Society

At what point are we going to drop the fiction that acquisitive crime is on the wane and admit that we are in an epidemic of fraud? Today, Barclays Bank has appealed to social media firms – rather than banks like itself – to refund victims of online scams. I am sure that social media companies could do more to close down scams, but isn’t the real problem that the law is tolerating online crime in a way that it doesn’t tolerate other crime?  If your house is burgled, you know to contact the police. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will investigate, or even pay you a visit to take fingerprints, but

Will the fallout from the Lucy Letby case really lead to lasting change in the NHS? The most prolific killer of babies was able to continue even as doctors raised concerns about her – to the extent that the consultants themselves were forced to apologise to her face for a ‘campaign’ of bullying, rather than their concerns being taken seriously about her presence at the deaths or collapse of all the babies at the Countess of Chester hospital. Now, doctors’ union the British Medical Association has turned on NHS managers, saying the time has come for a reckoning for the ‘unaccountable’ bosses. NHS managers are often unfairly maligned: politicians like

Travelling home on the train last week, I heard the dulcet sounds of political discourse drifting towards me across the carriage. The words ‘social housing’ were followed soon after by the word ‘moron.’ I removed my headphones and attended more closely.  The speakers were two men aged about 30, whipping themselves up into a lather over the suggestion that there ought to be less social housing in central London. They seemed to be genuinely astonished by an argument they’d come across which pointed out that social housing tenants are dependent on the state for subsidy. ‘Moronic!’ they said, ‘insane!’  Sometimes you’re brought up short by how badly the social contract

Two or three years ago, the Tory MP Jonathan Gullis was ridiculed for describing himself as ‘someone who grew up on Dad’s Army and Porridge and loves those traditional programmes of the past’, even though he was born in 1990. The suggestion was that if you weren’t old enough to vote when Tony Blair left office, then it was rather strange to retain a fondness for sitcoms which completed their original runs in the late seventies. This is not right, however. I know from personal experience that if you were raised in a household with traditional media tastes then even an eighties and nineties childhood – before the fragmentation of