Society

Yesterday afternoon, the ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s made an unusual contribution to the debate over how best to deal with migrants crossing the English Channel. In a series of tweets, the ice cream corporation blasted the Home Secretary Priti Patel, and advised her that the ‘real crisis is our lack of humanity for people fleeing war, climate change and torture.’ In response, a Home Office source hit back, telling the BBC that the government wasn’t afraid of ‘upsetting the social media team for a brand of overpriced junk food’ if it meant deterring migrants from crossing the Channel. It’s perhaps strange enough that an ice cream brand has

In the last few months we’ve been told that Britain is a fundamentally racist society, that the colour of your skin holds you back in life if you’re not white, that history, education and, in fact, all white people, are inherently racist. Too often, we hear this from the media, from universities and from many areas of the establishment. I worry that this trend is deeply damaging. Of course, there are problems in Britain. But there are problems in all countries, and at the very least, we have a very strong foundation to make positive change, if it is needed. We have freedom of speech, democracy, a free education system, an

At last, the government is doing something sensible. Amid the anxiety surrounding a putative ‘second wave’ of Covid-19, the Department for Education is standing firm in its commitment to re-open schools for all year groups come September. Reassuringly, the schools minister Nick Gibb is making this a non-negotiable priority. ‘Thank you Nick Gibb’ is not something I thought I would ever say. As a member of the maligned teaching profession, I have had my fill of Tory education initiatives over the past decade: accountability, performance-related pay and exam reforms. Such distractions are now a distant memory in the dystopian world of Covid. Teaching is a stressful job, with a poor

Daniel Kahneman called it anchoring; I call it tunnel vision. It’s when we depend too heavily on our pre-existing ideas and first pieces of information – the anchor – to inform our judgments. How a problem is perceived, how it is described, how it makes us feel alongside our individual experience and expertise shapes the decisions we make. Anchoring ensures emerging evidence is ignored. Even in the face of this new contradictory evidence, we refuse to change our early decisions. In the week ending the 24th of July, 8,891 deaths were registered in England and Wales (161 fewer than the five-year average). This is the sixth week in a row

Until relatively recently I was under the impression that preventing people breaking the law was the primary job of a police officer. But is this always the case? Or is tackling crime sometimes substituted for a form of morality-based policing? The protest for reparations in Brixton last Saturday – and the reaction of the police – is an excellent example of what morality policing looks like in practice. The event – a gathering of considerably more than 30 people in an apparent breach of the Health Protection (Coronavirus) regulations – was not, it would seem, authorised by the police. It was instead a planned protest with an arranged policing plan and conditions on