The Glass Box.
The Glass Box is where the PM team meets in at 18.00 every weeknight to discuss the content of the programme.
We try to be honest with each other, but not hurtful, as we talk about what worked and what didn't...what met our expectations and what fell short.
This virtual glass box is where you're encouraged to take part in the same spirit. Tonight's editorial team will read your comments and may well add their own.
Listen to PM
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~52~RS~)
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
Does Eddie know how to take time off?
Why is he posting glass boxes
Or has someone hacked him?
This should be investigated!!!
Complain about this comment
Carolyn,
BIG BROTHER OR OPEN GOVERNMENT?
Complain about this comment
The rise in CPI 'unexpected'???
No further fiscal stimulus needed?!?!?
More 'easing' (money printed and given to banks), though!!!
In this country of Two Nations, again, it is the poor who suffer, and the rich escape unscathed.
In fact, if they have a mortgage large enough, given the interest rate cuts, the rich are in clover.
And the poor, those on benefit, without jobs, or on or near the minimum wage, are suffering a decline in their standard of living as those low interest rates (and hence weak pound) push up import prices.
Complain about this comment
Clearly the idea of having post offices in churches has been disrupted by an act of God.
Complain about this comment
Anyone might suppose that the Royal Navy *wanted* to train people at great expense and then kill them by accident, judging by the way that they were attacked about an accident caused by a bit of equipment that they have stopped using as a result of that accident...
If my son died because some bit of kit he was given to use in the course of his duties was defective, I would be very unhappy about it and I would want to know that there had been an enquiry and the bit of kit in question had been either taken out of use or rendered safe, but I wouldn't claim that he was treated as a number, or that his accident had been ignored when it clearly hadn't been.
Complain about this comment
Terrorism and John Reid.
Well, well it seems all my old favourites are back- Mandy, Alistair Campbell and John Reid. Many a day I would drive to work and hear his dulcet tones telling us all whatever Tony told him to tell us. I have to share with you that road safety could have been compromised and here we go again.
PS I've actually heard lately that there is some scullduggery afoot in his constituency - surely not!! Never been known in Scottish Labour.
Complain about this comment
In the Nineties, I came into contact with two homeless men. Both these men had applied for and received, credit cards.
Homeless man A maxed out his card and then told the credit company, he couldn't pay the money back. He finally agreed to give them £2 a week - for many years.
Homeless man B maxed out but then, to his credit, paid back every penny. They cut up his card.
Both these men gave homeless hostels as their addresses.
Mr. Cameron said Britain is a broken society. That is understating the case. Britain is spiritually bankrupt.
Britain and Israel depend on America for their survival. America is in a bigger mess than we are.
When America goes down, Britain and Israel go too.
Political grandstanding will not be enough.
Complain about this comment
Ishmael,
This was probably the best interview I have had the privilege to listen to this year so far on PM. Listening to what Ismael had to say, I understood when he described the paternalistic, dismissive attitude of those who have, not only a duty of care, but the power of life and death over those we presume they care for.
How do we find out if there has been an unofficial quiet policy within the NHS and medical profession towards those with 'so called' learning difficulties and down-syndrome. My only experience of this was when a GP who was asked about an unrelated operation on one of the residents of a care home with down-syndrome, quite nonchalantly pointed out that they don't do that for such people. Delving deeper the care home supervisor found that such people are not seen as cost effective to the NHS, due to life expectancy.
I do feel that things will only really change (as in other areas of professional life) when these sort of actions are pursued in the criminal courts. no one ever seems to be really held personally, publicly responsible for such shameful behaviour. I once heard a person at a mental health conference get up and state to all the professionals there,"when you kill on of us, no one gives a 'expletive' if we kill one of you, its all over the papers and TV within hours.
Complain about this comment
Money changers in the church? Not so shocking.
That made me chuckle as the Bishop of London's telephone line went postal office.
I thought of all the places of worship I have been privileged to visit where so much money changes hands - candle, offertory plates, reparation boxes and postcards.
I queued in an actual postal office today - and you know - during the small wait. I used it wisely by studying the architecture - studded with jammy dodgers, magazines and books on troubled childhood.
Let us prey! No offence anyone.
lol
Complain about this comment
steelpulse @ 9, when I visited Liverpool Cathedral (the Anglican one) during the 1980s there was a gift shop inside the building, just off the nave, where you could buy all sorts of goodies including a pop-star's book about "My Conversations With God", but neither a Book of Common Prayer nor a Bible. :-(
Complain about this comment
Chris (10)
Thats because God isn't Anglican.
Complain about this comment
funnyJoedunn @ 11, I should hope not! but what has that to do with theunavailability of the Bible in a shop inside a church?
