Alastair's Blog

To a conference of software suppliers organised by Opentext, where ex civil servant Jonathan Portes and I were the keynote speakers. Jonathan now runs the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and gave a relatively upbeat assessment (I emphasise the relatively) of the economic future. Among his graphs was one which had the Labour [...]

Dennis Skinner may not thank me for saying so, but he was a huge support to me, and more importantly to Tony Blair, when TB was Prime Minister. Yes, he lambasted some of the changes made as huge strides to the right, and he could come up with questions for TB at PMQs  every bit [...]

Part of me hates the Blue Monday thing. Another part of me thinks that anything that gets people talking about mental illness is a good thing. And on Blue Monday (today or next Monday depending on how you calculate it) people certainly talk about it, albeit often in a fairly superficial way. Blue Monday, I [...]

My last blog was about depression and sport. I make no apology for returning to the theme today, inspired by going on twitter to see how Ed Miliband’s interview with Andrew Marr was going down – mixed (I thought he did well) – and seeing that Dean Windass was trending. I suspect a fair few [...]

Congratulations to Freddie Flintoff and the BBC for last night’s documentary on depression in sport. Sport plays such a central part in so many lives, and I have no doubt that the collection of sportsmen gathered by Freddie to talk about their own mental health problems will do a lot of good in advancing change [...]

So as expected, Ed Miliband’s speech got the thumbs down from most of the broadcasters yesterday. The mood around the Labour leader has been a good illustration of how the modern media works, and why the right-wing press continues to have a disproportionate influence on public life. Pretty much since he became leader, and certainly [...]

Today’s Financial Times has a full page ad (and a right-hand page 7 at that) for the Business in the Community awards. Down at the bottom of the page are a number of companies and their logos. The companies, corporate sponsors, presumably shelled out for the ad and thus have their little place above the [...]

Today’s blog is given over to a press release from a group of disabled disability campaigners who have exposed the sham that is the coalition government’s public consultation on Disability Living Allowance. It is long, but worth reading. It reveals inter alia, as Boris Johnson might say, the scale of the London Mayor’s opposition to [...]

Thank you for all the nice comments on twitter about the Guardian piece yesterday, an extract from my new ebook, The Happy Depressive, which is out on Thursday. The extract focused on Philip Gould, and what I feel I had learned from knowing him, and from seeing him face up to death with such humility [...]

So I am walking down Victoria Street a couple of hours ago, and a very kindly lady stops me, says hello and asks me why I haven’t blogged for a while. I could tell in her eyes that she knew the answer … This happened a couple of days after I had been walking down [...]