Society

There’s no such thing as a free lunch — and Owen Jones is quickly discovering that there’s also no such thing as a free jacket in a fashion shoot. The Guardian journalist has come under fire over his decision to model a £1,080 jacket while discussing the ‘collapse of capitalism’ with the men’s magazine. While Jones has since dismissed the criticism as ‘surreal’, Mr S is sorry to report that there is further bad news regarding the pricey attire. The designer Jones is ‘modelling’ is Corneliani. The menswear label is owned by Investcorp (with the company purchasing a 55pc stake in Corneliani in 2016), which is a Bahrain-based private investment bank. As an ardent campaigner against the

Are you a social media complainer? Do you use the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to vent your spleen at companies that have let you down?  If so, you’re one of millions of people who eschew the traditional letter of complaint or irate phone call, choosing instead to air grievances on a public forum. A cursory Google of the term ‘social complainer’ yields multiple results, from ‘The 5 Types of Social Media Complainers’ to ‘How to Deal With the Worst Social Media Complainers’. There’s even a guide to the ‘Five Complainer-Customer Personas’. Today’s Twitter fury over the United Airlines customer who was booted off a plane to make way

Theresa May’s £150,000 pay packet is dwarfed by that of many council employees up and down the country. Nearly 600 council staff now earn more money than the Prime Minister each year, and a report from the Taxpayers Alliance reveals that thousands of local authority employees earn six-figure sums. With many councils talking up fears about funding social care – and upping tax to pay for it – how much longer can these wages be justified? For many households facing rising council tax bills, the news that 539 council staff earn more than the PM will come as ‘a further gut-wrenching blow’, says the Daily Mail. The paper reports that nearly 2,500

Continuing Scotland’s reputation for outspending public services in England (courtesy of funding arrangements which transfer resources from taxpayers south of the border) the Scottish Medicines Consortium today approved the prescription of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis ( PrEP) – the drug claimed to prevent the spread of HIV from infected people to their non-infected partners. The drug is expected to be made available to 1,900 people, at a cost to NHS Scotland of £450 a month each. PrEP would be an inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money at the best of times, but coming at a time when the NHS is desperately short of cash it is an outrage that the taxpayer is being

My name is Helen Nugent and I am a pavement parker. This is not a hobby or something I set out to do on a daily basis but, in many instances, it’s that or block the road to traffic and put cyclists’ lives at risk. Britain’s roads weren’t built for this many vehicles. There are more than 25 million cars on UK roads, and that’s the licensed ones. Cities, towns and villages struggle to cope with available parking spaces. I can think of multiple places in my immediate vicinity where traffic is limited to single file because of vehicles parked on either side. And that’s often where people park on

A new survey finds that a quarter of British people who describe themselves as Christian say they do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Well, it won’t surprise you to hear that I think they are on theologically dodgy ground. Christians should affirm the resurrection of Jesus, however much they struggle to reconcile it with their rational assumptions. Unless it is affirmed, this whole religion is obviously toast. And yet, before we all agree to join in pouring scorn on these muddled sort-of Christians, I want to point out that the issue is not entirely clear-cut. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus but I also don’t really. I affirm