© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
The OECD warns the UK’s housing market is in danger of ‘overheating’reports Inside Housing.
Photograph © Kasia Kowalska
Spotted at work on an instant art exhibition joke about the festival theme of music at this year’s Shrewsbury cartoon event. My hat tipped to the photographer.
© Matt Buck Hack Cartoons
One of the more active ’workers’ of the 8 foot by 6 foot Big Boards at this year’s Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival was Kate Charlesworth. She delivered some properly dynamic drawing. (And yes, that is just an excuse for the crazy construction lines left in the speedy pencil sketching I was doing while she worked).
© Matt Buck Hack Cartoons
My successor as Editor of the UK Procartoonists blog, Royston Robertson, deployed his very best concentration face as he nailed five jokes about HMV’s Nipper the Dog – appropriate to the festival theme of music.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
Dave Brown of The Independent delivered a great painting of the ‘Bum Note’ featuring Alex Salmond and David Cameron as well as delivering his traditional cartoonist as rock star stance. (He’s a drummer in his other life.)
© Matt Buck Hack Cartoons
I was rather meaner to the excellent caricaturist Jonathan Cusick who was deep in concentration as he caricatured the local MP, Daniel Kawczynski. This was a really interesting job for me and the intensity of Jonathan’s concentration as he looked reflected itself in the amount of lead I gave to my efforts.
Quite suitably, I was then properly shown up by the kind gift of a drawing made of me. It went to demonstrate some wisdom, it’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out.
© Kasia Kowalska
My dubious hat tipped to Kasia Kowalska and everyone who contributed to the traditionally excellent event.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons for tribunecartoons.com
The former Labour Rochdale town councillor and later Liberal MP for Rochdale, Sir Cyril Smith, has been accused of persistent child abuse at public authority run children’s homes in the town. The accusations are made by the current MP in Rochdale Simon Danczuk in a new book which has been serialised in The Daily Mail.
Smith died in 2010 (you cannot libel the dead in law) but there are also many stories, some under legal suppression, concerning people in all of the major political parties.
This is what prompted an excruciatingly awkward interview for Sir David Steel, former leader of the Liberal party, on today’s BBC World at One. You can listen to that again here.
The broad spread of such stories and its associated legal restraint is what inspired the cartoon above and its reference to a very old and rather terrible football chant, below. Apologies seem due for both.
Updated: 27th September 2014: Another long running case is also getting a long overdue airing at Exaro News, just ahead of this year’s Conservative Party Conference.
Updated: 30th November 2014: The long running and increasingly well sourced stories in public have now reached the royal household.
The Daily Post newspaper which covers the area has a particularly useful piece explaining the context to how this appalling state of affairs became normal.
There’s a also piece of contemporary reporting from the Independent in January 1997 that also traces the long and miserable history of the North Wales inquiries – there have been made, some suppressed and some heavily redacted.
Updated: 8th March 2015: The Mail on Sunday newspaper has published some-eye-catching allegations about the scale of the cover-up over the activities of Cyril Smith.
Updated: 20th March 2015: Newsnight report on Sir Cyril Smith, the others, and a Metropolitan Police investigation that was stopped. Sadly, it appears to have been one of many in the case of Smith and his associates.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons
A very unusual British killing at a school in Leeds. Despite the horror of this particular knife crime administered by a 15 year old child (in the eyes of the law) there is an immediate media panic about a tide of violence in our schools. In fact, as the statistics from the Department for Education show, happily violence inside schools has been in steep decline for some years. My hat tipped to amp33d from the Mirror for rescuing the evidence to show so.
The image above was originally made in 2007 when things were not-so-good.
© Matthew Buck at Hack Cartoons
My hat doffed to Roger Penwill who has just retired as the Director of the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival after eleven magnificent years. The best of fortune to Richard Skipworth who is replacing him.
© Matt Buck Hack Cartoons. Original drawing as a magazine cover cartoon
The popular London landmark St Mary Axe aka the Gherkin is in financial strife. It’s owners lack, apparently, a currency hedge. Read all about it in the FT (£) or The Guardian.
It also featured in this cover image for a magazine about dying industries.
It has a nice, new break out box for riting, er, writing. And here is a gallery of some recent work.
© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons for tribunecartoons.com
The Monty Python revival shows due this summer might benefit from the efforts of the Conservative party and the Times Newspaper to destroy Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP over his expenses as an MEP.
The 2014 European elections are also imminent amid wide expectation UKIP will do well. They might. However, I’d argue the true test of UKIP’s popularity will be seeing if they can noticeably boost the national turnout at the notoriously badly attended polls.
If they do, that really will scare the established parties ahead of next year’s general election.
Cartoon: The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster Inquests © Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons for tribunecartoons.com
New inquests into the death of 96 people killed at the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 15th April 1989 have opened in Warrington on Merseyside. This follows the quashing of the verdicts from the original inquests in 2012.
After one quarter of a century and the many horrible revelations about the behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police force, the local MP and HMG the story still has the power to shock. The repeated process is expected to take one year.
The cartoon owes something to the iconography of the advertising hoardings which became makeshift stretchers as people died.
