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Articles by Lavinia Thompson

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About Lavinia Thompson

A university lecturer for many years, both at home and abroad, Lavinia Thompson retired in 2008 and has since taken up freelance journalism. She is currently studying for a distant learning degree in geo-political science and lives in Norwich with her partner. More Posts

Question Time verdict

  At some point around the early evening BBC1 6 O’ Clock News yesterday, the viewing public was presented with a between-programmes trailer about Car Share, the new Peter Kaye sit-com, whose opening episode I had earlier chosen to watch on ‘play-back’ (shortly after breakfast) having [...]

May 1, 2015 // 0 Comments

More heat than light

Yesterday morning – in the course of reading the newspapers, pleased that, due largely to the combined efforts of my other half’s superbly-professional lawyers and accountants, our names had not appeared in The Sunday Time Rich List for the ninth year running – I watched the second half [...]

April 27, 2015 // 0 Comments

The economic facts of life

One of the weirder aspects of the Election campaign – repeatedly aired in the Leaders’ Debates on television – is the polar extremes of how those of differing political persuasion view strategies to deal with the state of Britain’s finances. The Tories have, as usual, nailed their [...]

April 22, 2015 // 0 Comments

Troubling issues

The news yesterday that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided that it would not be in the public interest for Lord Janner to face prosecution for alleged sexual offences committed more than two decades ago because of his state of his health raises many difficult topics. The decision has been [...]

April 17, 2015 // 0 Comments

A disaster, but who takes responsibility?

Here’s a link to a worthy and worrying article by Jonathan Owen on the website of The Independent today, on the vexed subject of the overall cost of PFI initiatives as established under both Tory and Labour regimes – see here – THE [...]

April 12, 2015 // 0 Comments

A wake-up call … but for what?

The fall-out and speculation caused by the televised ‘Seven Leaders’ debate on Thursday evening continues to dominate the news media. I don’t sense that this is a five-day wonder, either. The pundits, based upon political surveys and polls – both supposedly independent/impartial and those [...]

April 4, 2015 // 0 Comments

Salmond served cold

By chance – I was doing other things beforehand and walked into the room not because I was looking out for it –  I caught  the last eight minutes  of yesterday’s appearance of former SNP leader Alex Salmond in the ‘main interview’ (0945 hours onwards) slot on The Andrew Marr [...]

March 23, 2015 // 0 Comments

Food for thought

In the wake of the Parisian Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket Jihadist massacres/shootouts and the demonstration rallies in France yesterday, both ‘serious’ journalism and social media are awash with a wide range of conflicting opinions as to what happened and why, and how the [...]

January 12, 2015 // 0 Comments

A mass of contradictions

One of comedian Frankie Howard’s much-loved catch-phrases [used conspiratorially to his audience, whether it was in a theatre or at home watching on television] was “No, don’t laugh – it’s wicked to mock the afflicted …” and I’m somewhat reluctant to invoke it here when [...]

December 10, 2014 // 0 Comments

Look at me now, not where I’ve been

It is a fact of life that politicians – and therefore media news and current affairs departments – the world over tend to operate as if we’re living in a ‘rolling news’ 24/7 world. Former UK premier Harold Wilson is attributed with having uttered the line ‘A week is a long time in [...]

November 2, 2014 // 0 Comments

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