These are dark and bewildering days for Britain’s community of Good People, the ones who – insulated from material discomfort through large incomes and in many cases large inheritances – believe that everything can be accomplished simply by being kind and, further, by wearing one’s kindness as a badge which on the surface proclaims gentility
Polls occasionally appear which reveal the extent to which people trust – or rather don’t trust – journalists. In one last year, something called the Edelman Trust Barometer found that just 31 per cent of the British public said they trust the media, a fall of 6 per cent in a year. This puts the
I first stuck my neck out on ‘trans’ nearly a decade ago, when a societal obsession with pretending to change sex was already going great guns. I’d been disturbed by this unhinged cultural preoccupation ever since documentaries about little boys in dresses started to glut our television schedules in 2012. I’m not proud of having
At the start of February, trade union chiefs assembled in No. 10 with their agenda for government. Top of the list was the Employment Rights Bill, which makes it easier to strike, picket and join a union. It will shortly pass into law: proof, Labour MPs say, of a Prime Minister willing to ignore squeals
Going to Glasto this year with your little tent? I only ask because the average age of people who attend this extortionate smugfest is now not terribly distant from that of people who read this magazine. So it is possible that some of you are off to watch good old Neil Young, Nick Lowe and
They say that death and taxes are the only certain things in this life. I would add BBC bias into that mix. It was probably about 20 years ago that I first went on Newsnight. In those days Jeremy Paxman ruled the roost and taught me an early lesson in live television. Jeremy asked me
Seldom has a collective term been less appropriate: ‘the Channel Islands’ – as though these were in any sense (other than the geographical) a place. Entertained in my English mind had been a scatter of similar, pretty but perhaps over-manicured little islands stuck in the mid-Channel between Great Britain and France but sunnier, and where
I’m not sure it’s possible to make a horror movie more sinister than the chirpy four-minute film on YouTube purporting to be an ‘interview’ with the late Lily Parr. Parr was a professional footballer who played as winger before the war, a chain-smoking 6ft Lancashire lesbian with that gung-ho spirit I remember from my girls’
It is an irony of Brexit that, since we left the EU, British politics has become more European. The local elections on Thursday will put another nail in the coffin of the two-party system that has dominated the UK for 100 years. Labour and the Conservatives now poll a combined 45 per cent of the
It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said
In recent days parliament has been recalled on a Saturday to debate the renationalisation of the British steel industry. Then, after a month-long strike by binmen in Birmingham, army planners have been called in to help address the issue of large amounts of refuse piling up in the city. Absent a major ideological split on
Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per
The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that
When MPs and peers were recalled to parliament for an emergency debate on renationalising British Steel, one man was the talk of the terrace: Nigel Farage. Out by the river, a Labour peer congratulated the Reform leader for ‘leading on everything’. After all, Farage had been in Scunthorpe days earlier calling for steel nationalisation. Since
‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out. So it’s unsurprising that in
A few years back, a friend from Newcastle was down in London and I was giving him a tour of the town. At various points I stopped and pointed out where various friends had lived. ‘That’s where my late friend X used to live.’ ‘That’s where my much-missed friend Y had his shop.’ Eventually my
If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to
I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew she existed – but how she existed and what she did with her existence did not impinge because she was safely sequestered in that booby hatch of methadone, lady-men, corruption and pies which we know
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Keir Starmer has struggled to set the agenda. The latest attempt came with the Spring Statement, but events soon overtook that when the US President announced his mass tariffs, which could derail Rachel Reeves’s spending plans. It is not yet 100 days into Trump’s secondterm, and ministers
Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days. For example, if you added them all together, I wonder how many hours of Prime Minister’s Questions and BBC Question Time – under consecutive governments – have been taken up by a discussion of HS2.
