The feats of the modern economy are, despite the present crisis, still considerable, indeed astonishing, if only we stopped to think about them instead of taking them for granted. For example, the Times arrives in the western part of Turkey where I stayed recently not much later in the day than in Shropshire where I live: and even its arrival … [Read on]
Of all the many foolish and inaccurate metaphors, one of the most foolish and inaccurate, it seems to me, is that of prisoners having ‘paid their debt to society’ on their release. The metaphor is in international use: I saw it recently in a French newspaper. The article was about Philippe El Shannawy, of an Egyptian father and French mother, … [Read on]
I witnessed an instructive but depressing little scene three days ago. I was on an escalator in the Paris Metro at quite a busy time of day when a young man in international slum-costume and face as malign as the late Mark Duggan’s who was standing a few steps ahead off me used a spray gun to scrawl his initials … [Read on]
Members of our political class believe in elections as peasants believe in saintly relics, though with rather less reason. Perhaps they cannot believe that a method that brought them to the top of the national pile, to fame and fortune, is not of universal human application, nor is it the solution to all human problems. I thought this when I … [Read on]
Some words, printed in red in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, caught my attention: Being at the receiving end of charity can be stigmatising… And, as everyone knows or by now has accepted as an unassailable orthodoxy, to stigmatise is both morally wrong and disastrous in its effects. Ergo charity is reprehensible and ought to be stamped … [Read on]
For French newspapers Britain means either riots or royalty, that is to say bad news or soap opera; and I was intrigued the other day to see in Le Figaro an article about Prince William’s recent interview with CNN about his accession to fatherhood. What intrigued me about the article was the photograph that accompanied it. It showed Prince William … [Read on]
If anyone doubted the complete destruction of British bourgeois civilisation, he could not find more convincing evidence of it than by travelling from Calais to Folkestone on the Eurostar. The vast majority of people taking it with their cars are British, of course; and they are not a pretty sight or a grateful sound. They are, by definition, not poor; … [Read on]
In Samuel Butler’s satire, Erewhon, crime was illness and illness was criminal. In at least one small respect we have taken the book as a model and put it into practice. While in our hospitals nurses are enjoined to address patients, however old and venerable, by their first names, or even by diminutives of their first names, in our prisons … [Read on]
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