The UK’s immigration figures are a fantasy
Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes…
Air travel is in terminal danger
During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited…
Give the people what they think they want
I have a mean streak. Perhaps my cruellest urge is to give people what they claim to want. When political…
The strange theatre of mask-wearing
However surreal and dystopian the pandemic landscape seemed at first, no enduring vista feels ‘surreal’ and ‘dystopian’ indefinitely. Citizenries uniformly…
The true cost of make-believe money
I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practising left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency…
The case against reparations for slavery
Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations…
Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?
In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s…
How to make the facts fit the narrative
Distracted by vaccine warfare, for once the British haven’t leapt onto America’s latest bandwagon of fake self-excoriation. Following last week’s…
The West has lost its moral high ground
International travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test negative for Covid before the flight, and on return…
Beware the linguistic Trojan horse
It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question:…
I’m living in a country that won’t let me out
Anyone who’s been through customs Down Under isn’t surprised by the region’s OTT response to Covid. Having been X-rayed before…
For Democrats, the Capitol assault was the gift that keeps on giving
As events recede, they change. When Donald Trump’s unhinged endgame culminated in a popular assault on the Capitol, most Americans…
From Trumpism to lockdown, people believe in the craziest things
Following his disgruntled supporters’ rampage through the Capitol, Donald Trump’s fate hangs in the balance. But one artefact of this…
It’s completely rational for girls to want to be boys
I’ve always been perplexed why anyone lucky enough to be born male would want to swap sexes. But it seems…
No one wins in the race race
After the explosion of international self-abasement over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, much theatrical soul-searching ensued. So your basic man…
We need a dose of vaccine realism
One of my geniuses as both a commentator and a character is to confront what for most normal people amounts…
What the three types of Trump supporter really want
As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the…
I’m voting to make America boring again
I just spent £2.50 in postage to bring about one of the last things I want. Specifically, the next-to-last thing…
Covid has killed off our civil liberties
It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying…
It isn’t always easy to give money away
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…
The Covid hysteria is getting worse
Readers may recall a column last month that laid out powerful evidence for the proposition that the ethnic and racial…
The trouble with ‘taking back control’
I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country…
What really makes people fat
In the UK’s capital city, where do the fewest obese people live? North London. The most? East London. The weight…
Never has a virus been so oversold
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Open letters have become ransom notes
In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary…
