Culture

A new star is born today into the centre-right blogosphere: UnHerd. The latest brainchild of Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome, it has launched with a mission statement to ‘dive deep into the economic, technological and cultural challenges of our time’. Its launch blogs show a wide mix of subjects: a YouGov poll revealing the low regard with which the public view traditional news media, Peter Franklin on why we should get ready for Prime Minister Corbyn, James Bloodworth on the crash ten years on and Graeme Archer on how meat-eating may come to be seen as barbaric by our grandchildren. UnHerd is also marked out by its financing model. It has no

There is a group of women who have every reason to feel aggrieved to learn that the BBC is paying Gary Lineker £1.8 million a year and John Humphreys between £600,000 and £650,000. But it doesn’t include Jane Garvey and Emily Maitlis, both of whom appear to be grubbing by on a little below £150,000. It is the 101,000 women found guilty last year of evading the TV licence. If you want a genuinely worrying gender disparity, forget the BBC’s highest-earners and look at the balance of people at the bottom of society who are being dragged through the courts for the non-payment of the tax. The Perry Review into the TV licence,

We all know that advertising is the work of the devil – creating entirely spurious wants, including in small children – but making it gender neutral doesn’t help. The Advertising Standards Authority is extending its brief to ensure that advertising does not confirm unhelpful sex stereotypes. That is to say, it is going to ban advertisements suggesting that little girls want to be ballerinas (Aptamil) or showing Lynda Bellingham at the stove (Bisto). Guy Parker of the ASA says, ‘advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole’; the ASA will make sure it does by stigmatising the

There is, let us be honest, a certain kind of England supporter who derives some cheerful satisfaction from disaster and weak-minded capitulation. Many England cricket supporters – for it is summer and time to put away minor matters such as Brexit and concentrate instead on more substantial civilisational matters – are naturally crepuscular, forever looking forward to the dying of the light. And why not? There is much to be said for being an Eeyore, especially if – as sometimes seems to be the case – being a Tigger is the only available alternative. Nevertheless, it is always a mistake to take things too far. Today’s miserable collapse at Trent

This one is priceless, believe me. Truly priceless. For a long time now I’ve been buying The Guardian for its unintentional hilarity. Not just the columnists, but even more so the letters pages. This is from their fatuous Saturday family section: yes, it is a minor miracle that such a reactionary receptacle still exists at The Guardian. This is an anonymous letter from a reader saying something they’ve always wanted to say – they have one every week. If you have the time read it all – because it tells you what these people are really like underneath. These tolerant, caring, liberals. If you can get to the part about

Food programmes are having a strange effect on me: I watch them and feel nauseated. Masterchef, The Great British Bake Off, Great British Menu, half a dozen others. In the past I’ve watched and loved them all, sharing the exhilarating triumphs and gut-wrenching despair of the trembling hopefuls. A thousand times I’ve held my breath with them, waiting for the axe to fall: ‘The person leaving us this week is… Wendy.’ Cue the tears and blotchy, shell-shocked face — and that’s just me. But lately something’s changed. I noticed myself finding the way the experts and chefs talked about the food vaguely distasteful, and the feeling grew stronger. It came

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s

Who would want be a member of Generation Z? Having your every youthful screw-up tracked and recorded on social media, facing the robot job apocalypse and without a lolly’s chance in hell of ever owning a home in London – even if medical advancements allow them to work until they’re 200. To top things off, they’re saddled with years of student debt after their three years learning about Whiteness and Privilege at university. As the Guardian puts it: Students from the poorest 40% of families entering university in England for the first time this September will emerge with an average debt of around £57,000, according to a new analysis by a leading

I suppose it says something about me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything funnier than this video – this brief video – of a man travelling to his target on a hoverboard.

Back in the 90s and even early noughties, it was a cliché that middle-class English people used to talk about house prices at dinner parties. That hasn’t been the case for a good decade, if my social circles are any indicators; it would be like bringing up interesting anecdotes of people we know discovering they have cancer. For years, a handful of miserablists, such as our own Nick Cohen, have been warning that housing inflation is not the great boom it was once believed to be, but is in fact an unmitigated social disaster. For years we’ve done nothing about it. And finally, in 2017, rising house prices have proven

So now we know who’s really responsible for the horrible attack at Finsbury Park Mosque: it was the Sun wot done it. And maybe the Daily Mail too. No sooner had Darren Osborne allegedly crashed a hired van into Muslim worshippers than certain so-called liberals were stringing up the tabloids. The low-rent press poisoned his mind, just as it’s always poisoning plebs’ minds, they claimed, without a morsel of evidence. He could take the Guardian for all we know. They present their tabloid-baiting as a challenge to bigotry, when anyone who knows anything about history knows that fearing the tabloids and their dim, malleable readers is classic British bigotry. Just

Bicycling up Regent Street in the intense June heat last week, I was cut up by a black cab driver. When I remonstrated with him, he leapt out of the cab and assaulted me, with a violent shove in the small of my back, trying to push me off my bike. It was the heat that did it. The driver wouldn’t have deserted his snug cab — and his passenger — if it had been raining. But, in the longest heatwave in more than a decade, he went stir-crazy in his confined space, as the black paint of his taxi absorbed mind-altering quantities of ultraviolet rays. He isn’t the only