Ed West

Should people who comment under YouTube videos be deciding the fate of our country? That’s the frightening scenario proposed by Ed Miliband, who wants to give 16-year-olds the vote because, as he put it, it will make them ‘part of our democracy’. Or, in other words, the electorate’s opinion is no more important than a child’s. There is nothing progressive about allowing children to vote, any more than it is progressive to allow kids to sit on juries or take out mortgages. These things all involve the ability to make judgments, which is not sufficiently developed in adolescence. Voting isn’t just a right that makes you feel ‘part of democracy’; it’s a responsibility and decision-making process.

In this week’s magazine Douglas Murray has struck up a friendship with Professor Richard Dawkins, despite things having started rather badly when Douglas previously suggested that the professor’s failure to criticise Islam was just him ‘showing his survival instinct’. Well, no one can accuse Dawkins of being shy on that front now, and the Professor recently received a sort of auto-de-fe for stating Islamophobic facts.

In the latest victory against sexism, Toys 'R' Us is to stop labelling its products as being for 'boys' and 'girls' after pressure from campaigners, joining such shops as Sainsbury's, Tesco, Boots, Harrods and Hamleys . In its report the Huffington Post quoted a woman who sells engineering toys aimed at girls, who hopes to show it's not just a 'niche' but rather they can 'prove convention wrong' by making it more mass market. But what is wrong with being a niche market? One of the wonderful benefits of free-market capitalism is that it allows niches to flourish, so that people who once would have been forced into uncomfortable roles can instead find a place for themselves in the world.

To Voltaire, the British class system could be summed up in a sentence. The people of these islands, he said, ‘are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent’. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but one that might still have some truth  in it today. Yes, we have horrible poverty in our council estates and toffery on our country estates. But Britain is a country that has always taken pride in what we think of as middle-class virtues — hard work, honesty, thrift and self-help. Today, however, we are witnessing the strange death of the middle class. In Britain, as in the United States, it isn’t just being squeezed — it is actually shrinking and sinking.

The ONS have published its list of popular names, and so it’s time for that annual ritual of debating whether Mohammed, if you include all eight spellings, is really the most popular name in Britain. It depends; if you include spelling variations in a name, do you also include diminutives, in which case Oliver and Ollie, and Henry and Harry, outnumber all Mo’s. But then diminutives are sort of separate names where variations are not, Isabella, Lisa and Jack all having started as diminutives, now surely names in their own right. Why on earth does this pedantry pop up?

I was away last week, filled with joy and love following the birth of our child, but just occasionally I’d check the multi-character psychodrama that is Twitter to stop myself getting too soppy. I sort of agree with Caitlin Moran’s stance in principle; if people are behaving appallingly on Twitter, Twitter should kick them out. If I ran a pub and people were driving away women with foul language, I needn’t call the police, but I’d have every right to bar them. What is problematic is that the organisers of Trolliday do not see this as a question of manners, but of misogyny – hate crime, in other words.

So the huge online campaign and (rather strange) legal action won in the end: Jane Austen is to appear on the new £10 note. Most people would agree that she is in the top division of English authors, so it’s a shame that, rather than being celebrated as a novelist, she has now been chosen as a woman, rather less of an accomplishment. As a consequence people will mentally devalue her, because the human mind always subconsciously adjusts to tokenism in the same way it adjusts to inflation. (And it is the same reason that Buy British campaigns have never worked, sending as they do the message that the products are lousy.

Congratulations to Kate and William, and Baby Cambridge, who has an extensive Wikipedia entry already but no name. The poor couple faced the cameras yesterday with good grace, which is the last thing you’d want in their situation; after my wife’s last labour was over I looked like one of the crew from Das Boot and I’d barely done anything. Not everyone is so keen to join in, which is why The Guardian has been offering readers the chance to switch off all coverage of royalty with a 'republican' button. It’s an interesting foretaste of newspapers tailoring news and comment towards an individual’s own interests.

When I was at secondary school my lunch usually consisted of a packet of Space Raiders and a Toffee Crisp, washed down with a healthy can of Dr Pepper, at least until I started spending the lunch money on fags. And look at me now – a strapping hulk of a man with teeth like Donny Osmond. Partly the reason I avoided school dinners was because they looked, smelled and tasted like something served up in Attica Penitentiary; that seems to have improved, as has the quality of food across British society. But many people prefer packed lunches, large proportions of which are apparently devoid of nutrition and presumably contribute to the nation’s morbid levels of obesity as well as educational shortcomings.

Imagine that you’re a passenger in a car driving down a country road at 20mph. All of a sudden the driver hits the accelerator and you’re now zinging away at 60mph. If asked what speed you were going at, what would you say? I’d imagine probably something like 80mph, at least until you became accustomed to your new situation. Yesterday it was revealed that the British public have some quite wildly inaccurate perceptions about the true level of crime, teenage pregnancy and immigration. Presumably this was seen as evidence that, although the public have conservative views on these subjects, they are misinformed and therefore cool policy reasoning should be left to the experts, who after all have done such a great job at running the country.

I’ve been reminded just why political correctness exists: Katie Hopkins of the Apprentice, the TV show that glorifies the entrepreneurial ideal and the psychopathic levels of self-confidence that accompany it. Hopkins is on a bit of a roll with her homespun wisdom. Late last week she criticised 'lower class' children’s names, saying: 'I think you can tell a great deal from a name… I tend to think that children who have intelligent names tend to have fairly intelligent parents and they make much better playdates for my children.' As well as also having a go at people with tattoos and fatties, she also quipped: 'Ginger babies. Like a baby. Just so much harder to love.' Her response on Twitter was: 'Dear PC brigade.

Should the government subsidise married couples? Arguing about whether births outside wedlock lead to worse childhood outcomes, or whether broken homes and such outcomes both stem from some third factor, really depends on one’s worldview and which studies one chooses to ignore. My own suspicion, based on the wisdom of the ages and what I read in the Daily Mail, is that social and personal problems are likely to be more prevalent on average among those who have children out of wedlock, which makes proving the case for marriage hard. In addition, the actual absence of a father on average makes a difference. But how could this be proved except through a cruel social experiment where random members of society lost their fathers?