Outside In

One of the phrases one often hears is that the rapid leap in media and communications technology, amongst other things, has brought the world closer together, has helped create a ‘global village’, and enabled people to overcome those old boundaries that once proved obstacles to unity. Which is all very…

One thing I have noticed more and more just recently is the tendency of so many to conflate between ‘conservative’ thought and libertarianism. It is on the blogosphere where the lines are most noticeably blurred, where a close-knit community of conservative and libertarian bloggers tend to find common voice on…

Reading Next Left’s blog today, I was struck by a passage regarding the problems inherent to any meritocratic structuring of society, and thought I might as well offer a few speculative (and no doubt rather more naive) thoughts of my own. Now I must confess that, until a few years…

They’re at it again. The Russell Group of leading universities can once again be found prophesying doom if they fail to receive the generous subsidies to which their industry has become accustomed over the past few years. Apparently, if funding drops, we’re likely to see a ‘devastating effect not only…

So James Purnell has joined the list of Ministers and ex-Ministers ‘setting out a vision’ for what will soon become the post-Brown political landscape. In a remarkably frank article, Purnell offered a bold vision that, were it to gain serious traction, would undoubtedly prove divisive, particularly amongst the metropolitan left…

It’s a refrain commonly asserted that all politicians are the same, and you couldn’t slide a fag paper between the three main parties. I have sympathy with this view, whilst not wholly endorsing it, simply because on so many social, cultural and moral issues one sees a political uniformity that,…

I do feel for Mr Brown. Watching him grasp frantically as all he ever longed for slowly slips through his fingers can thaw even the iciest heart. At root, I’m sure Mr Brown is not all that bad, and were he to have inherited the job he so dearly covets…

When asked a couple of weeks back about Martin Amis’s comments that the sexual revolution has been a more difficult transition for women than men, Fay Weldon, that thinking feminist that keeps stepping out of line with the sisterhood for saying things that might actually be true, responded, ‘It wasn’t…

A blog post over on the Demos website by liberal-in-chief Richard Reeves caught my eye today, entitled ‘Ditch the Alpha Male’ (isn’t this a rather alpha-male way of putting it? I mean, where’s the please?). Anyway, in the article Mr Reeves persists with his attempts to level society into a…

So, just as Mr Balls attempts to give the impression that he has listened to the public outcry against his Vetting and Barring Scheme (aka the paedophile-presumption scheme), and adjusted criteria so that now only 9 million well-meaning individuals have to clear their names before they work with children, it…