Should Sadiq Khan decline to run for a fourth term as London mayor, his contribution to public life will largely have been stoking the culture war. From spaffing European symbols over the New Year’s fireworks to funding bemusing anti-misogyny campaigns, the public messaging has been relentless, if little else has. And yet there’s another cultural […]
As the Sex Pistols sounded the last honk of their guitar amps in a San Francisco rock venue in 1978, Johnny Rotten leered over the crowd one final time. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” A strange question to ask a group of punks perhaps, if one made more explicable by Rotten’s swift departure […]
Americans like their eggs. While for Britons it is but one part of a fry up or mere fodder for toasted soldiers, for Yanks there is a deep romance, whether eaten at an old-school diner or as part of a trendy brunch. It was therefore bemusing for outsiders when the price of eggs caused a […]
As it touted the latest recipe change to its flagship beer Punk IPA in December, BrewDog decided to splash the news across many of the country’s billboards. The tagline? ‘Tastes like commercial suicide’. Rarely has a marketing campaign from the brewer proved so honest. This week, the one-time £2 billion company agreed a sale to […]
Amid the distraction of whether Nigel Farage’s latest party is racist, it’s worth casting your minds back a decade. Amid the rancour of the EU referendum, those wanting to leave were caricatured as a mix between ‘little Englanders’, whose horizons barely stretched beyond the next green and pleasant field, and imperial nostalgists desperate to get […]
It’s a crescendo as predictable as a chorus from the latest chart-topper – and unfortunately in a minor key. Late last week, a High Court judge ruled that Lambeth Council had bodged the planning process for the Brockwell Live festival series, throwing into doubt whether the events can go ahead at all. Brockwell Live had been […]
Whatever you think about JD Vance, there can be no doubt that the US vice presidential candidate’s attack on ‘childless cat ladies’ has set a feline among the feathered. First, there were angry tirades about the pressure and prejudice faced by single, childless women, then the paeans to living unanswerable to anybody else’s demands. But […]
Many casual observers of British politics will only just be being introduced to the probable next Vice President of the US. And in keeping with Donald Trump’s penchant for the bizarre, JD Vance has begun his tenure as presidential running mate with some unusual musings on Islamists and nuclear weapons. Speaking at the National Conservatism […]
If it’s risky to give a child a virtuous name, consider the quandary of political parties. Labour has enjoyed at best an on-off relationship with workers, while the Conservative and Unionist Party is currently best known for destroying ties with our neighbours. As for the Liberal Democrats, it’s possible neither of their names are accurate. […]
In the wake of the Brexit referendum, not a few people chided the Liberal Democrats over their name. With the party committed to nullifying the outcome after voters made the ‘wrong’ choice, was ‘democrats’ a misnomer? While Britain’s traditional third party remains committed to rejoining the EU ‘as a longer term objective’, nobody can now […]
There are few small pleasures in life that the Government has not lately committed itself to curbing, but one of them is beer. While Scotland and Wales recently introduced minimum unit pricing, only last year, Westminster cut back on alcohol duty – defending the role of pubs in British life. Indeed, if there is an […]
‘It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. So goes the wisdom of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, whose opening line for a piece in The Economist has become a dictum of workplace inefficiency. Even those unfamiliar with the adage will know the experience. Coming back from […]
Sticklers for spelling may wish to steer clear of supermarkets right now. Newfangled products with names like ‘cheeze’, ‘m*lk’ and even ‘cre&m’ are increasingly prominent in vegan food aisles, with no punctuation marks left behind. Other brands are finding further ways to wink at conventional dairy terms, branding their offerings as ‘not milk’, ‘cheddar-type’ or […]
When punk rock emerged in the 1970s, its adherents courted scorn from the authorities at every opportunity. They certainly weren’t the types to run to teacher at the first sign of trouble. So perhaps BrewDog will soon need to rename its flagship beer, Punk IPA. Over the past two years, the Scottish brewer has been […]
When is a poppadom a crisp? It’s the kind of question a philosophy undergraduate might fret over the night before a deadline. But under UK law, this bizarre quandary has recently taxed some of the country’s leading legal minds. In January, a tax tribunal ruled that poppadoms are crisps, at least when they come in […]
Accusing supermarkets of price gouging amid the cost-of-living crisis is something of a reflex for sections of the left. ‘It’s absolutely clear that workers and their families have been fleeced at the supermarket tills,’ wrote Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham in The Guardian in June. Such criticisms come despite several official reports which have largely […]
The new Foreign Secretary has been quick to reassert his presence on the world stage, glad-handing President Zelenskyy in Kyiv and addressing dignitaries at a global summit in London. But while Ukraine and the Middles East are likely to dominate his in-tray, there is a conflict over a British territory that he should not neglect. […]
He used to be knows as G.O.M, or Grand Old Man, to his supporters (God’s Only Mistake to his critics). But the descendants of the great liberal reformer, William Gladstone, have reserved quite different language for another of their ancestors. Charlie Gladstone has described William’s father John as ‘vile’, ‘greedy’ and ‘domineering’ in an interview […]
If the modern Royal Family can be understood as a maker of mass media, few of its products have proved as enticing as the spin-offs focusing on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. And as with a long-awaited season finale, few payoffs will have felt as deserved as the axing of a $20m deal with Spotify […]
