Society

The outrage over Jack Wilshere’s comment that ‘If you live in England for five years it doesn’t make you English’ shows how the Overton window can shift in such a short space of time. Fifteen years ago no one would have cared, but many drew sinister implications from the statement, and England cricketer Kevin Pietersen asked: ‘Interested to know how you define foreigner…? Would that include me, Strauss, Trott, Matt Prior, Justin Rose, Froome, Mo Farah?’ Mo Farah, again. Every time someone uses Mo Farah as an argument for multiculturalism I do my own version of the Mobot by sinking my head into my hands; even intelligent commentators writing for

People who support removing housing benefit for young people always focus on two arguments: finance and fairness. The former concerns the amount of money the government could save by not paying out to those who haven’t paid much in yet, while the latter points out that those who have jobs must often live at home and save before they can move out, unlike housing benefit claimants. But both these arguments are wrongheaded. The main reason we should support this policy has nothing to do with any desire to economise or to equalise – it is because it stops families from being driven apart. Certainly there are times when there is no

In the whole panoply of human idiocy is there anything so ridiculous as the outrage that occurs whenever people are reminded that spies spy? There was just such an outburst recently when Edward Snowden left his job as a contractor to the CIA and NSA, repelled, he said, by the discovery that surveillance programmes carry out surveillance. Snowden discovered that American and British intelligence agencies were involved in data trawling and was so horrified that he found it necessary to flee — first to the freedom-loving People’s Republic of China and then, to seek asylum, to Moscow. On the left of the political spectrum he is the new Julian Assange