Professor of Philosophy, author: philosophy, politics, history of ideas, culture.
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Education can be a hot potato in politics, and temperatures are rising yet again with indications that Andy Burnham wishes to put practical and academic education on an equal footing, focusing on relevance to today’s world and its exigencies.
Among the spate of initiatives announced by Andy Burnham in his first week as the UK’s Prime Minister is his proposal for greater devolution of powers to the regions and the idea of codifying the constitution.
In the palmy year of 1874 the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTM), which had been founded in Cleveland, Ohio, presented a petition to Congress in Washington calling for the ‘making, selling, importation and exportation of intoxicating liquors’ to be banned.
Though my political sympathies lie within the spectrum of the cluster ‘left, liberal, progressive’ (not a coterminous set of terms) I find myself agreeing with an important point made by R.
In everything that Trump and MAGA do in the way of pushing back against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives and asserting White Supremacist values (‘values’) there sound the echoes of the worst-ever Supreme Court decision in US history, the Dred Scott case.
Trump’s primetime television speech on Thursday 16 July was about ‘election vulnerabilities’, focusing on outside influence primarily from China, and the fallibility of voting machines and processes.
Dr Johnson, the Great Panjandrum of literature, said that ‘quotation is the parole of the literary man’.
Ancient Egyptians literally saw their god, and felt its power on their backs, on a daily basis.
Democracy is about voters picking their politicians, not politicians picking their voters.
Here is a personal note.
Washington DC is famous among other things for its springtime cherry blossoms.
Few will now remember the Labour politician Denis Howell, later Lord Howell of Aston Manor, who in the famously long hot summer of 1976 was appointed Minister for Drought.
I met the late and much lamented Arjen Hoekstra, ‘Mr Water Footprint’, in the Antarctic in 2015.
For weather like this a Jon Snow – a King of the North – seems to be the order of the day, Mancunian levels of precipitation and temperature looking most desirable at present.
That great philosopher Oscar Wilde said, ‘Most people are other people.
Join us at the National Rejoin March this Saturday, 20 June 2026
Bad times are times of opportunity.
As someone perennially allergic to conspiracy theories I once found it hard to accept quite everything said about a Far-Right campaign to sew discord by promoting violent racist outbursts such as those over the Henry Nowak murder and the Belfast stabbing in recent days.
Another thing, among many, that Trump does not understand is the nature of legacy.
Chapeau big time to French Senator Claude Malhuret.
