One of the more irritating aspects of Brexit, for both Remainers and Leavers, has been the number of times people on either side of the argument find themselves corralled alongside those with whom they disagree. With each new issue, it seems, there are either blithering idiots who agree with your stance, but for all the […]
When examining the alleged role played by Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and “big data” in the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, it’s worth looking at a book which opens by declaring that “is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic area of modern life”. It continues: “It is about the way […]
James Purnell, the BBC’s Director of Radio and Education and a former Labour Cabinet Minister, announced the other day that the Corporation’s primary educational “mission” was to be on “improving social mobility across the UK”. “We want to work with partners to have a positive impact on people’s lives,” he said, “especially those from disadvantaged […]
There are, God knows, enough things that governments ought not to do, but which they insist on doing. Helping themselves to too much of our pay, sticking their oar into markets which would function much better without their interference, spending taxpayers’ money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, often on huge vanity projects of […]
Now that everyone has given their tuppence-worth on the incoherence of the policies outlined in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on Brexit and the, or perhaps – we’re still not sure – a Customs Union, it’s worth noticing a much more extraordinary statement from the Q&A session that followed it. It demonstrates that, no matter how clueless […]
According to the Electoral Reform Society, hundreds of Parliamentary seats are effectively “reserved” by men. A new study concedes that that all the parties are doing much better at increasing women’s representation at Westminster, but it also claims that our electoral system is “blocking” progress towards greater equality. The progress is impressive. Of MPs first […]
Those of us who followed Alan Rickman’s career since the early 1980s, when he played the slimy Obadiah Slope in the BBC’s adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, felt inclined to protest when the headlines – inevitably – read: “Harry Potter and Die Hard star dies”. Rickman himself must have been a bit put out […]
In late 1969, just as Space Oddity became his first single to make the charts, David Bowie told the journalist George Tremlett that he didn’t plan to spend the rest of his life as a pop star. “A career like this would never satisfy me,” said the 22-year-old. “I shall be a millionaire by the […]
