Columns

The University of Washington technology department has banned the word ‘housekeeping’. Not because the ‘problematic’ noun is overtly ist (ableist, sexist, racist, ageist…; by now, you must know the ist list). No, because it ‘feels gendered’. Would that they’d simply banned housekeeping. I hate scrubbing the shower. This month, the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work proscribed the word ‘field’. ‘Field work’ might have unpleasant connotations for the descendants of slaves. (Sorry! Descendants of ‘enslaved people’. Nouns that reference persons – like, you know, ‘doctor’ – are reductive and dehumanising.) A ‘field of study’ is henceforth a ‘practicum’.

What self-respecting political leader would be seen in Davos? The World Economic Forum has become synonymous with sybaritic technocracy – champagne receptions, luxury chalets, £50 burgers and traffic jams of black limousines. David Cameron and George Osborne were in their element at these summits, sometimes staying to ski afterwards. But Rishi Sunak, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, has decided not to go this year, no doubt worried that his attendance would reinforce stereotypes he’s trying to dispel. Sir Keir Starmer has no such inhibitions. He’s making his debut as a Davos Man this week, alongside Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor. He will attempt to look like a prime-minister-in-waiting on a panel with Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, about ‘repowering the world’.

It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have found one in London. The educational group Black Blossoms is running a series of lectures as part of the Art on the Underground scheme making the case that – as I had long suspected – photography is racist. This is true of colour photography (can we not find a different name for that!) just as it is for monochrome photography, in which black is the domain of shadows, the dark and what we might call ‘otherness’. The history of photography is rooted in white supremacy and subjugation, according to Black Blossoms, and it needs decolonising, sharpish. Quite right – and it is the job of all of us to swing the wrecking ball.

There’s a new rule for members of Keir Starmer’s team on their WhatsApp group: no messages linking to opinion polls. It’s not because the Labour leader dislikes the figures. Labour polls consistently on about 45 per cent and the Tories on 25 per cent, which is landslide victory territory. The fear is that too much focus on such numbers will breed complacency. ‘We are a party scarred by its losses,’ says a member of Starmer’s office. Yet with the election expected next year, Labour and Tory MPs are talking less about whether Rishi Sunak can turn things around and more about the scale of Starmer’s victory. Will Labour have a majority of 20 or 200? It’s rare to find any MP, on any bench, who believes the Tories will win a fifth term.

From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often dazzle the reader with a display of erudition or passion, rather than tell the more mundane truth. The mundane truth is that our dispositions and the courses of our lives tend to be fixed before our ages run to two digits: a time when we were unlikely to be tackling Proust, understanding Nietzsche or appreciating C.P. Cavafy. The child being father to the man, we should be looking at fairy tales, picture books and First Readers if we seek the truly formative influence of literature. Foreign and war correspondents or derring-do travel writers are less likely to have been set upon their life’s path by Wilfred Thesiger, T.E.