is the moment, not just for the Labour Party to prove that the Tories are immoral, but to re-take everything that Thatcher took from us.
Ed, David, Peter, are you people who will be able to hold your heads high and say 'We brought socialism back to Britain'? Or are you going to crawl on your bellies, roll over on your backs and play dead, and claim socialism was too difficult to achieve?
I see it all! Suddenly, sullenly, these three bright sparks will claim they are not clever enough to be socialists. Or admit they don't have the courage of their fathers and grandfathers. That the strain is running out.
Let it not be said.
If ever a day of markets proved anything ,it was today. With America shut up, Britain is free.
And America is shut up and tied up, for some considerable time to come.
The market noise the Americans wil lstart up again tomorrow should not divert us.
Nor the market noises that London offers in caterwauling reply or the baleful bleating of British bankers.
Now is the time, surely, to ignore markets completely (which is all they deserve) and re-implement the '45 manifesto + labour direction.
If you can't do it, get out of the way. Others in the Labour Party will.
You are our leaders. Lead.
Complain about this comment
Well what I thought about your Programme this evening.
I was sitting in heavy traffic for the entire programme and the bits that hit me most are on our economy.
I’m scared that next week I wake up and all that will be left in the High Street will be Charity shops and supermarkets.
Why for the sake of the economy can we have a law governing who sells what and where? For example, why do supermarkets sell electrical items? Is food not their priority? Perhaps Curry’s should sell food as well as their electrical items.
Bina
Complain about this comment
Binacossar (15),
Robert Graves in his non-fiction book "The Last Week-end" relates the very story when this happened in one locality. It did not end well.
I disagree with you about the High Street; only charity shops. The supermarkets will be out of town, where they can provide car parking &c, which the modern shopper needs to drag their stuff back home.
Unless the economy nose-dives so much we can all no longer afford a car, in which case maybe markets return to the High Street.
Complain about this comment
aka-pmleader - if you want a news programme, don't switch on till 6 o'clock.
PM never has been just a news programme - why would you have the 5 o'clock news followed by the 6 o'clock news?
Complain about this comment
aka-pmL: Perhaps you'd find this Blog more to your taste?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/evandavis/
If you come to a Blog headed by Eddie Mair, you'll find the news has to take its place alongside the lighter side of life (though Eddie is perfectly capable of handling the serious stuff correctly).
Complain about this comment
My 18 above:
Sorry, I copied the wrong link- It should have read:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/
Complain about this comment
18 and 19
Thank you both, kindly.
(You can call me pmL by the way).
At it's home page PM comes under the heading 'News and Current Affairs'
Current affairs or events are 'important political or social events or issues of the present time'.
This blog is described there as PM's blog with Edgie Mare.
Harps led to worries about the resilience of the Welsh traditions, today, here.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtc9a4TgRus
caused in me the deepest melancholic reflections, here, today.
The film it came from was made in 1946 when the world was just learning of the holocaust.
How could anyone not respond to Harpo's exquisite pathos at such a time, in such a film (Casablanca) and in the middle of Groucho's and Chico's extraordinary wisecracking and slapstick.
I think I can just see a way of linking, indeed juxtaposing, that post war sympathy with current affairs and news.
Whoever would have thought to ask whether sympathies for the Holocaust may bias our current attitudes to Israel and turn blind eyes to things we should condemn, without that link, eh?
William Shatner has got fat. The young harpist is wearing a nice dress. I look forward to hearing her mother playing tomorrow.
Thinking we should take tous into public ownership legitimately belongs to current PM programmes. It scacely belongs to the blog of one of the innumerable Tory political commentators (Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, Micheal Gove) that the Beeb has gathered unto itself.
Indeed, it is because public ownership has thrust it's way into the political agenda so quickly, and because those who believe in it wholesale are nowhere to be found in any BBC niche whatsoever, that PM is one of the news and current affairs programmes that should already be discussing it.
How much support there is in the Parliamentary Labour Party for it, is a good place to start.
Surely PM can find young turks saying its back on. The Neil Kinnocks, Micheal Foots, Konni Zilliacus, Sydney Silverman of today. An Aneurin Bevan, is what we need.
All the old socialist sentiment is still there, y'know. In the young and old alike.
I'd be proud if I were a PM editor if I'd become well known as the person who traced it's re-emergence.
PS Put its for it's and vice versa, wherever, Sid.
Nite.
Complain about this comment
aka 12, You are right. Posts should be limited to ten lines. Preferably connected. And not boring.
Sid 17, I suppose because the 5 o'clock news would be 'olds' by 6 o'clock.
Complain about this comment
21
Is
that
with
or
without
gaps?
And frequency? Number per lifetime or hour? Instead, a word or key stroke limit?
Exceptions made for especially good jokes?
Where's your rig-up of a harpy dalek in a long dress playing a harp?
Is it one song, one photo, (one nod of the head, stand up sit down, keep moving) each, too, David.
I just wish the world's poor would stop living and dying in such boring ways. Then McN would blog of little else.
Think of them as martyrs, David, and of today as long ago.
Then some 25th Century McN (genetically engineered selection having turned out to be a disappointment) could worship in the Cathedral of the Starved Martyrs, and tell us how easy it would have been to have FED THE WORLD.
Complain about this comment
Random observation re Ebay / Paypal
I dont know if anyone has realised the above have recently made a policy change regarding auction payments.
If there are the slightest 'negative feedback' comments on sellers ebay accounts ( less than 4.5 out of 5 ) , then Paypal will retain any money made from the auction for a period of 21 days, then release it.
I can see no real explanation for this other than cash flow on behalf of Paypal ? Do they need cash that much ?
Is this monopoly suffering with the economic problems more than it is letting on ?
Complain about this comment
keyclicker @ 23, when I looked into accepting Paypal as a way for people to pay for membership of a convention, three years or so ago, I was advised not to accept Paypal as a means of payment even though it appeared more convenient for overseas people who might want to join. This, I was told, was because Paypal were not covered by any of the usual rules for banking, and were able (if they wanted, and without having to give any reason) to 'freeze' any Paypal account and not allow the convention access to its funds for as much as a year or more -- and that there had been occasions on which such things had happened.
I am unsure how this differs from hanging on to the funds from an auction on EBay, except that 21 days seems to be rather less objectionable than 'for an indefinite period'.
Complain about this comment
If Sir Ian knows so much about the future, why could he not predict his own downfall.
It seems the only person not working to his plan is himself.
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS