True stories from ‘Norky’ who comes from Scapegoat Hill, a small, isolated farming village, high on the Pennines in West Yorkshire. You can catch up on his ramblings so far via his author page. The war took a different turn for my father in 1943. He had served on the Scillonian for about a year, plying between […]
Those who voted for Johnson in the belief that inside the clown was a serious-minded politician trying to get out, are slowly being disappointed as his government staggers through a parade of fumbling incoherence, from one disaster to the next. The near constant succession of missteps, U-turns and policy mistakes are not even punctuated by […]
The prime minister was in a bad mood. His settee was full of children’s plastic toys and when Gandalf’s staff spiked his rear as he sat down to savour his Coco Pops before bed, his satanic retaliatory reflex kicked in. He ordered a national lockdown to teach everyone a lesson and kill two birds with […]
True stories from ‘Norky’ who comes from Scapegoat Hill, a small, isolated farming village, high on the Pennines in West Yorkshire. You can catch up on his ramblings so far via his author page. In the months following the end of the Second World War, millions of military personnel were returning to their homes, at […]
Can you afford to die? The price of a funeral is high, costing on average around £4,271 (2020) – a huge amount for a normal family, especially when they are grieving. For poorer families, the expense is even more distressing. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more poor working families have turned to crowdfunding on sites […]
On 19 August 2020 the BBC’s Today programme introduced an item about driverless cars with a 2016 recording of Justin Webb describing how he tried out such a vehicle on the M4. His breathlessly account was, more or less, “I’ve got my feet on nothing, my hands are on the steering wheel, but it has […]
On Thursday 30 July, Nigel Farage, having broken the rules of lockdown several times in preceding months to whip up anti-refugee hysteria on the south coast, turned up at the Bromsgrove Hotel in Birmingham to shoot his latest propaganda video in a desperate cry for attention. To date, the video has been seen by several million people […]
The Conservative government’s proposals in the business and planning bill have been justly criticised for being far too developer-friendly, to the detriment of the local environment, climate change, housing standards and local democracy. The bill panders to the interests of big builders and not those of millions of people who need low cost, secure housing […]
Some of you may have been watching the BBC’s programme on the regeneration of Manchester (Manctopia) with a mixture of horror and fascination. Here on this side of the Pennines I think we can do things better, in a way that includes local people and is fair to all. Our towns and city centres are […]
The A-level results fiasco is just the tip of the educational inequality iceberg, one which extends even beyond the issue of private and grammar schools, but is nevertheless exacerbated by it. Underlying the broad inequalities we find in our education system is one key ingredient: socioeconomic inequality. We must now quickly learn the lesson that […]
By Dido “Noelle” Harding One: When you’re born make jolly sure daddy’s a peer, grandpapa’s a retired general and even the family dog has a clubfoot. If you can’t manage this then FORGET COMPLETELY ABOUT BEING IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING. Go to the local academy (they’re all exactly the same for a reason, and they […]
In 1890, my great grandparents Joseph and Eliza Senior took the whole family to Sagan in what was then Germany (now Żagań in Poland). This is where a Yorkshire mill owner called Oldroyd set up a textile factory (which is still running today, now in local Polish ownership). He took a skilled labour force with him fro
Twitter wars; they’re everywhere. Even if you are not on Twitter, you’ve probably still seen a fair few. And even if you haven’t directly seen the venomous, back-and-forth, 280-character limited attacks, I’ll wager that you’ve read the news articles denouncing or encouraging them. It seems that the debate around whether or not these Twitter wars […]
Being in government is like playing with Lego. Or at least it seems to be, judging by the number of times things are taken apart before being triumphantly put back together again. Allied to which is a collective amnesia. It appears that when you’ve been in power for over a decade, it’s fine to forget […]
Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring up the Bodies are impressively imagined, atmospheric works that have rekindled our fascination with all things Tudor. Elevating the once looked-down-upon historical novel to critical acclaim, the first two books were published three years apart and deservedly won the Man Booker prize and an award-winning TV adaption. The Mirror […]
