Every online review for one of Blackpool’s brothels tells a sordid story. “I plan to visit nightly,” writes a punter whose wife has just died. “A depressing hovel,” claims another who took a teddy bear with him. A third admits …
The toxic trope of ‘benefit scroungers’
The quickest way for a weak government to score cheap points with a sceptical electorate is to announce a load of stuff it’s going to “crack down” on. And so, in the past year we’ve had crackdowns on single-use vapes, …
The assisted-dying lobby has already won
What counts as a “dignified death”? On Monday, we got an intimation of what one looks like for Guardian readers, as journalist Renate van der Zee wrote about her elderly mother’s “completely calm, almost cheerful” legal demise at the hands …
Britain needs to deploy Warhammer
If the BBC is the cultural expression of the British state, then the omens are surely unfavourable. Its funding contested and overstretched, bogged down in interminable culture war disputes, the BBC does not know what it is for. Every few …
The gravediggers of British conservatism
For the 20th-century Greek philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis, conservatism was a purely historical phenomenon. A Marxist from a distinguished military family, he was lauded as “one of the great conservative thinkers of our age” by the paleo-conservative, Paul Gottfried. Kondylis came …
Penny Mordaunt: the perfect head for the headless Tories
The Westminster bush drums are beating out a death-tattoo for Rishi Sunak. Having been installed to replace the Tory membership’s own preferred candidate after her politics offended the City of London, Sunak has led the Conservative Party to a record …
Britain’s farmers need to revolt
In The Shepherd’s Life, his memoir about following the family tradition of Cumbrian hill farming, James Rebanks highlights the obsession of “modern industrial communities” with the importance of “going somewhere”. “The implication,” he observes, “is an idea I have come …
Welcome to the stagnation nation
Fifteen years after the great financial crisis blew Britain’s economic settlement apart, we’re still scrabbling around for a replacement. The staggering scale of our problems was revealed yesterday in Jeremy Hunt’s thoroughly depressing budget statement. Despite heavy doses of magical …
How the miners created a new working class
In 1984 I was lending a hand to some miners who were picketing a power station when a police officer kicked me rather viciously in the leg. I suppose he was only doing his job. A few days later I …
Britain is still scarred by the miners’ defeat
In July 1984, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the 1922 Committee about the miners who had been on strike since March. “We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,” she said. “We always have to be aware …
Confessions of a Country Parson
I spent the first week of January in the parish of Weston Longville, Norfolk, in the company of the Revd James Woodforde. The year is 1776, or 1784, or 1801. No matter. The year is not important, because each year …
The year Toryism failed Britain
In early 1960, fresh from another Conservative victory and almost a decade of Tory rule, T.E. Utley wondered what it all was for. “The Tories have shown they can win General Elections,” he wrote. “[But] have they still got a …
The hymns not fit for children
It should have been a formality. The education committee for Somerset had already approved Day School Hymns for use by teachers in the county; now all that Bath Council had to do was nod the thing through for schools in …
In defence of Weebs
When I moved to Japan in the mid-2000s, a friend of mine generously suggested that I was a romantic underachiever doing the equivalent of what thwarted job-seekers in the finance industry referred to as FILTH: Failed In London, Try Hong …
The brutal truth about ‘Never Again’
“An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned,” was how the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, greeted the news of nine-year-old Emily Hand being released from her Hamas hellhole. He made it sound like the poor …
