This week’s UK election is one of the most uncertain for decades. But one thing is sure: Labour will do disastrously in Scotland. And the likelihood is that that situation will persist until such time as the Scottish party can effectively assert its independence from the English one.
A minister recently suggested that Polish immigrants might be losing out on the possibility of social integration by attending their own schools on Saturdays. But surely if they don’t they will be losing out too.
The causes of a spike in suicides and self-harm have been traced to financial insecurity and other effects of the recession, yet the response is to treat it as a result of staffing problems in the health service.
Prof Thomas Docherty, a leading critic of the managerialist threat to the traditional idea and role of the university, is to give a talk at Maynooth University on March 25th.
What is the purpose of ‘jargon’? Is it simply to bamboozle us and disguise the nature, or absence, of the message? Or do difficult concepts sometimes need difficult words? A bit of both perhaps.
In the editing game there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get everything in your text just so – as long as you’ve got unlimited time and an endless supply of well-trained staff. But in the real world nine out of ten sometimes ain’t bad.
Can the observant Muslim take alcohol? The most common answer would be no, yet the ninth century Abassid caliphs so much admired by ISIS couldn’t leave the stuff alone.
England in the late 1960s was full of temptations, what with barmaids, divorcees and lingerie ads in the London Underground. It was the kind of place where anything might happen, though it didn’t.
It is not difficult to find statistics to back up the view that our parliamentary democracies are not very democratic. But is there any evidence that we would wish to make the effort to invent any other kind?
British diplomats have been told that they can now call the neighbouring island Ireland. Does that mean that we have to stop calling them the Brits?