Joy oh joy! The prime minister grabbed his rubber ring, stuffed his budgie smugglers into his pocket and flip-flopped around the room, packing his case ready for his hols. Briefly stopping to douse his joss sticks, slap on some self-tan and check the latest Tory sex scandals, he did a press-up to celebrate his success […]
In the land of smash ‘n grab, the prime minister packed the final box of champers and truffles to send to his chums. This was the signal to pop off on their hols now he’d finished playing whack-a-mole with public services and outsourced just about every public contract and asset he could lay his hands […]
Never, never apologise! Sorry? The word isn’t in the prime minister’s lexicon and he wasn’t about to start by wiff-waffing around with apologies at prime minister’s questions before the hols. He’d thrown a cordon sanitaire around him and his crew. He was fed up with clapping the NHS, ready instead to clamp them for not […]
Dad dancing to YMCA after a pint of wallop and a whiskey cider chaser at 6am to test-drive independence day had left the prime minister feeling decidedly razzled. It was all Jabber-the-Raab’s fault for sending their Uber to Soho’s Old Compton Street instead of Chequers. It was an easy mistake for someone so geographically challenged […]
Having escaped, down but not out, from another prime minister’s questions, Johnson breathed a sigh of relief and made a dive for the exit … If you’re out-gabbed by that “left-wing agitator”, you know your number’s up. Mark Sedwill had an uncanny knack for saying stuff the PM really didn’t want to hear. So did […]
This was the week of the great cover-up that didn’t work. There weren’t just bats in Big Ben’s belfry but sloth-sized rats running amok in the Commons. Prime ministers’ questions had become just an ad break in a very British farce masquerading as democracy. The prime minister understood neither the concept nor the practice. Hit […]
The week before the 4th birthday of the Brexit referendum hasn’t been a walk in the park for Tories escaping lockdown. The now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t prime minister has proved he can remember things after all. After schoolchildren demonstrated how to keep him at arm’s length, he got Father’s Day done and ducked for cover when Prince William’s […]
Mid-summer’s eve and the former Australian prime minister’s verdict on UK trade deals couldn’t have been more apt if Bottom had uttered it. Had Malvolio pranced into a Cabinet meeting cross-gartered, no one would have blinked either. The president of the USA didn’t know the UK had nuclear capabilities. The UK foreign secretary, renowned for […]
And a very blasé tiger in the tank. After the click-and-collect school of government had run out of bait, it was perhaps unsurprising that the blancmange-like prime minister claimed to have been inspired by an email about bubbles from a constituent. Wedded to his ear-buds and never one to ponder risk and impact assessments, he […]
It’s hard to say precisely when the government sold its collective soul to the devil. But it was way before Theresa May did her Faustian dance in the shadow of Cameron, busily bent on decimating decency with indecent speed. Not a shred of honesty remained by the time the government and BBC repeatedly displayed an […]
Chris Onuoha, 22, medical student Amidst the ongoing pandemic, we are reminded yet again that systemic racism is a serious problem in the world we live in today. The murder of George Floyd and many other black men and women before him should not be swept under the carpet, should not be treated as a […]
Asking for the great British public. In Belgium, King Leopold II’s statue was taken down as part of the global response to #BlackLivesMatter. In Belgium, the prince who went on a lockdown-breaking jaunt to Spain was fined over €10k. But in barmy Britain, the public was told to get over the lockdown-breaking Barnard Castle affair […]
I’m working-class and I’d like to stay that way. Looking across a smoky room at my Nanna buffing the dance floor of our local working men’s club, St. Johns Terrace. Sodden beer mats, cheesy eighties music on repeat. This is her third job of the day. This is one of those stand-out memories from my […]
As I write, on the eve of Floyd’s funeral, there can be no sense this is something that can be dismissed as a problem with US policing.
“A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven; hands have no tears to flow.” (Dylan Thomas) Government buildings and police stations set ablaze, multinational businesses wrecked with bricks, enraged protesters on the streets being tear-gassed and shot at by police officers. Are these the symptoms of the 2020 pandemic? I’m not talking about the […]