Friday 8 July 2011


Brendan O’Neill

You know politics is in a bad way when Hugh Grant is championed for doing a real-life version of the PM he played in Richard Curtis’s execrable film Love, Actually. All this week Grant, cheered by the respectable political and media classes, has been holding forth on the need to clamp down on the wicked and morally compromised tabloids. And now, a PM who seems to have modelled himself on Grant’s fictional version, David Cameron, is promising to do precisely that. It’s censorship, actually.


Brendan O’Neill
After the News of the World, who’s safe?
The unprecedented harrying to extinction of a tabloid newspaper is likely to have a chilling effect across the British media.
Frank Furedi
It’s health-and-safety gone mainstream!
British officials love to laugh at mad bans on conkers and snowfights, yet they continue to institutionalise a cult of caution.
Mick Hume
Did that ‘historic’ public-sector strike really happen?
The one-day strike over public-sector pension reform looked more like a fancy-dress fantasy re-enactment of battles of the past.
Rob Lyons
Who’s really fibbing about Fukushima?
The way greens tried to play up the accident was far more shocking than ministers’ attempts to ‘play it down’.
Brendan O’Neill
What’s really motoring this anti-Murdoch crusade?
What the News of the World is alleged to have done is terrible and indefensible. But the fury about it is being driven by something else.
Rob Lyons
The fag end of the argument
Attempts by anti-smoking zealots to smear a report on civil liberties reveal just how bankrupt their arguments are.
Tim Black
Why ‘victim’s rights’ are bad for justice
Why is the state keen to stand up for victims in the justice system? Because it wants to boost prosecution rates.
Brendan O’Neill
Celebrate your identity! That is, know your place
A new report says fewer workers now define themselves as ‘working class’. Maybe they’re rebelling against the stifling politics of identity.
Tiffany Jenkins
Culture: it’s not the economy, stupid!
Plans to get UK cultural institutions to measure the economic value of art are both philistine and futile.
Rob Lyons
The tasteless aim of the war on salt
Why are health campaigners so down on the white stuff when all the evidence suggests it isn't bad for us?		 Patrick Hayes
Let’s just all SQUASH together
Squatters once fancied themselves as radical. Now they have embraced the low horizons of the political elite.
Max Klinger
The BMA: modern-day prohibitionists
The British Medical Association is dressing up moralistic attacks on smoking and drinking as health policy.		 Tim Black
Miss Fancy Pants vs uncouth youth
That snooty mother-in-law’s email about manners has been a viral hit because it exercises something rare: adult authority.
Duleep Allirajah
Murray’s defeat was no choking matter
Andy Murray’s Wimbledon loss had more to do with Rafa Nadal’s brilliance than with Murray’s inner demons.		 David Bowden
The Perfect Suit: a luxury production
Chanel and Louis Vuitton are just too good for the masses – as are BBC4’s documentaries, apparently.