Children

There’s a myth that lots of us fall for/ ‘Kids’ books are so easy to write’/ And you can see why we might think so/ As so many of them are shite. Little poem by me there. As the dad of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, I have spent perhaps 100 hours reading some wonderful books, and hearing gorgeous books read to me. But parents everywhere will know what I mean when I say: Christ there’s a lot of dross out there. Why are so many children’s books so bad? Children learn through books. If they read lazy poetry, they’ll become lazy writers and lazy thinkers While looking for kids’

I still hang out with the same two lovable crackheads I sat beside on the first day of primary school. I keep all the stubs from every concert I’ve ever been to. I meet the same school dads in the same pub on the same night every single week and my point is that I’m a creature of habit. It takes a lot to change my mind, but enough is enough. I’m ending a lifetime of support for my beloved Labour party as 2025 draws to a disastrous close. This nightmarish, totalitarian rabble has done more damage to our country than Margaret Thatcher and the Luftwaffe put together. Flushed with

As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into her uniform and then into the car. She has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the UK’s most underdiagnosed neuro-developmental condition, which leaves her with a brain wired for impulsivity, memory lapses and emotional storms that no local school can contain. Each day, I drive her across several counties to the only specialist placement that can meet her needs. Four hours a day, every week day. While I’m grinding through the traffic, taxpayers are footing bills that could fund whole classrooms. Councils and schools spent a record £2.26 billion on special educational

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim; the potential for suffering too much to bear. What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once

‘Good news for patriots,’ said one of our most celebrated national newspapers this week: ‘Your numbers are likely to swell.’ This was on the editorial page, where the opinions of the paper are laid out, and it referred to a poll conducted by ‘More in Common’ which had found, to everyone’s surprise, that British teenagers are pretty patriotic. About half of all 16- and 17-year-olds feel proud of their country, it found, which is more than their parents. It was an interesting poll for anyone considering the rise of Reform and how that might interact with the incoming slew of teenage voters. Interesting too for those of us in liberal

The foster care system in this country is collapsing. There are roughly 80,000 children who’ve been removed from violent or neglectful parents and need homes, but there’s a catastrophic lack of people prepared to care for them – a shortfall of around 6,500 foster carers. The rate of decline is terrifying. Every year the small pool of available foster households shrinks and those who do apply to be carers are increasingly elderly. Perhaps you assumed that a generation with ‘Be kind’ tattooed on their wrists would leap to look after the worst off? Not a chance. ‘Be kind’ is an instruction to others, not a memo to self. Neither my

Last month, the government announced that 16-year-olds would be able to vote at the next general election. If these new voters had wanted to inform themselves about political issues over the weekend, they would have found it strangely difficult. Take, for example, a recent speech about the rape gangs made by the Tory MP Katie Lam in parliament. It was blocked on X, alongside transcripts of the trials of the perpetrators. X users also discovered that they were unable to watch videos of protests against illegal immigration, unless they could prove they were over 18. Even if 16-year-olds are now wise enough to vote, the government believes there is information

Last week the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its State of World Population report. According to the Guardian: ‘Millions of people are prevented from having the number of children they want by a toxic mix of economic barriers and sexism, a new UN report has warned.’ Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of UNFPA, said: ‘The answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.’ Nonsense, of course. Does Africa (4.1 births per woman) have better family leave and fertility care and more supportive partners than Sweden (1.4)? The reason for UNFPA’s counter-intuitive findings is simple. They have not ‘found’