Tag: bureaucracy

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Back to Basics, Rebranded: Burnham’s High Streets and the Politics of Looking Busy by Lawson Akhigbe

John Major's government never intended "Back to Basics" to become a punchline. Launched in 1993 as a pitch for moral and civic renewal, family values, personal responsibility, respect for the old certainties, it was retail politics in the purest sense: cheap to announce, easy to photograph, and entirely disconnected from the actual machinery of governing a mid-sized post-imperial economy adjusting to the ERM's wreckage. Section 28 sat quietly in the background as inherited scaffolding for this mood music, and the Education Act 1993's sex-education clauses supplied a fresh, deniable coat of paint. None of it required legislative heavy lifting. All of it signalled seriousness to an audience that wanted reassurance more than reform. The scheme collapsed, memorably, when half the cabinet turned out to be failing the basics they were instructed to return to.

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When the Living Governor’s Pen Meets the Dead Monarch’s Signature: Nigeria’s Land Use Act Versus Britain’s 1925 Registration Revolution by Lawson Akhigbe

In 1925, while Britain was still recovering from one war and quietly preparing for the next, its legislators decided that land law had become an expensive medieval farce. The result was a cluster of statutes, most notably the Land Registration Act 1925, working in tandem with the Law of Property Act 1925, that performed a quiet but decisive act of administrative hygiene. They did not nationalise the soil. They did not turn every landowner into a tenant of the state. They simply made the register the master of the title, and the process of dealing with land a matter of bureaucracy rather than political favour or ancestral archaeology.

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Reform UK’s Brexit immigration impact

Reform UK’s perspective on Brexit and immigration is central to its identity: Brexit was meant to deliver control over borders and lower overall migration, but post-2016 (especially post-2021) governments primarily Conservative, failed to use that control effectively, leading to a non-EU migration surge that the party labels the “Boriswave.” Reform argues this undermined the Brexit promise, strained public services, housing, wages, and cultural cohesion, and necessitates far tougher policies.

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EDITORIAL: Osun election, the rise of civic action, and 2027 by PREMIUM TIMES

Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State was re-elected for a second term in the 15 August governorship contest. It was an off-cycle election like no other before it, in the build-up, with its eerie elements of tension, violence and resultant deaths.

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Anarchism in judicial robes, by Owei Lakemfa

My mind raced back to British jurist, Lord Denning who famously declared in 1964: “Justice has no place in darkness or secrecy. When a judge sits on a case, he himself is on trial… If he is suspicious, biased, or unfair, then the judge is the one who is condemned in the eyes of public opinion.” But these words of wisdom seem not to have any meaning to Justice Lifu, shockingly, a former lecturer of Public and International Law, University of Ibadan. For me, what was more distressing was that despite the uproar, Justice Lifu seemed oblivious of the damage he    had done to the body polity, the judiciary and his thirty five years post-call to bar history.

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