2014

Why cannot people say, or write, what they mean? One reason for obfuscation is that it conceals the banality of what the person says or writes. It can also make something simple sound complex, impressive and highly technical. In a world in which we are subliminally humiliated by the fact that we employ technology whose workings we do not in … [Read on]

I have just discovered further shocking news about disgraceful inequalities in British society. Private schooling was found to be an advantage in the graduate labour market UK graduates who went to private schools earn thousands of pounds more, on average, than their state-educated peers, research finds. The study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies says the pay gap is more than … [Read on]

If I had to choose a new national symbol for Britain, which happily I don’t, I think I should choose the orange and white-striped traffic cone. The other day I drove 120 miles to a town in the east of the country and there were road-works every ten miles on average. The journey took an hour longer than predicted in … [Read on]

Loneliness is a terrible state, of course, but speaking personally I have suffered far more from human company than from the lack of it. Hell, as Sartre famously remarked, is other people; but such is the capacity of the human soul for contradiction that so too, in many cases, is the absence of other people. A recent article in the … [Read on]

The earth is no more than a huge piece of cooling rock. Clinging to its surface like gossamer is the biosphere, a living breathing membrane in which billions of creatures, including ourselves, live. Compared with the size of the earth, it is no thicker than a coat of varnish on a door, but infinitely more fragile. Earth’s greatest enemy is … [Read on]

A quarter of my council tax goes to pay the pensions of the former council tax workers, and thank goodness for it. Without such payments those pensioners would have no money to spend; and if they (and many others like them) had no money to spend, demand in the economy would decline catastrophically. It follows, then, that the solution to … [Read on]

Last week I met a pleasant lady who, though she had appeared a few times on television, could hardly be counted a public figure. Nevertheless, she had received many abusive messages on Facebook and Twitter as a result of her appearances, and one man had written to her thousands of times and threatened to kill her, telling her that he … [Read on]

Gordon Brown was never as detestable as Prime Minister as Anthony Blair because incompetence is less appalling than evil. Mr Brown may have been a flawed, even a very flawed, human being, but he was at least recognisably human. And he had one quality that moved me and in my opinion lent him great dignity: he never made political capital … [Read on]