Politics

The charges against Mason Greenwood, the Manchester United footballer who was accused of assault and attempted rape, have been dropped. Yet the trial of both him and the woman involved in the case continues unabated online. The ongoing discussion of the case brought back painful memories of my experience at the hands of my rapist – and the verdict of online trolls about what happened to me. When the reports about the conviction of my ex-boyfriend and abuser were published online, I did my best to ignore the coverage. But one afternoon, I scrolled through the comments on a tabloid news article about my case. I knew I shouldn’t look,

It’s been over a week since the devastating twin earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria and the death toll continues to rise. The number of known casualties has passed 30,000 and tens of thousands more are injured. Hundreds of thousands people have lost their homes. Alongside the plight of the Turkish population, Syrian refugees in southern Turkey have suffered a second disaster. Turkey hosts over 3.6 million Syrians who fled their country’s civil war. Almost half a million live in the Hatay region, which was the worst hit by the quakes.  Amidst the overwhelming tragedy, there are moments of joy: three elderly members of the Gezer family were brought out from

Ah parliamentary renovation: they talk of little else in the Red Wall. For more than a decade now, Westminster has been obsessed with the subject of our crumbling Commons, with staff forced to dodge falling masonry, leaking pipes and impudent rodents as they navigate the estate. Last month, Dame Meg Hillier of the Public Accounts Committee warned that there was an ‘unacceptable cloak of secrecy’ around the ongoing restoration programme. And perhaps we now know why. For figures were published yesterday which show that some £216.5 million was spent on the Restoration and Renewal Programme between spring 2020 and March 2022. The total forecast spend for the current financial year

This week’s public disorder outside a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in the town of Knowsley in Merseyside was in some ways inevitable. A total of 45,756 people entered the UK on small boats via the English Channel last year – which, according to the 2021 Census, is a number larger than the entire population of English towns such as Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. Britain’s asylum regime should be prioritising the world’s most persecuted peoples, especially women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in their conflict-ridden homelands. Instead, it has been reduced to a survival-of-the-fittest system which has been

It’s more bad news for the Beeb with a stinging set of Sunday papers today. The Culture select committee has released a report in the appointment of Richard Sharp as the Corporation’s chairman – and it makes for damning reading. The MPs accuse him of failing to publicly divulge his role in facilitating an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson by omitting key details in introducing Johnson to businessman Sam Blyth. He is accused of making ‘significant errors of judgement’ and undermining the selection process for his role. The omissions ‘constitute a breach of the standards expected of individuals’ applying for top public jobs. And while the MPs stop short of calling for

It wasn’t Liz Truss’s failure to make big changes we should worry about. It was her inability to deliver even the most modest pro-market reforms after a decade in high office that ought to alarm us. As Prime Minister for six weeks, Truss tried and failed reduce Britain’s tax burden to about the level it was under Gordon Brown. As a cabinet minister for ten years, Truss – a mother as well as a free marketeer – tried to reduce the costs of childcare by reducing red tape. Her efforts to change legally mandated child/carer ratios, despite mountains of evidence it could be done safely, were persistently thwarted. If even