Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Just over half a million people migrated to the UK in the year to June. And half a million the year before – actually, it was 517,000, but let’s not quibble. A million, then, in two years…that’s quite something. But you wouldn’t have known from the news about the new immigration stats from the Home Office, which
Animal stories for children are always tricky; as J.R.R. Tolkien observed in his essay on fairy stories, you can end up, as in The Wind in the Willows, with an animal mask on human form. Watership Down has been described as a nice story about a group of English public schoolboys with occasional rabbit features.
It was a curious coincidence, don’t you think, that the sexual conduct findings that the Lancet published today coincided with the publication of a report from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, about child-on-child sexual violence? The two stories were juxtaposed uncomfortably in the news. In the case of the Lancet survey, which is conducted
Was any one actually surprised by the splash on immigration in yesterday’s Daily Mail? Its poll (of 1,027 people by Harris/Daily Mail) suggests that nearly two thirds of people think that immigration since 2004 has not been good for British society; eight in ten think that 176,000 net immigration last year was too much; and nearly
George Bernard Shaw made no bones about the merits of schooling: it was, he felt, a way for parents to offload the care of their children onto other people, and he was right. The rich do this systematically, of course, in delegating their children to boarding schools, but for the rest of us, Ed Miliband’s plan
Whenever a public figure says ‘we need a debate here’, as Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, has done, it doesn’t need much in the way of translation to interpret this as ‘let’s change the law to my way of thinking’. Alas, the debate he started so promisingly about lowering the age
It takes a lot to make the subject of immigration respectable for liberals, at least if you’re pointing out its problematic aspects. But Paul Collier, an Oxford economist specialising in the world’s bottom billion, has, in the 270-odd pages of his new book Exodus, opened up the issue for the left — well, for all
Did anyone else feel a bat-squeak of embarrassment, a ‘Not in My Name’ sort of feeling, at the barracking of a Russian composer at the Barbican last night? The only bit of the catcalls from the 60 or 70 protesters I could make out was ‘Shame!’ but it was vicarious shame I felt at the
Most Coffeehousers are probably profoundly and justifiably cynical about anything masquerading as a consultation exercise in politics, so it might spread a little cheer to see how the Catholic Church goes about it. There’s been a surprising fuss – BBC news coverage; leader in The Times – about Catholic bishops consulting the laity about matters
It’s not that often I feel a real bond with Richard Dawkins but no sooner did I read his diatribe about Osama bin Laden having won the global war on terror because he, Prof Dawkins, had had a jar of honey confiscated at the airport, than I realised that here was a kindred soul. The
Kosovo held regional elections over the weekend…and it rather looks as if the Serbs in the north of the country, in Mitrovica, stayed away in droves, notwithstanding the instructions from Belgrade that they should participate in the elections. The Serbian government stance is in turn dictated by Coffee Housers’ favourite EU politician, Britain’s own Cathy Ashton.
The outgoing chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Lisa Jardine, has been paying graceful tribute to the woman whose report enabled the Authority to be set up: Dame Mary Warnock. She was, observed Prof Jardine, in an aural essay on Radio 4’s A Point of View, regarded as something of a philosophical plumber
Well, the whole Royal Mail privatisation is going terrifically well, isn’t it? I’m not talking about the pricing of the issue which has obsessed most of the pundits. I’m talking about users. The latest exciting new development from this privatised company with the Queen’s head on the product is that it is to use new
Well, Prince George has already done his bit for the Church of England. Simply by getting baptised he will bolster a sacrament that pretty well defines Christianity and is, like the state church which he may yet be head of (assuming disestablishment never happens), in sharp decline. In 1950, nearly 70 per cent of the
Alas, it looks like the return to third class travel won’t happen. The papers had got terrifically excited about what seemed like a rolling back of 56 years, when British Rail finally ditched its working class fare. The story was on the back of the privatisation of the East Coast Line from Aberdeen to London, for which it
The Prime Minister and the Energy Minister, Ed Davey, were unanimous in their response to the British Gas price hike this week by 10 per cent, about four times the rate of inflation – described judiciously by the PM as ‘disappointing’. Shop around! they said. ‘We need more competition!’ cried Mr Davey. They haven’t yet
To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite what she meant to her readers first time round. It wasn’t just the way she seemed to sum up the female condition for unmarried women in their thirties — indeed, she put a name on
Rather to my embarrassment, I find that I missed last night’s episode of the BBC2 three-part series on The Ottomans, Europe’s Muslim Conquerors, in which I briefly featured. So Heaven knows what I actually said in it; it’s been a while since filming. But I’m rather hoping that the point I wanted to get across
The establishment has a target in its sights; you can always tell from the tone of the Today programme. In this case, it’s Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The occasion is the genuinely tragic case of Sarah Ewart, who travelled to Britain this week in order to abort a foetus with the most severe case of
Jeer if you will, but I was shocked by the latest Bridget Jones book, Mad About the Boy. I was shocked by the sex. No, honestly. Compared with its predecessors, including a one-off series about how Bridget got pregnant but wasn’t sure by whom, this latest book ratchets up the raunch quite markedly. Granted, Bridget
