In an interview with The Times, Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, said: “There is crass irresponsibility in some of the larger monstrosities people drive around suburbia and in London. We have to move against this kind of thing.”
Nice words from the minister, and he is promising an increase in taxes to discourage this anti-social behaviour, but there’s nothing concrete there. A government that can dream up new repressive, police-state legislation at the drop of the prime minister’s hat seems to be taking an astonishingly long time over a simple change in charges.
****
The Guardian’s Reader’s Editor, Ian Mayes, for whom I have enormous respect, today brings up the interesting issue of “corrections and clarifications” on news stories in an online archive.
The paper’s policy is that these should always be immediately visible on a story (at the top) and kept to a minimum. When you think about it, there is a powerful possible shadow of 1984 over the fact that our archives are increasingly electronic – far, far easier to airbrush inconvenient pieces out of history.
About
One comment