Miatta Fahnbulleh and the society of socialist hypocrisy
‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons,’ was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s immortal line to…
The problem with Andy Burnham’s casual dress code
When I started secondary school in 1994, we were supplied with a copy of the rules for our uniform, haircuts…
What’s wrong with heckling Rachel Reeves?
As Mrs Thatcher stood to give her speech at the 1980 Conservative party conference at Brighton, she was under considerable…
Lord of the Flies is no Adolescence
There are certain works that have attained, through their inclusion in GCSE and A-level syllabuses, an enduring place in the…
The power and nostalgia of Christmas music
Picking up the children from school recently, I heard the lovely old carol ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ drifting slowly across the…
The Guardian’s desperate smears about Farage’s school days
Nigel Farage is the perfect folk devil for the British liberal left. He is robustly patriotic, cheerfully irreverent about modern…
The case for Biggles
The first Cold War thriller I ever read – before MacLean, before Le Carre, before Clancy – was Biggles Buries…
It’s time to arm the police
Displays of sheer physical bravery are always impressive. Having been in precisely one real fight in my life, I enormously…
VE Day and the taboo of victory
I was born in 1983, and when I was a child, the second world war still had a significant cultural…
In defence of teenage boys
Horatio Nelson passed his examination for lieutenant on 9 April 1777 (possibly with a little help from his uncle, who was…
Can the social contract survive in Britain?
In the vestry of the church where my father was priest, there was a large wall-mounted plaque commemorating some long-dead…
Britain is failing Gen Z
Ask not what you country can do for you, said JFK in his inaugural address in 1961, but what you…
How parliament has fallen
Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its Second Reading in the Commons on Friday, which means…
The cowardice of the Chris Kaba case
Since 2010, British police have shot dead 30 people. This works out at an average of around 2.1 people per…
Stop trying to make ‘weird’ happen
Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonisation, white fragility; there is no intellectual…
The triumph of Labour’s centrists
Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale,…
Count Binface just isn’t funny
On British general election nights, I like to watch Dish and Dishonesty, the first episode of the third series of Blackadder. It…
Does Channel 4 think this counts as balanced?
We are now just nine months out from the latest possible general election, which means that in a year’s time…
Ian Hislop’s elite blindspot
A common attack line against populist politicians such as Nigel Farage or Donald Trump is that their attacks on contemporary…
We can’t eliminate all risk for children
The classic book The Railway Children contains several episodes that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern children. None perhaps are…
Why is the New Scientist defending cannibalism?
Most law students in the English-speaking world will have come across R v Dudley and Stephens, from 1884, which established…
Say no to Labour’s citizens’ assembly
A spectre is haunting Westminster – the spectre of the citizens’ assembly. This unkillable bad idea is making the headlines…
The problem with Kneecap – and the arts blob
When I was about 14 or 15, someone sent me a birthday card with the words: ‘Teenagers – tired of…
Who will oppose Labour’s racial dystopia?
Britain’s ruling class are currently conducting an enormous experiment – perhaps not consciously or intentionally, but with great enthusiasm –…
The Turner prize doesn’t make sense anymore
In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing…