Complain about this comment
Chris (12)
'But what has that to do with the unavailability of the bible in a shop inside a church?'
It depends on which explanation you want. The long one or the short?
The long one begins with Henry the 8th and the dissolution of the monasteries and the setting up of the Church of England so that he might be able to legally divorce one of his wives. The Catholic Church had refused Henry a divorce. His plan was to set up a national church that would allow him (with God's approval) to do away with his women when necessary.
He also banned common folk from learning to read through the fear of them learning to interpret the scripture for themselves. The only person allowed to read the bible publicly was the local priest who had to swear allegiance to Henry and the crown(which still persists today). this was meant to convey that the local priest was the voice of the King, who in turn was the voice of God on earth. So what the priest said was what the king said. What the king said was what God said. Wo Betide any thinking to question this. However, I prefer the short version, Namely;
All sorts of goodies and books by pop-stars bring in more spondulix that the holy word. Simple really.
Complain about this comment
Why save the banking system?
Why not instead 'quantitatively ease' the real world slump that we are in?
By
1. reducing to nothing the money printed to buy banks' best paper
2. counting the high powered money as
i. the money the ecologically sound growing economy needs
and
ii. the increased cash reserves that banks must hold
and
iii. money to be repaid from increased tax receipts generated by its use?
Complain about this comment
14 is one quessie to Nils.
Another is, since NY closes two and a half hours after he's gone up and down stairs, why doesn't his report START each day with Dow-Jones for the rest of the day before?
For example, today it closed two percent DOWn. When else can he report that 1/3 retrenchment in the rises of yesterday?
He didn't seem to make anywhere near half as much noise about London's half-way back down fall today, as he did of the one-off rise yesterday.
It still seems like 'UPSHARES!!!, downshares.' to me.
Complain about this comment
Chris (12): An alternative explanation might be that it is assumed that visitors to a cathedral are likely to already have their own Bible, and nowadays the Book of Common Prayer is not universally used.
Just a thought?
Complain about this comment
Bonjour Vous Tous,
Thanks for all your postings. An odd sort of day, with inflation figures not doing what some people had expected or predicted and then Mervyn dropping that fiscal stimulus warning to the Treasury Select Committee.
I think we just about got there, though some of the turnaround was a bit tight and we deidn't have as much preparation time for some of the interviews as we would normall have hoped. Quite a lot of pre-recorded stuff on the programme.
The highlight for me was the interview with Ishmail, talking us through the problems people with learning disabilities have in being treated like adults by society in general, but, more pertinently to yesterday's obudsman report, more specifically in dealing with the health service.
I also like the piece about the auction of the score to music of the film Psycho. A really knowledgeable and eloquent interviewee.
All the best
Rog
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Sid, have you been swearing again?
Complain about this comment
fJd 13, So who funded the printing of the Bible in English?
Complain about this comment
TIH - no, I was correcting Roger's French. He says hallo to all us blokes - and I suggested that he might like to say hallo to the ladies too. If I quote what I said, it'll probably be OK here, since I've now rambled on in English for a while.
"'Bonjour Vous Tous' - et toutes??"
Is what I said ... silly that Roger can use French but we can't reply in French ...
Complain about this comment
Not sure, Sid, that I want to be referred to as a toot ;o)
Complain about this comment
My, not only a talking but an educated horse. Whatever next?
Tootle pip
Complain about this comment
Lady Sue - I think you meant an educated Sid. I'm pig ignorant.
Complain about this comment
Whoops! Indeed I did! Sorry Horse, sorry Sid.
Complain about this comment
I want to use one of Syd's jokes, so I'll be cautious, given his propensities to get modded.
It's more a turn of phrase than a joke, really. In fact its no joke.
It concerns a whizz kid who never was.
He's not even a was-kid now.
He was the youngest professor we'd ever seen and now he's the oldest out-of-dater I've ever seen.
He thinks, since the banks are refusing to lend money, that we should reduce the price of lent money......
well, good, .... but to save a suply and demand market system, where a higher price brings forth more supply?
Now he's against a fiscal expansion
'cos otherwise the credit crunch wouldn't work. There'd be no slump and Indai and China would take the leadership of the world away from America and the UK.
He thinks he's found a way of having a credit crunch and handing huge sums of our money to the banks.
Is he a loser? No, he's a high flier who hit his ceiling when he was young (he was once)
We are the losers. We who wanted something different in 1997 but found the Labour Government inheriting not only policies but also placemen from the Tories.
Who is he? A good question. Who was he? Someone with real promise that he squandered on silly jokes, too many formal business dinners and on trying to make his discipline boring
At a time when it needed verve, ability and imagination.
Beware whizz kids, who whizz by being ultra conformist to their sponsors. They tend to run out of inspiration and real ability.
