Global fertility is plummeting, as are sperm counts. The populations of Spain and Japan are set to halve; nearly every country will begin to shrink. Researchers say we will have to totally reorganise society if we are to maintain order through this transition. This is not the introduction to the dystopian thriller ‘Children of Men’; Read More
A rope is tied round the neck and feet of a statue standing on a plinth. Six men standing below heave and pull it to the ground, where it shatters as a riotous crowd smashes windows. Half a century after academics began to publish treatises on the need for deep and lasting change, anger and Read More
Newspapers across the United States are tying themselves into knots justifying the decision to capitalise ‘Black’ while keeping ‘white’ lowercase. The Chicago Sun-Times provides a useful illustration; its new approach capitalises ‘Black’ and ‘Brown’ but retains ‘white’ in lower case as “a wider descriptor of people of numerous origins”, resulting in the curious conclusion that Read More
Until relatively recently, you may have been under the misapprehension that preventing people from breaking the law was somehow part of the job of a police officer. If current events had not quite managed to disabuse you of this notion, then you can ask Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington: officers at Black Lives Matter rallies dedicated Read More
Once again, Tom Holland has put it best: “Whenever people steeped in Christian assumptions experience a particular upsurge of moral fervour, iconoclasm has rarely been far behind.” With the police watching politely from the sidelines, enterprising mobs across Britain and America are taking matters into their own hands; monuments to the old ways must fall, Read More
As protesters crammed themselves into Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, as they screamed “hands up don’t shoot” at unarmed British police officers, and as they threw objects and grapple with the same — some of whom had just taken a knee in solidarity with George Floyd — all I could think was how fortunate it Read More
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
British politicians, I suspect, feel a degree of envy towards their American counterparts. An MP who proceeds along the time-honoured route through Eton and Oxford to the Palace of Westminster will spend most of their lives surrounded by the same sort of people in the same sort of architecture, and eating the same sort of Read More
One of the best known laws of economics is that bad money drives out good. If a country debases its coinage, mixing the gold and silver in new coins with lower value metals, people will hold onto the older and more valuable coins and spend the new ones. The bad money flushes the ‘good’ money Read More