Looking at the list breaking down the reasons for which people are granted Personal Independence Payments (PIPSs), up to £180 a week to help them with their daily living and mobility, one cannot help but be reminded of the London Bills of Mortality of the seventeenth century, when some people died ‘frighted’, or of ‘grief’,
This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is. A migrant is not just
In some countries, the study and pursuit of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proceeds apace, while in this country the practice of Artificial Unintelligence (AU) becomes ever more widespread. AU is the means by which people of perfectly adequate natural intelligence are transformed by policies, procedures and protocols into animate but inflexible cogs. They speak and behave,
A contributory factor to the continuing impoverishment of Britain is psychiatric diagnosis – or rather, the superstitious official belief in it. More than two thirds of Incapacity Benefit claims over the space of two years were for supposed psychiatric conditions. Psychiatric diagnosis has produced more invalids than the first world war. It is the foundry
Mr Timpson, the new prisons minister, is the head of a company that employs about 600 ex-prisoners, and this is an admirable and humane social service. But good as this experience is, it is insufficient to decide on public policy as a whole. In a recent interview, Mr Timpson said that there were far too many people
The concept of mental health is a hypochondriac’s, narcissist’s, shirker’s and social security fraud’s charter: for who can prove that someone does not so feel depressed, anxious, or grief-stricken that he is unable to work? Who can distinguish between can’t, won’t and would rather not? Unfortunately, mental health has come to mean any deviance from
Sixty years ago, my biology teacher told me (so it must have been true) that after the war, some Americans were so delighted that the restrictions on food had been lifted that they ate capsules containing a tape worm so that they could eat to their heart’s content without getting fat. This, of course, revolted
If you repeatedly ask someone to do something that is inherently, and obviously, impossible, and then blame him for not having done it, you might be suspected of ulterior motives, such as a desire to hide something such as your own incompetence. And so it is with the criticism constantly levelled at the Probation Service,
There is a modern superstition that for every terrible experience suffered there is an equal and opposite psychological technique that, like an antibiotic in a case of infection, can overcome or dissolve away the distress it caused or continues to cause. This superstition is not only false and shallow but demeaning and even insulting. It
The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By then, of course, this famous neurochemical had become the key to a perfect human existence, too little or too much of it resulting in all the little problems that continue to plague mankind. If only
The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the system of parole is disgraceful in theory and irredeemably unwork-able in practice. The only thing that it is good for is the employment of large numbers of officials engaged in pointless or fatuous tasks who
Paris The rat is an intelligent, flexible and determined creature that’s difficult to eliminate A rat’s not called a rat for nothing, and — as we are repeatedly told — we are never very far from one. Certainly not in Paris, where I sit, which has seen a great increase in their number recently. There’s
The French election, of unprecedented interest, hazard and potential for violence, has been largely about who is to blame. Blame for what, exactly? For the country’s chronic malaise. But is it the fault of the bankers, the bosses, the bureaucracy, or the immigrants? Quite often the British press gives the impression that France is in
Whenever I return to England from my home in France I am struck at once by the number of grossly fat people of beached-whale proportions, by the almost militant vulgarity of much of the population, and by the shabbiness of the infrastructure. This suggests to me that our deeper problems are unrelated to our membership
Mental health is a slippery concept at best and according to the annual prevalence rates given in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, people in north America and Europe suffer from an average of about two-and-a-half psychiatric conditions a year. This suggests that either we are all mad or the
If there is one characteristic that accounts for the deep unattractiveness of the modern British, it is their lack of self-control. It is not merely that they lack such self-control as they scream their obscenities in the street, eat everywhere they go, and leave litter behind them: it is that they are actively opposed to
Mao Tse-tung was by far the greatest therapist of drug addiction in world history. He threatened to execute opium addicts if they didn’t give up. Threats to murder were about the only utterances of Mao’s that could be believed, and 20 million addicts duly gave up. I hope you don’t think that I am advocating
There is no better way of discrediting an opinion than by attributing it to a psychological quirk or peculiarity. The task is then not to refute it, but to explain it away by reference to its murky psychic origins. For a number of years, doubt about the wisdom of a European project (whose end can
‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,’ said the Soviet worker in the good old days; the British criminal could nowadays say with equal reason, ‘They pretend to punish us and we pretend to reform.’ Recent statistics show that two thirds of young criminals ordered to wear electronic tags break their court
The slowest and most expensive museum refurbishment in world history must be that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is taking longer and costing more than it took and cost to build it in the first place. Let us hope that the result will be magnificent, with all the interactive features that any modern child
