Society

One of the many pleasures of writing the life of Thomas Cromwell was to reach out behind the various versions of his life published in the past few years and glimpse the real man lost for so long: a complex, often admirable statesman who set England and Ireland and their successor-kingdom on to new paths. From page one, the story needs rewriting. The great opening of Hilary Mantel’s modern-classic novel Wolf Hall is the boy Thomas reeling under blows from his father. This dark picture of the bad pub landlord Walter Cromwell is good fiction, but not history: in fact, it’s Victorian fantasy, cheekily made up by a 19th-century antiquary.

The National Centre for Social Research’s held an ‘The Class Ceiling’ yesterday where attendees included Sky’s Lewis Goodall. He tweeted afterwards that thanks to Sam Friedman, an LSE researcher, there is now ‘solid evidence for the class pay gap: Those from a working class background are paid £7,000 less for doing the same job as someone from a middle class home.’ Quite a claim, but how solid is the evidence? Last year, Friedman and others published a report (pdf) for the Social Mobility Commission saying that those from a working-class backgrounds earn on average £6,800 less than colleagues from professional and managerial backgrounds. This is, presumably, where the £7,000 figure

There are a couple of things I just don’t get. Maybe someone of liberal mind can explain them. Didn’t equalities minister Penny Mordaunt back in July throw her weight behind Theresa May’s promise to make it much easier to reassign your own gender? Of the current process (which requires you, for example, to provide medical evidence before being allowed to redefine yourself as a woman) she said: ‘It is overly bureaucratic and it’s highly medicalised with people making decisions about you who have never met you.’ In other words, it’s your life and your decision as to which gender you wish to identify with – the state should keep its nose

In July I did two live events in Dublin and London with Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. At each of these venues (the first at the 3Arena in Dublin, and the second at the O2 Arena in London) there were something in the region or eight or nine thousand people in attendance. All of which makes them some of the biggest speaking events in recent history. In fact the Guinness Book of Records is apparently looking into the whole business. Anyhow, after a couple of months of delay, videos of these events are now emerging online. They are available at various venues, notably at Pangburn Philosophy’s YouTube channel here (for

Justin Welby is a business man these days. On top of his duties as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Welby is carving out a career for himself as a wealth inequality spokesperson. In a recent interview, the Old Etonian was voluble on the subject of wealth inequality.  Having spent two years on the IPPR’s commission on economic justice, Welby suggested that taxes should be hiked for corporations and regulatory bodies should be strengthened. In a speech to the Trade Union Congress on Wednesday, Welby singled out Amazon: ‘When vast companies like Amazon and other online traders, the new industries, can get away with paying almost nothing in tax, there is something wrong with