The Mirror Crack'd

Sir Keir Starmer held a meeting in Downing Street recently to discuss the Netflix series, Adolescence,  with it's co-writer, Jack Thorne. The four-part series, highlighting the effect of 'toxic masculinity' and mysogyny targeted at young boys on social media, aired recently and has caused a sensation, sparking a national debate. This is not the first time, though, that television drama has stirred the nation's conscience or created a succès de scandale . In 1966, a BBC Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home , highlighted the issue of homelessness. Last year an ITV mini-series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, forced politicians to address, and redress, the issue of postmasters and -mistresses wrongly accused of embezzlement due to a Fujitsu computer error, covered up for decades. Of course, popular culture has long exerted a social impact and created moral and political debate. Think of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist , Charles Kingsley's  The Water-Babies , or Thomas Hardy...

This is how the environmental protest movement, Just Stop Oil (JSO), flagged up to followers its surprise decision to cease its three-year campaign of civil resistance to the actions of the oil and fossil fuel industry. In an upbeat email to followers, circulated yesterday, JSO stated, "Just Stop Oil’s initial demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history." This signals the end of large-scale street protests (although there will be a valedictory rally in Westminster on Saturday 26 April) and what it describes as "soup on Van Goghs [and] cornstarch on Stonehenge". The claim that its demands have been met by the incoming Labour government, though true as far as it goes, feels rather like whistling to keep the spirits up while crossing fingers. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that emissions caused by extraction and burning should be included in an environmental impact assessment ...

We know the Tories broke Britain, that's why millions of us voted Labour in the last general election, but why aren't Labour mending it? They will say they've only had eight months in power and inherited an even worse economic situation than they'd anticipated. This may well be true but they wasted no time in cutting pensioners' winter fuel payments, slashing the foreign aid budget and refusing to compensate WASPI women, while showing zero enthusiasm for abolishing the two-child benefit cap or taxing the super-rich and non-doms. Now they appear to be planning draconian cuts to disability benefits in an attempt to force disabled people into work. In other words, they are taking a leaf out of the Tories' playbook in going after the poor and disadvantaged in an attempt to court the rich. How does this differ from actual Toryism? If we'd wanted this, we would have voted for the real thing, not Tory lite, which is what we seem to have ended up with. Had Labour un...

I shouted myself hoarse yesterday at Republic's anti-monarchy demonstration opposite Westminster Abbey. King Charles and Queen Camilla, accompanied by the Prince and Princess of Wales, were attending the Commonwealth Day service being held there. We had positioned ourselves in a strategic spot opposite the Abbey, as close as the police would allow, but absolutely in the frontline where our yellow and black placards and shouted slogans could not be ignored by any of the guests, including members of the royal family, even though the pipe band tried valliantly to drown out our booing. How the royals must dread the sight of a swelling sea of yellow at every event they attend these days! Not content with this, we had brought along for good measure our mascot, Chuck the Rex, a fifteen foot high crowned model Tyrannosaurus, to make the point graphically that the institution of monarchy is a relic that belongs with the dinosaurs. Britain's may be a constitutional monarchy but an heredi...

Boomers have been getting a bad press of late but the time has come to stage a fightback. Lest the prospect of hordes of disgruntled pensioners getting militant should prompt alarm on the one hand or hoots of derision on the other allow me to clarify. I'm not for one moment suggesting that, collectively, we oldies should take to the streets demanding yet further concessions for ourselves, rather mobilise our political clout on behalf of those young, disabled and disadvantaged people who are facing hardship as a result of increasingly punitive government policies. Our generation turns out to vote disproportionately, while others are either too apathetic or too disenchanted to make the effort. That gives us enormous political clout which, if harnessed to the common good rather than selfish ends, could be transformational. Losing our winter fuel payment (known by some as the wine allowance) was insulting for loyal Labour voters and, for many, caused anxiety or actual hardship. But, ha...

JD Vance just let the cat out of the bag - to the Americans the 'special relationship' with the UK is not only not special, it's laughable. Many of us have long suspected this to be the case but it's helpful to have it finally confirmed for the avoidance of any doubt by someone at the heart of the US administration. Vance obviously believes his role as Vice President is to act as an  agent provocateur, sowing alarm and discord amongst former allies the better to wrong foot them. He demonstrated this in his castigation of the assembled delegates at the recent Munich Security Conference and again in the Oval Office last Friday at the car crash of a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky.  Now, he's upset the US' two major European allies, Britain and France, by suggesting that they haven't had relevant battle experience in the last thirty or forty years to enable them to support Ukraine against Putin's aggression. When it was pointed out to him by aggrieved polit...