World
11 people who should have statues
The Black Lives Matter movement and the ‘Topple the Racists’ campaign have reminded us that monuments in public spaces can…
A rabbi stabbed, but no hate crime?
A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple…
Neocons come home to roost
Dolphins returned to the canals of Venice during the COVID-19 lockdown, and neoconservatives are returning to the Democratic party. Bill…
How do you like US now?
It’s that time again when newspapers tell us that America’s standing in the world has substantially declined under Donald Trump.…
How a serious issue with racism was reduced to a tick-boxing exercise
Who needs statue topplers when the state will do it for you? Some bright spark in authority has decided the…
What Britain should learn from Belgium: history can be reappraised
Is it best to erase history, or reappraise history? We haven’t started taking down statues of royalty in Britain yet,…
Conservatives – corporations are not your friend
Amazon is suspending police use of its face-recognition software, HBO Max has pulled Gone With the Wind and Paramount Network…
The European Union may never have its ‘Hamilton moment’
The European Union has always been quintessentially risk averse. What a surprise therefore to see it jeopardising its very existence…
Slayed queens: the girlboss, dethroned
The girlboss is dead. Intersectionality killed her. Female CEOs who sacrificed their twenties to build their women-focused businesses are being…
Is change on the horizon in Baltimore?
Crime-ridden Baltimore finally dodged a bullet this week. The bullet, in this case, was former mayor Sheila Dixon, who nearly…
What the cancelling of JK Rowling is really about
Shall we start with an easy question? As a general rule, would it be appropriate for a 15-year-old boy to…
Speak up for J.K. Rowling
Nerds everywhere are frantically googling tattoo removal services this week, as the author who inspired their ink failed to STFU…
Boxed-up Churchill is a real work of art
Central London is becoming a paradise for modernists like me. First there was the extraordinary encasement of Big Ben in…
How fast can Britain recover from its economic free-fall?
Putting the UK into lockdown was only going to send growth in one direction: down. While today’s figures from the…
Germans can laugh at Fawlty Towers, so why can’t Brits?
Now UKTV (owned by the BBC) has removed the classic ‘Germans’ episode of Fawlty Towers from its playlist, this sorry…
Our unseen Queen is more important than ever
Andrew Morton is being a bit previous, isn’t he, in suggesting to the Telegraphthat the Covid crisis means that the…
The Taliban: an apology
When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, they embarked on a cultural agenda that we in the West mocked. As…
Binning Fawlty Towers does nothing to solve racism
We’ve done it. We’ve solved racism. And who’d have thought that all it would take was a few judicious edits…
The dire effects of Italy’s coronavirus lockdown
Locking down Britain sooner would have saved thousands of lives, according to Neil Ferguson. But while Ferguson’s claims have been…
UKTV’s bizarre Fawlty Towers ban
It’s been 45 years since the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ first aired on the BBC, in which Basil Fawlty…
What’s it like in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone?
Seattle Ah, Seattle, that environmentally obsessed city where all is decorous, the sidewalks immaculately swept, the parks rigorously trimmed, proverbial…
Wisconsin’s lockdown lifting offers a lesson
What would happen if the government suddenly announced that from next week it was ending all lockdown measures and that…
How do you enforce anarchy?
I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so…
Statue toppling is doing a disservice to Black Lives Matter
I don’t know how much of a organisational structure there is to Black Lives Matter in Britain but if I…
‘Global Britain’ should learn from New Zealand’s mistakes
One of the greatest prizes from Brexit is the opportunity to make the Global Britain aspiration a reality. Included is…
