A year on from Tory MP Tracey Crouch’s fan-led review of football governance in England, the country’s most popular sport remains in urgent need of institutional and cultural reform. English football has suffered its fair share of tragedies in the lower leagues and scandals at the very top. The winding-up of Macclesfield Town and expulsion […]
As the Treasury’s announces that it will aim to have 6% of its staff come from black backgrounds, it’s worth revisiting the debate on racial quotas in employment. It has been reported in The Telegraph that a memo appeared on the department’s intranet service for civil servants last week, stating that ‘for the first time […]
Rishi Sunak’s first photo-call with his wife on the steps of Downing Street came as part of the launch for this year’s Poppy Appeal. He had, on his first day in office, entered Number 10 on his own after speaking to the nation from outside – part of a decidedly low key ‘lets get to […]
If you want to reach for a ready cliché, complain about the modern world’s ‘consumer culture’, about the prevalence of commercialism, of advertising or shopping centres. But cross your fingers as you do for you will be talking verifiable nonsense. Shopping is as old as cities – which makes it at least fourteen thousand years […]
Former health secretary Matt Hancock’s constituents in West Suffolk have been vocally expressing their ire over his decision to take part in reality TV show I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here. The prime minister has called Hancock’s departure from the UK while parliament is sitting “very disappointing”. The Conservative Party has removed the […]
The news that Matt Hancock is to appear on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! raises an old and vital question: why can’t politicians resist the siren call of reality television? The answer is for the same reason as everyone else: narcissism and money. Of course, if money was the primary concern, they would […]
Remember those halcyon days before social media when we didn’t know what our favourite ice cream brand thought of immigration? When banks didn’t tell us to get accounts elsewhere if we didn’t agree with them on the use of pronoun badges? When shaving gel companies didn’t wade in on the question of toxic masculinity? Simply […]
The great Pablo Picasso once quipped that ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’. But would he still have felt that way if he saw one of his Cubist masterpieces reproduced by art robot Ai-Da, who addressed the House of Lords this week? New Artificial Intelligence tools have made it possible to create and copy intricate […]
A little less conversation, a little more action. It might be that Elvis had the right prescription for a more constructive agenda on race. The Conservative leadership race has highlighted both the increasing presence of ethnic diversity at the top, and a growing partisan rift over the politics of race. But a new book from […]
As the daughter of a father who wanted boys, I’d often kick about with a football in the garden. I had little idea of what I was doing – he had little idea about how to teach me. I still can’t even kick a ball properly; there was no chance to learn. I was born […]
This week, we have seen further proof – if that was even needed – that the BBC Licence Fee is an anachronism that needs to be rightfully consigned to history. Across the Channel, the French have done away with their national levy to fund public broadcasting. The National Assembly (their version of Parliament) voted more […]
It’s exactly 10 years to the day since the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. While at the time there was much fanfare about a moment of national unity after the awful post-crash years, the longer term legacy of the Games ought to be subject to close scrutiny. Before 2012, there was certainly a […]
We need to talk about perverts. I know we don’t want to – even uttering the word seems somehow rude, as if thinking about them is somehow making us party to their depraved behaviour. But unless we do, women will never be safe. There are some who would like to pretend these men (they are […]
Yesterday, after heavy consultation, a number of safety reports and trials, and to the jubilation of football fans up and down the country, the Government finally confirmed that Premier League and Championship clubs who wish to introduce licensed safe standing areas will be allowed to do so from the start of the upcoming 2022/2023 season. […]
Philip Larkin’s cancellation by the OCR exam board is as predictable as it is wrong. Predictable, because ‘England’s other poet Laureate’ was both a supporter of Margaret Thatcher and well known for his ‘problematic’ views on women and minorities. Wrong because any decision to remove authors from the GCSE English Literature syllabus should be done […]
As part of his welcome war on waste in the NHS, Health Secretary Sajid Javid reportedly intends to take on the equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) blob, abolishing a swathe of ‘equality and diversity’ positions within the health service bureaucracy. Each EDI job ended will liberate between £25,000 and £100,000 a year for the diagnosis, […]
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