So ignore them and reflate the economy as I outline in 14
Complain about this comment
FTSE heading south as usual. Soon back to the low three thousands.
Complain about this comment
Big Sister @ 16, I'm not sure that everyone who visits a cathedral will necessarily own a bible: those buildings are part of everyone's "cultural heritage" as well as places of worship. Anyhow, if they will sell religious books, why not sell the main ones?
Personally I do have a bible, a King James translation one inherited from my mother's godmother and probably printed in about 1910: it has some splendid maps of the Holy Land at the back, and is called "The Palestine Illustrated Bible", which meant that my daughter felt it would be unwise to take it with her to Israel this month. Even so, I might have wanted to buy a more recent edition, or even a more recent translation, fond though I am of the poetry of the Authorised.
As for the book of Common Prayer, back in those days it was still in use quite a lot. OK, mine probably dates from about 1930, and I would quite like to have one that isn't falling apart (but lacks my aunt's name in the front in a childish hand). Not to have it available in a shop in a church in which it was in use at the time seemed to me to be poor salesmanship at the very least.
If they are going to worship Mammon, they might at least do it efficiently, was my point really.
Complain about this comment
27 - is it Andy Fairweather-Low?
Complain about this comment
Sid (30) - Possibly, but I was thinking along the lines of Garry Glitter.
Complain about this comment
TIH (31)
Damn - I'd forgotten that Gary Glitter was (though only briefly) a financial adviser to Tony Blair. Funny how your memory plays tricks, eh?
Complain about this comment
I think we were meant to think that it was Derek Hatton - but I'm far too clever to fall for that!
Complain about this comment
Didn't he play with the Dominoes?
Complain about this comment
Chris: I don't disagree with you, but my point was that the shop (usually owned by the cathedral) might be have been making a wrong assumption. And, of course, you are quite right that the Book of Common Prayer was much more commonly used at that time.
Another explanation may be that was an SPCK shop, or similar, in the neighbourhood and the cathedral may have had a private arrangement not to tread on its toes. Cathedral shops tend to gear themselves more towards the tourists anyway, don't they? Even in Notre Dame, as I recall, you don't see bibles for sale, but you do see religious medals and the like. I'd never be tempted to buy a bible as a tourist, but have a stack of postcards of rose windows, etc., not to mention a shelf of Pitkin guides. :)
Complain about this comment
Nah, you're thinking of Derek Nimmo.
Complain about this comment
After the Dominoes he turned to acting - he was in 'All Gaiters Great and Small', I think.
Complain about this comment
TRW: you must be so disappointed that the FTSE has gone back up again this afternoon. Oh dear, just think of all those individuals who are invested in stocks courtesy of ISAs, pension plans, etc, who aren't losing money like you wish they were...
Complain about this comment
Must be a mod from Liverpool...
Complain about this comment
Sid 22, You shouldn't correct another person's attempts at a foreign language. It will put them off trying again.
Complain about this comment
TIH 36, I think Derek Nimmo's sister lived/lives in St Albans. I'll ask her.
Complain about this comment
Sid at 22... 'Vous tous' includes all the women as the masculine in the plural is not exclusive, but includes both male and female. The feminine of 'tout' in the plural is not inclusive. So 'Bonjour vous toutes' would exclude the men.
That probablt doesn't make sense because I explained it poorly. Sorry.
Complain about this comment
DMcN (41) - Do you ever hear a 'whooooshing' sound when things go over your head?
Complain about this comment
Oy, Roger Sawyer @ 42, you can't go doing that there here! Making sense on a Thursday before noon? No, no, sir, that is the act of a cad, sir, a bounder!
Complain about this comment
Roger, did you look that up or are you as clever as we are led to believe?
Complain about this comment
44+45... I happened to know it, not because I'm clever, but because I have a French step-family, lived in the country for years, went to a lycee for a year and used to be a furniture removal man there during school and university holidays. I sort of picked up the language through all of that. Chris, you're right. I am a cad and a bounder... a blackguard too I hope.
Rog
Complain about this comment
Roger - you explained it fine ... but I'm sure I've heard 'tous et toutes' ... perhaps just a matter of emphasis? or gallantry? (I am excessively gallant, I'll have you know.)
Complain about this comment
Roger @ 46, ok, you may now twirl your moustache and utter a sinister chuckle.
Sid @ 47, so may you! Gallanting about the place like that on a Thursday, I don't know *what* has got into you.
Complain about this comment
TIH 43, The first sentence is true.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Amazing how some posters here (those in power) can use French and others (mere mortals) can't. Too bad the mods don't speak a bit of it.
Complain about this comment
Sid, have you been seizing power as well as gallanting? Honestly, I don't know what has come over this blog today.
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS