This government is not fond of people who disagree with them. Witness the Serious Organised Crime Act (Socpa), the swingeing restrictions on protesting within audible distance of parliament. The government do not like to hear voices of dissent, and especially when those voices join together in a chorus. So with the growing consensus of outrage [...]
If you have ever wondered why it is that the British people – unlike many others - have not managed to have a revolution in the past three centuries, then some pictures I took yesterday might go some way to explaining. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was outside Waterloo station. The word outside is emphasised for [...]
Well apparently September is fashion season in London. This is probably not common knowledge in the left blogosphere. In fact, as somebody who invariably dresses in bad leather jackets and beanies, catwalk events barely registered on my radar until the shitstorm kicked up a few years ago about so-called ’size zero’ models. It was a strange moment [...]
Today the Observer published an extremely alarming report that Dr Denis Walsh, “one of the countries most influential midwives,” has argued that women should be receiving less pain relief in child-birth, in favour of “yoga, hypnosis, massage, support from their partners, hydrotherapy and birthing pools as natural ways of alleviating their pain.” Walsh mixes up [...]
A few days ago I was sitting on a bench in Marylebone reading a book. A middle aged man came up holding a can of beer and sat down on the other side. He then turned to and asked ‘Do you mind if I a open it?.’ Needless to say I agreed. But I was [...]
It would appear from this week’s NUS conference that many of the delegates consider themselves not as representatives of our concerns and interests, but instead as elders of the student community charged with sanitising our wretched lifestyles. The Telegraph reports that the NUS have decided to lobby for an end to cheap beer in student bars. [...]
Liam Donaldson – the UK’s Chief Medical Officer for the past decade – is something the crusader. The smoking ban , which he describes as his ‘greatest achievement’, does not appear to have satiated his appetite for reshaping our lifestyles. Thus he is unveiling plans to set a minimum price for alcohol of 50 pence [...]
Back in the bad old days of Victorian England being a factory worker wasn’t much fun. Not only were you expected to work long hours for little pay. You were also expected to adjust your lifestyle to meet the expectations of your boss – usually some humourless non-conformist Protestant. This could mean abstaining from alcohol, [...]
Action on Smoking and Health have become something of a fixture in the discussion of public health. A group which seeks to ‘eliminate’ the harm cause by tobacco, they seem to have a talent for getting heard and getting listened to. So I was more than a little concerned to find that as the budget [...]
If like me you travel a lot on the underground, you will have noticed the mass of posters that have gone up advertising plastic surgery. You will have also noticed that a vast number of the posters have been vandalised with stickers and scrawlings. A few years ago I would applauded such attacks on an [...]
