Dan McNeil's Blog

It's not every day that you walk out of Waitrose to see a red Range Rover sweep past you and get back home, switch on the news and find out that an embattled Rupert Murdoch was in the car. I'm no lover of other people's pain. And I'm no lovers of blood sports. But to watch the underdogs of the Guardian and the Indy slowly ripping the jugular out of News International like two enraged and tenacious pitbulls does put a smile on my face. There is no doubt in my mind that Rebekah Brooks should resign because either she was party to illegal hacking or she should resign through incompetence if she didn't know what was going on. Either way, she certainly shouldn't still in be her job right now. It would be too easy to sit back and celebrate the demise of the News Of The World. It's certainly true that a world without that horrid rag is a better world than one with it; but there are still other horrors lurking in the British press. An easy way to see which pape

Over the past few years - and in the past year especially - politics has taken a turn into a direction which leaves me feeling cold. It's got nothing to do with the particular policy, but it's to do with the quality of the debates and discussions which have been happening. Whichever party had won the election last year, there would be difficult decisions to make and steering the economy back into growth is not an easy thing to do. So now, more than ever, we could do with some clarify of explanation behind the decisions being made, and more importantly to have the alternative options presented in the form of a reasonable argument rather than partisan ranting. Take the AV referendum for instance. Both sides of the discussion resorted to rhetoric and soundbites to make their case, rather than presenting a logical argument about why they did (or didn't) believe AV to be a fairer system than first past the post. I would much rather hear an eloquent speech from someone with wh