Welcome to Striking 13.
This place is dedicated to one thing and one thing only: good, clean, honest fucking journalism. Fun to read and easy to understand, grounded in evidence and expertise, making you better informed about the political system which governs you and the state of the world around you.
It's a place where you will find journalism that comes from the head and the heart.
There'll be none of the impartial refereeing you often see on TV, where a journalist sits there allowing one side to shout rubbish and the other to spout nonsense without ever intervening to tell the viewer what's actually true. Nor will there be any of that mock sports commentator analysis you often find in the papers, in which columnists adopt an amoral distance from the subject and report it in terms of electoral strategy, without bothering to mention whether it will solve the problems it claims to address.
Instead you'll get journalism that is committed to basic values: reason, tolerance, truth, individual freedom and empiricism.
There'll be no balance here, or impartiality. I am entirely partial to the things I believe in. I am overwhelmingly imbalanced in their favour. There will be no who's-up-who's-down Westminster vacuity. There'll be no reporting of anodyne internal party conflict or pieces about the shouty-shouty know-nothing bollocks some halfwit backbencher wrote on Twitter. There will be no cynical whipping up of tribal identity for clicks.
There'll be none of the empty calories that we typically consume as political coverage. It leaves us uninformed, frustrated and increasingly cynical about the possibility of change.
What you will get instead is objective political coverage: grounded in evidence, research papers, reliable sources and interviews with specialists. Sometimes that will conform to my political biases. Sometimes it will not. In that case, I will still include it.
Also I'll sometimes experience a complete emotional breakdown about the state of political life in this country and just write a screech of despair. You know how it is.
Welcome aboard. It'll be fucking horrible.
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