Society

When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction was pretty standard. My eyes bugged. I stood up. I exclaimed something like: ‘Bloody hell!’ We’ve all seen the video dozens of times now, but it’s worth clinging to that initial shock, the better to appreciate that America’s spontaneous collective revulsion in response to such grotesque abuse of power was genuinely commendable. Yet the nationwide marches a fortnight ago had a clear goal: the culprit’s arrest. If late in the day — had a civilian choked a policeman to death, he’d have been handcuffed faster than it takes to say

Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back to doing pretty much what you were doing before. It is only five weeks since Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was forced to resign from the government’s SAGE committee after it was revealed that he had twice broken lockdown by entertaining his married lover at his London home. Yet twice in the past fortnight

This will come as little surprise to anyone who has followed my writing over the last few years, but I have accepted that I simply do not understand politics at all.  On Tuesday, the government announced that it was no longer urging primary schools in England to get all children back to school for some teaching before the summer holidays. There are many reasons for this announcement and its consequences are probably being overstated in some places: the government doesn’t have any effective power to compel headteachers to reopen, but merely issues guidelines and sets expectations. Some schools will likely go ahead with whatever opening plans they had in place.

It has become a ritual almost as traditional as the Changing of the Guard. During a weekend of mostly peaceful protests, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was once again vandalised. The first recorded defacement of Ivor Roberts-Jones’ imposing rendition of Churchill took place during London’s 2000 May Day anti-capitalist protests. A strip of grass placed on the statue’s head gave the impression it sported a Mohican haircut. James Mitchell, a former soldier in his twenties, also sprayed its mouth with blood-like red paint. Mitchell said he did this because: ‘Churchill was an exponent of capitalism and of imperialism and anti-Semitism. A Tory reactionary vehemently opposed to the emancipation of

Edward Colston sleeps with the fishes. A mob of Bristolians has toppled the statue of one of their city’s founding fathers, Saddam-style, and lobbed the poor fellow into the docks. Other footage on social media shows protesters kneeling on his brass neck, as if he had something to do with modern-day police brutality in the United States. What on earth has caused this madness, which looked like violent scenes from the English reformation? As is obvious, it’s not really much to do with George Floyd, the man suffocated to death by police last month in Minneapolis. The controversy around Colston has been raging for years in Bristol. A mega-rich philanthropist