IN THEIR seven years as the inaugural Metro Mayors for Greater Manchester and Liverpool City, Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham have completely failed to grasp the point of devolution – to give local people more power over political decision-making for their region. The pair have now produced a politics of envy, grievance and victimhood book, Head […]
‘TAKING the piss’ is one of those phrases in common use of which few people know the original meaning. As a crude remark, it is sometimes more politely reworded by journalists and commentators as ‘extracting the urine’. But like the misused raw version, making fun of someone is not really what ‘taking the piss’ means. […]
ANNA Wintour appeared on BBC’s Any Questions during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I youthfully cared about politics and thought the invitation to the editor of a fashion magazine undermined the whole show. How wrong I was. The Vogue editor shared a political pearl of wisdom I have never forgotten. Asked what she thought of the woman with whom Bill […]
THE past few years of electoral results across Europe have confirmed, without a shadow of a doubt, that Europe is swinging right, from Hungary, Italy and Greece to Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland. (See note at end.) The tendency is not completely uniform – for example, Spain’s strongly nationalist and conservative Vox party […]
ANOTHER depressing article on the state of our youth: Britain has a boy problem, according to the Telegraph, as male educational attainment lags well behind female. And not just a boy problem, either. The same article states that since covid, men have been working fewer hours and have been dropping out of the workforce, whereas women […]
JUST how gullible are the decision-makers in the justice system? If they make a major error, are they ever held to account? Are the tribunals incredibly naïve, misinformed or just negligent? Recently a number of decisions have been so obviously wrong and have led to such catastrophic results that one wonders if this is a general […]
IN AN insensitively timed opinion piece in the London Standard, Martha Gill declared that London’s crime figures are nothing to worry about. Killings are tragic, she admitted, but the capital city has a slightly lower rate of stabbings than in Birmingham. This casuistry appeared in the same edition which reported on the police hunt following a brutal knife […]
‘I don’t do portfolio politics. I don’t take the line that because I think something about issue X I’ve got to think something about some unrelated issue Y. I try to look at each problem on its merits.’ Former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption, UnHerd podcast, February 2024 IT’S NOT common for us commoners to hear […]
THE more frequently accidents happen, the less accidental they seem. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a container ship struck a supporting pillar could have been the freak calamity reported on mainstream news. But the unlikelihood of the incident – an electrical failure followed by the ship somehow veering into […]
DESPITE Rishi Sunak’s claims that the UK’s response to the increasingly malicious and democracy-threatening Chinese regime is ‘more robust’ than many allies, recent weeks have shown the grave threat posed by the CCP. In the Commons, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden blamed Chinese ‘state-affiliated actors’ for cyber-attacks at the heart of British democracy, which targeted […]
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