Opinion Panel

Tories equate gay marriage with internet porn. When you read between the lines, this is the message David Cameron is sending out. In a desperate attempt to win back traditional Conservative voters after a disastrous set of local election results, the Prime Minister promised a crackdown on internet pornography in the Queen’s Speech, while failing [...]

Eduard Mead of Pointless Economic Musings explains how monetary aid is wrong on so many levels… Dependency and Inequality India is one of the world’s fastest growing economies with a multi-billion pound defence and nuclear weapons programmes as well as a £750m space programme. It is also the biggest recipient of UK foreign aid. Before [...]

You can judge a society by the strength of its paramilitaries. A morbid sign of national weakness is an abundance of well-populated movements of legitimised thugs patrolling the streets. Pride may be found in having a vast reserve of armed men to be called upon for political repression or macho posturing, but a prevalence of [...]

Boris Johnson has taken a rare Churchillian moment of redeeming himself in the face of the monsters of unreason, some of them courted by Conservative Party members and European Parliament-level politicians. Despite his range of backward and ludicrous suggestions for how to move the capital (and the country) back to the glory days of the [...]

I’ve developed an unhealthy habit. I say habit but it’s more like a knee-jerk reaction. It’s not exactly something I’ve done before, nor would recommend to others. Yet over the past week and with alarming frequency, I’ve taken to asking passersby to pinch me. My request hasn’t been fuelled by sexual desire or any kind [...]

I sit staring blithely out of the window as the train heads north, when I’m roused from my daydream by the gentle swoomf of the compartment doors. They part to admit the considerable girth of a dour gentleman bearing an ominous looking machine and stamp. ‘Paaspoorts. Paaaaspoorts’. I reach calmly into my inside jacket pocket [...]

If voting or peaceful demonstrations made any difference, they would have banned it already. ‘They’ being the beneficiaries of a culture of docility and complacency, and ‘it’ being any meaningful exercise of protest. It’s one of the oldest clichés in counterculture, borne of endless frustrations and failures harking back to soixante-huit and before. Alfie Meadows [...]

The spectre of targeted religious and racial murders haunts Europe once again. There is little division in French national opinion that what happened in Toulouse on Monday 20th March was an atrocity, and a tragedy to be observed with solemn memorial. Isolated incidents of mass murder cannot reveal much about a national character. The attacks [...]

By Wednesday afternoon, the contents of the Chancellor’s red briefcase will be very much public knowledge. He has already hinted that the main focus of the 2012 Budget will be on lower to middle income earners, and that the budget will not simply be a Conservative manifesto but will represent both sides of the coalition. [...]