Society

There are times when you wonder whether our culture is too stupid to survive. The thought has kept occurring over recent days as I have watched the cooked-up furore over the appointment of Sir Roger Scruton to chair a British government commission looking into beauty in architecture. What are Scruton’s qualifications for this unpaid job? Well, he has written two exceedingly influential books on architecture, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1980) and The Classical Vernacular (1995), as well as numerous papers and articles on the subject. He has spent more than half a century thinking about the question. And he is also Britain’s most famous living philosopher, respected in – and honoured by

Today, the BBC news channel ran a short piece on the increase of hate crime incidents against disabled children – which have tripled in four years. As part of the report, the BBC visited a school which catered for disabled children in Newcastle, which had recently been broken into and vandalised by thugs who destroyed toys and sprayed offensive graffiti on the school’s walls. The whole piece was fairly emotional, and anyone listening to the children describe the incident, couldn’t help but ask, how did this happen and how can we stop it happening again? Fortunately, the BBC had a ready-made answer already on hand. Instead of following the school

Asia Bibi and Sir Roger Scruton don’t have much in common. She is a lowly farm labourer from a rural part of Pakistan where she experienced great poverty, hardship and persecution, on account of the fact that she is Christian. He is an erudite professor, a knight of the realm, and not short of a few bob. And yet something binds these two into unlikely bedfellows: both are currently keeping a low profile in response to mobs that want to punish them for the crime of insulting Islam. This week, Bibi was finally released from death row after Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned the obscene conviction against her for mocking Muhammad (a charge she

Just when you thought identity politics couldn’t get any more confusing, along comes along Emile Ratelband. Mr Ratelband, who is described in the Guardian as a ‘motivational speaker’ and ‘positivity guru’, has appeared in a court in Arnhem in the Netherlands trying to persuade the judge to allow him to change his official birth date – from 11 March 1949 to 11 March 1969. He complains that when he enters his birth date on Tinder he doesn’t get any replies. He says that his age has also limited his options in getting a mortgage and car insurance. He identifies as a man in his 40s – a view, he asserts,