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Johann Hari and the Seven Seals of Dacre
by Don Paskini
Nick Cohen’s decline from interesting leftie columnist to right-wing hack has been well chronicled over here. One amusing marker of this was Watching how he broken one by one the ‘Seven Seals of Dacre’.
The idea behind the Seals of Dacre are that every time you adopt a bizarre and counterfactual view which is also believed by Melanie Phillips, a seal breaks open, and when all seven are broken, the Vaults open and an army of ghouls rush out and drag you off to write a column in the Daily Mail (or in Nick’s case the Evening Standard).
I haven’t been tracking Johann Hari’s progress in this way until recently, but I reckon he has broken at least two Seals in recent weeks.
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What’s the minimum you can survive on?
by Don Paskini
What’s the minimum amount of money that someone living in Britain needs?
The new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, “A Minimum Income Standard for Britain“, makes an interesting attempt to answer this question. They asked people from a range of different backgrounds, with advice from experts, to put together a list of ‘essentials’ of what they thought people would need in order to be able to participate in society.
They found that, after tax and excluding rent and childcare, a single adult would need a minimum of £158/week, a pensioner couple would need £201/week, a couple with 2 children would need £370/week and a lone parent with one child would need £210/week.
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