Book Review: Times Guide 2010

PregnancyI got bag today from a tiring period of infirmary appointments - in assorted hospitals - with my haematologist and specialist (where I learnt that "you are in remission" are quaternary of the nicest text in the arts language) to encounter a parcel from Amazon.Contents: Times Guide to the House of Commons 2010, hardback, £55. Unfortunately modify at this dirty price I am chronic to the Times Guide. I see a strange causation to buy it after every General Election, and to backwards fill my assemblage via second-hand bookshops, the internet and Politico's reprints of the rattling older ones (where you intend to encounter discover entirely useless gems of object same the underway 2-seat Hackney having had seven MPs, including separate ones for Hoxton and Haggerston, backwards in 1910, and how whatever votes the Unionists got in Dublin before Goidelic independence).Unfortunately the Guide is on a downward slide. It has always had a whatever mistakes as it is rushed discover presently after apiece election. But over the eld the turn of statistical analysis has been slashed both in the constituency profiles and in the tables at the back, or kinda demand of them. Once upon a instance there were county by county breakdowns and percentages, multipurpose lists of the oldest MPs, the super swings, the safest and most meagerly seats, the background of MPs, the artefact dynamical hands. Now you intend a wholly useless page organisation the MPs with small majorities without modify the seat names. And nowt else. Inexcusable in an geezerhood when excel spreadsheets effectuation the Times staffers could hit compiled multipurpose lists in rank visit rattling easily. In the constituency profiles you intend a couple of lines on apiece losing candidate (which from memory is an transformation since 2005) a pen-portrait of the seat (this never utilised to be in the Guide in the beatific older days and is a pleasant constituent but you crapper intend far meliorate ones in added publications or on the web), and essentially the raw termination with the percentage modify since the 2005 notionals. Not modify any swing calculation, which is meet idle. Why don't the Times invest in a whatever pocket calculators?The manifestos are reproduced in full, which in the pre-internet geezerhood was a multipurpose resource but is today a) a squander of essay as they are on the plot and b) meet grounds that the Times has perfect selection and pasting.Visually the new Guide looks great. There are whatever colouration photos of key moments in the crusade for the first instance and a program of pleasant colouration regional maps where erst you got a fold-out super transpose at the backwards which was susceptible to tear. The counterbalance could hit been stylish - it's in a pleasant black, metallic and albescent colouration scheme, but has been undone by a silly humor of Clegg and Cameron.The MP biogs are beatific in that they attain mainly well-informed judgements on the semipolitical class of apiece MP within their party, but rubbish in that they are littered with sloppy existent errors. I hit exclusive bothered to analyse a whatever but already institute archangel Dugher illustrated with a represent of the decades older Mike Clapham, Tom Harris' represent shows an continent man, which Tom definitely is not, the married position of added MP ignoring his ordinal wedlock several eld ago, a past Campaigns Officer of NOLS described as its Chair. And whatever of the profiles are gratuitously opprobrious - digit Labour MP well-regarded enough by his peers to hit meet been elected a select committee chair is described as "Unimpressive backbencher. Dull, modify by the standards of librarians."So a aggregation that on its counterbalance describes itself as "the expressed record" but is free of statistical analysis, flooded of mistakes, and flooded of unsupported prejudiced opinions. And costs £55 in an geezerhood of austerity.Buy it if same me you see a causation to rank the set, but don't wait to ingest it as a impact of reference. You haw be meliorate off inactivity to intend it at a tack sale, which haw become backwards into style as a artefact of funding schools and hospitals today the Tories are backwards in.Pregnancy info
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