Author Archives: Tim Bearder

The millions missing out

By Tim Bearder | Mon 11th May 2020 - 1:45 pm

We’ve waved our flags for VE Day, we’ve spent Thursday evenings clapping the NHS and we’ve listened to the PM thanking us for doing the right thing, staying at home and saving lives.

We’re all in this together and together we’ll beat it – right? Well, not really.

Hospitality UK, the trade body for the third largest employment sector in the country, say that of the 3.2 million people it employs, only 84% have been able to receive money from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

That leaves somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 that could not be furloughed because of the way the …

An election review from the front line

By Tim Bearder | Tue 21st January 2020 - 2:56 pm

I downed tools and stopped almost all my usual work as a videographer for five weeks this winter. Here are some of my observations from the frontline…

I’ll say this first so that anyone with a short attention span understands the root cause of all our problems. It really is very simple and everything else I mention after this one cataclysmic issue, is a significant order of magnitude less important.

The reason this country is utterly broken is First Past the Post.

Sadly you can’t change it until you take power and you will only take power if the system works for you, in which case you are unlikely to change it when you get into power!

That’s the ‘exciting’ bit out of the way, the two other bits that I want to focus on here are Messaging and All Women Short Lists.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged all-women shortlists | 46 Comments

Lib Dem MPs have got it wrong on Syria

By Tim Bearder | Wed 2nd December 2015 - 3:00 pm

If you kill people to stop them killing each other you haven’t curbed the sum total of killings, you’ve merely become one of the killers.

If I thought for a minute that we’d lesson the number of deaths as a result of firing Brimstone missiles into cities like Raqqa I might be persuaded, but the Air Wars Project, which is monitoring international airstrikes on Isis, estimates that there have been about 700 civilian deaths as a result – more than five times the number of people killed in Paris.

Civilians in this desperate part of the world will still be getting raped and tortured. Gay men will still be thrown off rooftops and to add insult to injury now their children will be getting blown limb from limb by British bombs.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged syria | 24 Comments