Society

The Guardian is currently engaged in an orgy of sanctimonious breast-beating. After two years’ research commissioned by its proprietor, the Scott Trust, it has discovered that its founding editor John Edward Taylor and some of his backers had ‘extensive links’ to slavery. This has caused something like a nervous breakdown in the paper’s York Way offices. The editor, Katharine Viner, writes that the revelation made her ‘sick to my stomach’. The paper’s staff are said to be ‘tormented’ by the thought. There have been abject public apologies, promises of amendment, and all the usual apparatus of cringing self-laceration. What is the problem? The Guardian was founded in 1821 as a

I have a friend, let’s call her Ellie, who has a diverting side hustle: she sells erotic images of herself online: nude, semi-nude, basically nude but in roller-skates and smoking Cohiba cigars. That kind of thing. She does this on a site many people will know: OnlyFans, which has become the site for women (and it is mainly young women) who want to make money from exhibiting themselves for the sexual arousal of online subscribers. Ellie knows that some people might find her part-time job indecent or ill-advised, she doesn’t remotely care. As she says, it’s her body, her choice. It’s all adults, she has no kids or employers to

It’s perhaps still too early to tell if the Jewish and Muslim communities, here in Britain and indeed throughout the world, were brought closer by the actions of the former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq.   How refreshing it is to see the quaint concept of proof being demanded before a man’s life is ruined Rafiq, you will remember, in November 2021 went to hear in person from Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett, 86, about her experience of being on the receiving end in Nazi Germany of what you’d probably have to say was on balance worse than anything you could possibly experience in or around a cricket ground. He did this, no