Panda La Terriere

Lawfare: how Starmer will govern through the courts

From our UK edition

40 min listen

This week: Lawfare Our cover piece examines how Keir Starmer’s legal experience will influence his politics. Ross Clark argues that Starmer will govern through the courts, and continue what he describes as the slow movement of power away from elected politicians. As poll after poll predicts an unprecedented Labour majority, what recourse would there be to stop him? Ross joined the podcast to discuss alongside solicitor and commentator Joshua Rozenberg (02:15). Next: we’ve become accustomed to the police wearing cameras, but what’s behind the rise in bodycams in other industries? In her article this week, Panda La Terriere highlights the surprising businesses that have begun using them, but what are the implications for daily life and how concerned should we be?

How body cams create a culture of fear

From our UK edition

Thanks to an underage relative who’d stolen my driving licence, I recently found myself ID-less at the local Co-op. I know the woman at the checkout reasonably well, so I said hi, enquired about her day and then asked if I could have my usual vape anyway. She had the decency to look shifty and said: ‘Sorry love.’ Did she not remember me and my ID from just a few days earlier? Was she senile? Did she hate me? I suspected that the reason she was unswayable was because she was bugged. She was wearing a body worn camera and the Co-op’s Security Operations Center was spying on us. The public is accustomed to, or at least aware of, the police’s use of body worn cameras (BWCs). But in recent years, the technology has been proliferating at a dizzying rate.

Why Gen Z is turning against woke culture

From our UK edition

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. ‘Pain lasts a long time,’ he assured me. What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.