Society

Britain is to deploy one warship, the Type 45 destroyer HMS Daring, which is currently on station near Singapore, and RAF support aircraft, including one Boeing C17 transporter, to the Philippines. The US has deployed a carrier group. It will take HMS Daring 5 days or so to reach its destination. It will provide engineering equipment, first aid, water sanitising kits and the means to turn sea water into drinking water. Most reports from the disaster area warn of the threat of waterborne disaster, so HMS Daring’s supplies will be very welcome. The destroyer is also equipped with one Lynx helicopter, which will extend its operational reach inland. The RAF

These days I find myself so drifting away from the bounds of acceptable opinion that I don’t even shout at Radio 4 for being biased, because I don’t even understand the basis of what the arguments are about. Take this morning’s schools feature (occasioned by Sir John Major’s comments about the ‘truly shocking’ dominance of a privately educated elite in public life), in which Harry Mount argued in favour and Owen Jones against the motion that grammar schools lead to more social mobility than comprehensives. listen to ‘Owen Jones and Harry Mount on social mobility’ on Audioboo

Few images are more seared in the Tory consciousness than that of Margaret Thatcher handing over the keys to people who had brought their council house under ‘right to buy’. The image seemed to sum up the aspirational appeal of Thatcherism. I suspect that there’ll be a slight homage to these images when Cameron meets some of those that the government’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is helping onto the housing ladder tomorrow. Number 10 wants to show that the full scheme, which has only been running for a month, is already being used by a large number of people. The economics behind ‘Help to Buy’ might make many on the

On waking up (at noon) on Thursday morning, I found I had a text from one of my fellow History freshers. Sent at 6am and accompanied by a screenshot of a half-finished essay: ‘WHY am I still up?!’ The all-nighter is a notorious Oxford experience, and not one I thought I would ever have to sample. ‘I’ll be fine getting the work done at university,’ I blithely assured those warning me of how unstructured a History student’s life is, ‘I like to keep busy.’ What I failed to appreciate is that it’s impossible not to be busy at university. School without lessons was dire — by Tuesday afternoon of the

The Norwegian students’ group which  last year came out with the brilliant ‘Africa for Norway’ spoof video has again released a hilarious film lampooning the aid industry for the stereotypes they perpetuate. The video makes a serious point. That the aid industry uses pictures of starving babies to trigger donations, even if it means spinning a misleading and patronising view of Africa. All this is Western self-indulgence if the aid doesn’t actually help Africa (as African authors like Dambisa Moyo have demonstrated). There are many African countries with a wide array of problems – chiefly, bad governance. These videos raise a potent question: what’s the point of all these charity appeals?