One golden autumn afternoon, in a quiet North London suburb, I stumbled across a portal to a possible English future. Hadley Wood sits on the fringes of the city, between Barnet and the M25, seemingly forgotten in its own little …
Labour is in denial about knife crime
In the early hours of a recent Sunday morning, not far from my home in a cosy south London suburb, a fight broke out between a large group of males. Eyewitnesses say the assailants were armed with knives, and described …
California’s aristocracy of lunatics
The standard TV image of a district attorney — or, prosecuting attorney — in the US is of a tough government lawyer passionate about putting bad guys behind bars. Or maybe the “DA” is a cynical, striving politician willing to …
Lock up your cats
Back in the last century, “putting the cat out” was a definite thing. You might remember the excellent zeugma from Flanders & Swann’s Have Some Madeira, M’Dear: “he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the …
Why America is losing the war on drugs
In the summer and early fall of 2020, as protests and riots swept across the United States, a new consensus began to emerge among progressive activists, writers and politicians. Given that black men, from George Floyd to Daniel Prude, were …