Debt is like minor toothache; you can get worryingly used to having it but will rarely forget it’s there. And for increasing numbers of us in the UK, it’s how we fund our day-to-day lives. Yet, no one talks about …
Stop calling Ricky Gervais anti-woke
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A man’s wife divorces him and shacks up with his boss. Soon after, a friend suggests that he should remarry. “What for?” he asks. “Are you looking for a wife as well?”
It …
Should junior doctors be paid more?
Only two years after the NHS was founded in 1948, GPs first demanded an increase to their salaries — and threatened to withdraw their labour from the service entirely if those demands weren’t met. Many of the doctors involved in …
2024 is the year of the New Right
Of the torrent of elections scheduled throughout the world this year, the most transformative promises to span an entire continent. In all of the 27 nations which constitute the European Union, and which will ask their citizens to vote for …
Claudine Gay and the mafia of mediocrity
What do Nasra Abukar Ali and Claudine Gay have in common? Or, for that matter, the Somali Ministry of Sports and the Harvard Corporation?
The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed …
We need to free Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg has never been a party animal. In a 2021 podcast, she said she had never been in a bar, spending “all my waking hours when I am not in school constantly working and being an activist”. She also …
The African village mining Bitcoin
Bondo is a scattered cluster of villages in a remote region of Malawi near the border with Mozambique. It sits in the foothills of Mount Mulanje, where residents rely on their feet for transport and a few crops to feed …
The Tory shires are turning Green
A quiet revolution is underway in the dales and downs of rural England. What the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” — local churches, families, charities, and civic associations — are in open revolt against the party they …
Who really rules Manchester United?
Talk to Manchester United fans about why they don’t like the Glazers and it comes down to one word: love. The club’s American owners do not share the passion of its followers. For them, how their team fares is as …
The propaganda that damned Ukraine
The way the American media has dealt with the Ukraine War brings to mind a remark credited to Mark Twain: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they …
The propaganda that damned Ukraine
The way the American media has dealt with the Ukraine War brings to mind a remark credited to Mark Twain: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they …
Fat positivity is a fantasy
If societal mores are designed for the comfort and prosperity of human beings, they are also necessarily designed to restrict the movement of human bodies. Some of these constraints seem only fair, and even intuitive: don’t step on people’s toes, …
Why our cities should be sacred
At some unknown moment in around 9,500 BC, hunter-gatherers in what is now south-east Turkey, and was then lush grasslands rich with pistachio and almond forests, and abundant with sheep and goats, did something for the first time in human …
The perversion of the English language
What is the most overused word in the English language at present? “Incredible.” Just count how many times it crops up in an evening’s TV viewing. It’s almost never used literally. “Incredible” literally means not to be believed, but when …
The Eurocrats’ secret weapon
On January 1, as the European Union ushered in another year of economic chaos and not-so-distant wars, no one was in the mood to celebrate the euro’s 25th birthday. No one, that is, but the Eurocrats.
As always, the EU’s …