Opinion Panel

Here’s a fantastic statistic for you. At Sainsburys, you can buy five custard donuts for sixty pence. Five donuts. Five. For sixty pence. That’s a grand total of 12 pence per donut. Just one of these five donuts contains 234 calories, which, as a woman, is more than a tenth of my daily calorie allowance. [...]

How much would you pay for the job you want? Ten thousand pounds? Twenty thousand? How about seventy thousand? That’s how much I estimate it will have cost me to change career direction, including the two years’ salary I will have given up in order to get some relevant experience on my CV (mostly unpaid [...]

Now don’t get me wrong, I was fully aware when I signed up for this French degree that I was going to be spending a year abroad in France, with people who speak it all the time, think in it, dream in it, and have done since it was their first word, but now it’s [...]

As soon as the news broke, the backlash was certain. A High Court ruling has found the inclusion of prayers on council meeting agendas “unlawful” and has declared that local authorities have “no power” to institute them in official motions. What began as a complaint by the National Secular Society and a councillor in Bideford, [...]

In the early hours of Sunday morning, I had assumed my regular slot as relationship counsellor in a nightclub smoking area (I’m not the most reliable of therapists – I’m never in the same club two Sunday mornings running, so my patients, without the benefit of ongoing marital advice, often end up divorcing anyway) when [...]

Persuasion, temptation and attraction ooze from the fashion magazines of today. Glamour, Vogue and Grazia are all guilty of being symbols of splendour and expense. But how do they manage to brainwash us with an almost gluttonous desire to buy another version of that LBD or the coveted Mulberry handbag? You don’t need the item; [...]

Military spending presents a dilemma for any government. To improve current personnel and equipment is incredibly expensive; yet saving such funds could potentially leave you militarily vulnerable, and will almost certainly lead to political labels of ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘weak’. So what kind of balance are we striking in this country? Well, as far as I [...]

“We will build the greatest golf course in the world” stated Donald Trump – but at what cost? The prospect of a world class golf course on the Menie Estate in Aberdeen was controversial to begin with: local MSP’s seeing it as an investment that would boost employment rates, ecologists seeing it as unnecessary destruction [...]

David Lammy MP, one of the noble faces of civil society’s response to the August 2011 riots, has come out in somewhat surprising favour of changing the law on physical disciplining of children by parents – the “reasonable chastisement” entitlement of parents should be considered for reinstatement as a means of bringing restless children into [...]