Culture

The RSPCA have been in a fair pickle for a while now. It had been without a CEO for two years – after their last one, Gavin Grant, stepped down citing health reasons – until two weeks ago when they announced that Jeremy Cooper, (formerly chief executive of the charity’s ethical food label) would be taking on the role. This comes after reports at the end of last year that three candidates had pulled out, apparently due to concerns over finances, and the fact anyone in the job would be accountable to the charity’s council. Two trustees have also stepped down since September over concerns about the governance of the

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that

On the radio this morning the subject of high-rise housing was being discussed, the hook being the new film adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise. Tower blocks are widely considered to be a disaster today; they took largely working-class populations out of often sub-standard (but potentially very nice) terraced houses into technically better housing that was in reality often isolated and unsafe. Yet, despite this hindsight, I feel we’re making something of the same mistake again, with the current rush for skyscrapers across the city – with some 435 high-rise buildings now approved. Some of those being proposed and planned, such as the Paddington Pole and the new tower in Notting Hill

The toughest causes to campaign for are those which are not fashionable. To fight racism in the 1950s or stand up for gay rights in the 1980s took guts – and the progress made today is largely down to those who took up the cause before it became a form of virtue signalling. International Women’s Day should be a chance to remember the billions of women who are treated appallingly in developing countries – but when it comes to Britain, the battle has pretty much been won. The pay gap is a problem for women born before 1975, but not after. The problem is sorting itself out. For the under-40s, there is a negative pay gap: i.e., men are paid marginally less.

Of all the frankly riveting stuff in the Daily Mail’s serial of what it calls ‘The Unknown Queen’ — nicely timed for the Queen’s 90th birthday — is there anything less surprising than the revelation she was/is opposed to gay marriage? Is the head of the Church of England a Christian? Well, it seems so. ‘There is,’ say Richard Kay (a friend of the late Princess Diana) and Geoffrey Levy, ‘one area of social policy where Her Majesty holds more traditional views…same sex marriage.’ Talking about the issue in the home of a close friend around the time the legislation was being passed by Parliament, the Queen is said to have expressed

A friend of mine, another journalist, is getting terrifically worked up about the Department for Education’s persecution of exclamation marks. He’s busy writing a defence of free punctuation and because he’s a better stylist than the people laying down the law on this one, this will sting. Apparently, exam bureaucrats told teachers and moderators at a briefing run by the Standards Testing Agency last month that the use of an ‘exclamation sentence’ must start with either a ‘how’ or ‘what’ and must be a full sentence – including a verb. So, ‘What a delightful home yours is!’ is fine; ‘Awesome!’ is not. Naturally, there’s going to be a backlash. It

Among the treats the mothers of Britain can look forward to on Mothering Sunday there are some rum offerings. A company called Nosh Detox is offering a hamper including something called a Nux Vom drink, and the Guardian has helpfully drawn up a list of mother-related films you only take your mother to if you want to terminate the relationship. Meanwhile, the profile of the mother as depicted in the gift sections of M&S and Waitrose is that of a woman with a penchant for anything pink, who loves imported roses and has a thing about prosecco. Her day is made if you take her out to tea. I quite like

I’m planning to propose to my boyfriend this leap year. I’m proposing that he earns another £10,000 and loses a stone. But marriage? Hell, no. I don’t know why, in the age of equality, society still endorses women going down on bended knee on one solitary day every four years. The internet blames it on St Bridget, who in the 5th century allegedly complained that some men took too damn long to propose. It was St Patrick, though, who came up with the wheeze of granting us special dispensation to propose every 29 February. But to propose on this day is hideously outdated. It is tacky. It is tabloid. It is

For years, now, the Sutton Trust has been releasing research showing how many doctors, judges, journalists etc were privately educated and conclude that it’s all a posh boys’ stitch-up. The British press loves banging this old drum, but in doing so they drown out a new tune. Today, there is more academic excellence in the state sector than the private sector. Not that many people want to know. Take, for example, an article in this week’s Economist. “Education should not be about wealth” it quotes Tony Blair saying in 1996. Wrong, Blair! The Sutton Trust’s report shows that “two decades later, it still is” about wealth. But when does the Economist think these ‘senior civil

Something very strange is happening in London: its state schools are going through a huge renaissance – while attainment in many northern English schools is going into reverse. The chief of Ofsted, Sir Micahel Wilshaw, laid the problem bare in a speech to the IPPR today:- Three in ten secondary schools in Manchester and four in ten in Liverpool require improvement or are inadequate compared to one in ten in inner London. The situation in some of their satellite towns is even worse. A third of the schools in Rochdale are not good enough, as is a similar proportion in Salford. In Oldham, six in ten secondaries require improvement or are inadequate and in Knowsley

I’ll never forget the first ‘Funisher’ I met. It was sometime in the late 1980s when you could meet all sorts of interesting girls. She was one of the moderately attractive, moderately intelligent broads the media has always been jam-packed with, the on-off up-down girlfriend of a male mate of mine, and one night she was annoyed by some roué writer who seemed to think he had droit du seigneur over all the PR girls at his publishing house, of which she was one. She fussed and fumed about it for a bit, then three vodkatinis in, a serene smile swallowed her face and she said ‘I know how to punish