Sheffield families vs the super rich: who flies more often?
MILLIONAIRE Tory Oliver Letwin has come out against building new airports because he doesn’t want ‘more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays’. However, I suspect that he has missed the primary sources of additional demand for aviation services. One of the many interesting findings of the 2011 Wealth Report, produced by property consultant [...]
Internships won’t overturn the class sytem: reply to Nick Clegg
ANOTHER year, another politician sounds off about social mobility. Today it is the turn of Nick Clegg, who seems to think that democratising Whitehall internships can at a stroke reverse the inegalitarianism inherent in the abolition of Educational Maintenance Allowance and trebling tuition fees. This may or may not be a step up from the [...]
Fashism.com: the mass psychology of clothing conformity
COMING up with the name fashism.com for a website that crowdsources ‘how to dress’ advice is a fairly obvious if slightly tasteless play on words, and most of the target demographic will have just the foggiest idea of what the pun entails. After all, only a small minority of teen and twentysomething sharp dressers have [...]
Votes for prisoners? Absolutely
GOING out and voting is a sign of at least minimal engagement with political debate. That more than one in three adults entitled to do so did not bother pitching up at the polling booths at the 2010 general election is one obvious indicator of the detachment so many now plainly feel. And most [...]
Tory adviser: don’t get your round in
IF CHUCK Palahniuk were to pen an allegorical tale of contemporary masculinity in a UK rather than an American context, he would surely concede that the first rule of Bloke Club is that you always get your round in. The second rule of Bloke Club is that you *always* get your round in. There are no [...]
Olympics, World Cup: please God, no
I REMEMBER going on a business trip to Glasgow which happened to coincide with the seventh world congress of flower arrangers. Perhaps because I did not appreciate the popularity of this pastime, I didn’t think to check for any clash of dates on that particular score. So it was that 32,000 attendees – predominantly ladies of [...]
That’s the thing about Eton
IT IS terribly bad form for a chap to come over all chippy about his education. Frankly, that’s the sort of stuff one would expect from a provincial Grammar School boy, and not a journalist, novelist and historian of the stature of Guy Walters. Nevertheless, the Old Etonian has devoted a post on the Daily Telegraph-sponsored [...]
Town Hall skiving: worse than the private sector?
COUNCIL staff twiddle their thumbs for two-thirds of their working day, according to a survey by some firm of management consultants I have never heard of, which has predictably been bigged up by the Daily Telegraph. I did google to try to find the original report, so that I could at least run my eye [...]
For the right to wear the burqa (and the right not to)
OF COURSE the state has no business telling people what to wear, and of course the French parliament’s 355-1 decision to ban the wearing of full face covering in public was motivated primarily by racism towards Muslims. On those considerations alone, the move should be resolutely opposed in France, and certainly not be emulated elsewhere. [...]
Want labour mobility? Build social housing
LABOUR’S vigorous denunciation of Tory plans to boot the unemployed out of their sink estate council flats faces one obvious and glaring credibility problem, and that is the fact that Blairism owns the copyright. Only two years ago, the then housing minister Caroline Flint floated more or less the same idea, demanding that one million [...]
