Was England ever merry? We’re stagnant, divided, increasingly heavily taxed, and even our Prime Minister promises it’s going to get worse. Barely two months into a premiership in which he promised to “tread more lightly” upon the lives of Britons, …
The sisterhood is a feminist lie
What is the collective noun for female Labour MPs? The question arose anew last week as 13 politicians glammed up for a Vogue article and accompanying photo shoot.
Written in the hagiographic style beloved of women’s glossies, the piece presents …
A&E is now a deathtrap
Last Friday night, a young man walked into my A&E department, mid-hallucination, and started to lash out at a crowd of patients. After being wrestled to the ground by my specialist clinical colleagues and security staff, it didn’t take long …
A&E is now a deathtrap
Last Friday night, a young man walked into my A&E department, mid-hallucination, and started to lash out at a crowd of patients. After being wrestled to the ground by my specialist clinical colleagues and security staff, it didn’t take long …
Broken Britain needs a tax hike
The recent British election was, by most accounts, a “service-delivery” vote. Appalled at the state of their public services, Britons opted for new management. And while they need no reminding of how bad things have become, the facts are still …
Keir Starmer’s war on mothers
As their swift suspensions indicated, Keir Starmer can probably cope with a rebellion of “pissed-off” Labour MPs over his failure to commit to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. But when even Suella Braverman, the Right-winger that right-thinkers love to hate, …
Searching for Britain’s JD Vance
A recurring theme in C.P. Cavafy’s poems is of the elites in some Hellenistic city in the Near East, long subsumed into the Roman empire, anxiously awaiting news from the imperial centre of the outcome of a great …
How snobbery killed suburbia
The new Labour government’s day one commitment to a vast national housebuilding effort has been almost uniformly welcomed, yet there are some glaring exceptions. Naturally, the rump Corbynite Left is grouching on social media that plans to work with private …
Prepare for a Hot Keir Summer
Forget the much drooled-over Rat Boy summer, it seems we’re in for a Hot Keir one. The entry of Labour into government this week has made certain female journalists come over all peculiar. Caitlin Moran has documented these current heightened …
Starmer faces a farmers’ revolt
We sheared our sheep today, beneath a sky full of gloomy grey clouds. There were hours of chasing sheep up the ramp to the men on the trailer. The radio blared out country songs and an occasional news bulletin informing …
Starmer is turning Britain into a vassal state
It seems fitting that Keir Starmer’s international debut should be the Nato summit that kicks off in Washington, DC today. Ostensibly scheduled as a celebration of the alliance’s 75th anniversary, it will no doubt be remembered as the moment that …
Will Starmer discover his Romantic side?
Hungover with apathy, there was no champagne drunk in our household after last night’s theatre of the predictable. Starmer is in power, and the Tories are out. How did our politics become so dull?
Should there have been more dancing …
What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing
The Renaissance in Italy came from its cities, and not by accident. What we now call “agglomeration effects” were at work here. Within their curtain walls, all classes and factions were crammed together in lunatic proximity. Unable to grow out, …
British feminism needs a history lesson
These days, we tend to interpret figures from long ago as if they lived just across the road. Such is the thesis of French sociologist Olivier Roy, who argues that an erasure of national cultural history is well underway. We …
Labour won’t save the NHS
Any culture, society or nation is ultimately judged on how it protects its citizens, and how it treats and cares for its most vulnerable. And on this standard, the Conservatives have failed. Over the past 14 years, their contempt has …