With Mr and Mrs Cameron, Mr and Mrs Clegg and Mr and Mrs Brown lining up with their kiddies as competing models of perfect, well-scrubbed domestic contentment, it has been a good moment to receive a sharp lesson in reality...
Read moreFollowing the great debate about the deployment of the word “retard” by Vinnie Jones on Celebrity Big Brother, more words seem about to appear on the list of words which must not be used in respectable company. In this week’s...
Read more"Simplistic" was the word used by the Advertising Standards Authority to describe an ill-fated government campaign to raise awareness of climate change. It was a polite way of describing the smoothing out of inconvenient truths in order to deliver a...
Read moreOfficial policy statements from Whitehall tend to be bland and full of sincere-sounding generalities, but just now and then something important, perhaps even revolutionary, can be glimpsed in their pages. So it is with the latest paper from Defra (the...
Read moreIt seems that I am in trouble with that estimable organization Mencap. We have fallen out over the tricky question of offensive language on TV after I had written in the Independent in support of an Ofcom ruling which had...
Read moreThe phrase “community consultation” has a warm and friendly feel to it. Politicians of all parties agree that local communities represent all that is good, noble and unsung about modern Britain. As for consultation, it is of course an essential...
Read moreFor the first and I very much hope the last time, I share a problem with the celebrity hardman Vinnie Jones. We have both recently laid ourselves open to the charge of what is now known as "ableism". Jones was...
Read moreThis week I spent a day in prison, thanks to the good offices of the writers’ organization, English PEN. I was part of an ongoing programme aimed to get prisoners talking about their own writing and reading with professional authors....
Read moreIn the great establishment vs the people clash which is developing around the fate and future of Jon Venables, there will be only one winner. Ministers will argue the letter of the law, but then that is what they did...
Read moreWhen farmers involved in large-scale developments protest tender concern for animal welfare, it is prudent to assume that they are up to something. When they make promises of bringing money into the community, one should become even more wary. In...
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