Society

Martin Vander Weyer tells an interesting tale in his Any Other Business column this week of Business Secretary Vince Cable demanding that companies appoint more women to senior positions: ‘The Business Secretary has been busy behind the scenes, too. “We had a letter from Vince telling us we should appoint a female non-exec…” one chief executive told me last week “…and we’ve found a really good one, totally one of the boys, she even likes shooting.”‘ Martin points out that Cable’s campaign is ‘about equality for its own sake rather than the distinctive qualities of female decision-making, and the otherwise already emancipated objects of his support feel themselves patronised’. He

On this day in 1989, the World Wide Web was born. Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, published a paper called ‘Information Management: A Proposal‘. Although it’s tricky to pin down exactly how and when the Internet was formed, Berners-Lee’s concept of a global system of interlinked pages was key. It wasn’t until a year later when Berners-Lee published a more formal paper, along with the necessary tools to create and host web pages, that the project took the name and form — WorldWideWeb. Since then, the WWW has changed the world in a way that Berners-Lee never predicted. Instead of listing platitudes about all the wonderful things the web

The Cheltenham Festival kicks off today, and this year marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Arkle’s winning streak of 3 consecutive Cheltenham Gold Cups, from 1964-1966. Here he is winning in both ’64 and ’65: Known to many racing fans simply as ‘Himself’, no other horse has even come close to beating his astounding triple in the Gold Cup. Indeed when he first ran, in 1964, many believed that his rival Mill House was invincible. But beaten he was, and Arkle went on to be thought of as at least one of the greatest – if not the greatest – steeplechaser in history. Nowadays many racehorses are household

Will Universal Credit ever become universal and will the lowest paid still face an effective tax rate of a sometimes outrageous 76 per cent? Iain Duncan Smith took a grilling over his plans for welfare reform on the Sunday Politics today, but didn’t give a clear answer to either of these questions regarding his reforms. Firstly, on the progress of implementing Universal Credit, the Work and Pensions Secretary claimed that ‘Universal Credit is already rolling out and the IT is working’, despite just 6,000 people currently on the ‘Pathfinder’ stage. In his initial plans, a million people claiming six existing working-age benefits were due to be on the Pathfinder stage by

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, and no doubt it will be marked by plenty of discussions about internet misogyny, everyday sexism, the war on women and all the other things that get people worked up. So I’d like readers to have a look at this blogpost from Australian forensic psychologist Claire Lehmann, on the subject of feminism, which begins: ‘“Pop-feminism,” as a movement, valorises feelings above reason, cynicism above hope. It has regressed to a point where anything at all, no matter how irrational or how narcissistic, can be celebrated as ‘feminist’. ‘Articles such as: I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry, or