James Kirkup is a partner at Apella Advisors and a senior fellow at the Social Market Foundation.
The summer ritual of A-level results day is so well known it’s easy to forget the thousands of students receiving their BTec National results. That’s the intro to a BBC News item on vocational qualification results issued today. It’s also the story of British culture and economics, told in a single, unwittingly revealing, sentence. Around
Kirstie Allsopp is in trouble. The posh-but-nice telly lady committed two cardinal errors of modern life: first by saying something interesting on Twitter, and second by assuming people would credit her with good intentions. She wrote: ‘If your job can be done from home it can be done from abroad where wages are lower. If
I’m starting to think that Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer have quite similar views about the politics of trans rights, sex and gender. I’m also inclined to think this could be a good thing. In the last couple of weeks, both the PM and the Labour leader have been invited to wade into the lake
‘Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed’. It’s a good headline, in that it catches your attention. But there are two things making it an effective headline, at least in the sense that it gets attention. One is the notion of someone looking at child porn in a hospital – that’s a shocking
Politicians give speeches all the time, but with differing levels of significance. Can you think of a genuinely important political speech given by a minister this week? Maybe your answer is Rishi Sunak’s fiscal statement, and I’m not going to suggest that speech isn’t a big deal. It is. But I am going to make
The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust carries out some of the most complex and contentious clinical work in the NHS. It deals with children and young people who are experiencing discomfort over their gender identity, but is it raising patient safety concerns? Some of the children it
One of my proudest moments as a Daily Telegraph leader writer came in 2015 when I managed to persuade my masters that their paper should bestow official praise on Harriet Harman as she stepped down (for a second time) as Labour’s interim leader and made way for Jeremy Corbyn. The resulting editorial (you can read
Helen Whately, the care minister, is being tarred and feathered. She wrote a letter to an MP about student nurses, saying they are ‘supernumerary and not deemed to be providing a service’. The outpouring of fury online and, sadly, from some traditional media outlets provides an object lesson in all that’s wrong with the way
No. 10’s screeching U-turn on food for low-income kids over the summer will not do the government or ministers serious harm with the wider public. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. First, the public. They are not on Twitter. This fact cannot be repeated enough around Westminster. In a finding that should be tattooed
The Sunday Times says Boris Johnson is going to reject May-era proposals to allow people to “self-identify” changes of their legal gender. Some thoughts: 1. Trust this report. It’s by one of the best-connected reporters around and it’s consistent with public and private signals from inside government in recent months. The organised trans rights groups also
This will come as little surprise to anyone who has followed my writing over the last few years, but I have accepted that I simply do not understand politics at all. On Tuesday, the government announced that it was no longer urging primary schools in England to get all children back to school for some
The tale of JK Rowling, finally revealed as a modern-day witch guilty of wickedness over sex and gender, is one of those stories that captures just about everything bad about this issue and about public conversation conducted via, and shaped by, social media. Rowling’s crime was to tweet that biological sex is real and should
Imagine you have a child who says they believe they were born in the wrong body, describing what amounts to a fundamental and painful mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. Imagine the child you see as your daughter declaring that they are in fact a boy. Where would you turn for information?
Power does not corrupt. It reveals. It was once said of Abraham Lincoln: ‘Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.
At times such as these, politicians like to say that ‘this is not the time for politics’. Which is not true, of course, because politics never stops, and especially not the politics of personal advancement. Just as sharks must always swim forwards to stay alive, politicians must always be thinking about the next thing, the
Here are some numbers that too many people who work in and around politics don’t know. In any given year, around 700,000 young people turn 18 and leave school. A little under half of them go on to higher education (HE). The other half, around 360,000, do something else. Roughly half of these non-HE school
Schools should stay closed until September, according to a big teaching union: In view of the continued and pressing public health challenges and the considerable task that will be required to ensure that every school is ready to admit increased numbers of children and adults into safe learning and working environments, the NASUWT urges ministers
Every now and then, the House of Commons sees one of those speeches, a moment when an MP, generally a backbencher, speaks with power and clarity and honesty. Speeches that deserve to be heard far beyond parliament, partly because of what they say and partly because of how it’s said. Speeches that give politics a
It is open season on the Lobby. Social media is full of condemnation for political correspondents over the questions they ask at the daily coronavirus briefing. Polling, private and public, shows that UK trust in media reporting has suffered badly in this crisis. Ministers and officials privately rage about the quality of reporting on much
Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus comparable to a man who accosts you in the street and tries to steal your phone and wallet? Boris Johnson used the image of virus-as-mugger in his Downing Street statement today: If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger, which I can tell you from personal experience
