Haven’t done a news roundup for ages. They’re much more fun than real blogging because you can be sarcastic without having to think too much about whether your sarcasm is warranted.

  • From The Independent:

    Children from council estates may be “bused” to wealthier middle-class suburbs under a government plan to give their parents more choice of schools.

    In the age of ‘Education, education, education’ you’d think the government would actually work out why the local schools were so poor and do something useful with them. But you’d be wrong. You see, this is an ‘initiative’, it’s a ‘reform’, it’s probably ‘modern’ and it offers ‘choice’. Buzzwords fall like confetti but the bad schools remain bad and the poor sods left languishing there may as well give up now.

  • Conservative Party MPs vote this afternoon in the first round of the leadership contest. The Daily Telegraph suggests Liam Fox and Kenneth Clarke are battling to avoid getting the wooden spoon and being knocked out in the first round.

    Mr Carke said

    …there would be “a great deal of ill-feeling” if he did not make the final round. He claimed that rank-and-file party members wanted to be able to make a choice between him and Mr Cameron - as they plainly had “overwhelmingly more public support than the other two”.

    You’re a nice chap and all the rest of it Mr C but the wails of your disappointed supporters will be drowned by the celebrations of those of us who want the Conservative Party to actually be conservative.

  • From The Guardian:

    Bob Kiley, the commissioner of Transport for London, plans to use a maintenance and safety crisis on a key part of the capital’s underground rail system as a trigger to wrestle more control from the private sector.

    He also called for Tube Lines to scrap a maintenance contract with the French firm Alstom.

    The extent to which the commissioner has control over the system he’s commissioner of is revealed by the hoops he had to jump through just to be able to send inspectors in to oversee maintenance work on the Northern Line.

    An army of lawyers had had to read the 2m words of the PPP agreement to ensure that TfL’s actions through its London Underground arm were appropriate, and check a separate private finance initiative (PFI) deal between Tube Lines and Alstom contained in another 18 volumes and 358 different documents.

    When I get to vote in the Conservative Party leadership contest I’ll use it for the non-Ken candidate with the balls to admit some things shouldn’t be privatised - and that one of those some things is the railway system.

  • The National Lottery is sitting on a cool £2.4 billion of unspent money, says The Times.

    Every year about 28,000 projects receive funding but a further 56,000 are turned away because they fail to meet the criteria or the fund has run out of cash.

    Ah, like The Samaritans, who were originally refused a grant because they didn’t do enough to encourage asylum seekers and immigrants to use their facilities.

  • Finally, a new spin-off from Dr Who is, apparently, going to be “dark, wild and sexy” according to Russell T Davies, its creator. Called Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who - how clever) it will contain swearing.

    [Davies] described it as “the X Files meets This Life”. Stuart Murphy, the BBC3 controller, said: “There will be sex and swearing, I assume. I’m quite relaxed about that, as it will be post-watershed and Russell can do it in a funny and sexy way.”

    The star will be John Barrowman, who plays the bi-sexual Capt Jack Harkness.

    How very ‘modern’ and ‘relevant’. Let’s hope they remember to include a story of some sort…