Pandering to prejudice

It’s hard to express how profoundly depressed I am by the current state of politics in the UK. I mean, I try to avoid it, but I keep on hearing about it.

The BNP is a racist party. That’s bad. UKIP seem a bit racist. They may not actually be racists, but they certainly have policies that appeal to racists. The current government, on the other hand, running scared from mid-parliamentary-term council election results, actively develops policies specifically to attract the votes of racists and xenophobes, because it’s easier to pander to prejudice than to educate.

It’s disappointing because it reinforces the divisive rhetoric of the xenophobic fringe. It’s disappointing because the Conservatives really should know better. They do know better.

Thus, we get nonsense like this:

The Immigration Bill, introduced in the Queen’s Speech today, would require future private landlords to make simple checks on new tenants to make sure that they are entitled to be in this country. The government will ensure that UK nationals are not adversely affected and avoid red tape on honest landlords in the private rented sector.

The private rented sector in England is desperately in need of regulation. Letting agents are almost universally terrible. I’ve had some pretty awful experiences dealing with them, and I’d prefer never to go near one again (unless I’m armed with some kind of edged weapon or other means of removing the head or destroying the brain, I suppose).

There are a hundred useful laws that could be written to clean up the rotten business of residential lettings. The government does none of this. Instead, it chooses jingoistic nonsense for the UKIP-panic-inspired Queen’s Speech, forcing landlords to check the immigration status of tenants.

This is a country in which rogue slumlords let converted garages and walk-in-freezers at extortionate prices to desperate people. Do you think they’ll check the immigration status of their tenants/victims?

If this pointless requirement has any effect other than to give letting agents another excuse to tack another bullshit fee (common here, but illegal in Scotland!) onto the process of renting, I’ll eat my hat.

2013-05-08 22:52 UTC. Comments: 1.

£53 a week

Ian Duncan Smith claims that he could live on £53 a week. I don’t doubt it. I could easily live on £53 a week. More…

2013-04-01 21:34 UTC. Comments: 2.

Writing Rails apps without wanting to kill everybody

I don’t think it’s any secret that working on a significant-sized Rails codebase is not nearly as free and easy as any number of make-a-blog-in-fifteen-minutes screencasts would have you believe.

The good news is, I think I have the solution, and it’s simple. The bad news is, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy. More…

2013-03-21 21:37 UTC. Comments: 0.

Rail Travel Vouchers

I complained earlier about receiving compensation for a cancelled train in the form of £25 Rail Travel Vouchers rather than a more fungible means of exchange, but they’re not as useless as you might think, at least if you live in London: you can turn them into Oyster credit. More…

2013-03-21 20:47 UTC. Comments: 1.

One does not simply … (Turbolinks edition)

The web is a profoundly broken medium in many ways. The network is unreliable, servers are unreliable, and the human beings who write code for dynamic services are most unreliable of all. Nonetheless, amongst all those problems, one that I’ve never really found significant is the milliseconds taken to load and process a page’s JavaScript and CSS—and if that were an issue, I think my solution would be to optimise and minimise the JavaScript and CSS, not write more of it! More…

2013-02-26 14:10 UTC. Comments: 1.

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