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Dolan Cummings
This Life will eat itself
The sequel to the trendsetting Nineties series was more self-regarding 'reality TV' than real-world drama.
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Brendan O’Neill
‘Dangerous dogs’: code for underclass Britain
Behind the headlines about crazed pitbulls there's a salacious contempt for certain sorts of people.
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| Thursday 4 January 2007 |
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Chris Tyler
I’m A Celebrity…Get Me The Facts!
A science charity explains why it has created a helpline for celebs to check their facts before endorsing dodgy campaigns.
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Rob Killick
Are you the Person of the Year?
Time's claim that we web surfers have 'changed the world' shows how low our aspirations for change have sunk.
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Ethan Greenhart
What is the ethical way to detox?
Ask Ethan: Our eco-columnist offers advice on how to cleanse your mind, body and the planet in the New Year.
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Mick Hume
They couldn’t organise a hanging on a gallows
The furore over Saddam's 'X-ecution Factor' hanging reveals the state of Iraq – and the West's state of mind.
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Duleep Allirajah
My New Year’s Dis-Honours List
The gayest team, most po-faced censors and other Football Awards for 2006.
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Mick Hume
Sex at 16 - but no smoking afterwards
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's columns in The Times (London) this week.
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| Friday 5 January 2007 |
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Daniel Ben-Ami
There is no ‘paradox of prosperity’
So what if material progress doesn't always make us happy? It's still a good thing, and here's why.
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| Sunday 7 January 2007 |
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Emily Hill
Perfume? It's a stinker
The big screen adaptation of Patrick Suskind's 'unfilmable' bestselling novel leaves a bad smell.
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John Gillott
Who’s afraid of ‘Frankenbunnies’?
Scientists should vigorously oppose the UK authorities' clampdown on research involving 'hybrid' embryos.
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| Monday 8 January 2007 |
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Bill Durodié
The government is for turning
As U-turn follows U-turn, New Labour is looking more and more like a party devoid of direction.
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| Tuesday 9 January 2007 |
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Neil Davenport
Testing times for literacy
Declining standards cannot be reversed in the classroom alone - we need to recreate a passion for words in society at large.
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Nathalie Rothschild
Pretty predictable
Ugly Betty, the global drama-comedy franchise, hammers a familiar message: it's the inside that counts.
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Brendan O’Neill
‘Issue politics’? This is issue-avoidance politics
From Ruth Kelly's school choice to the footage of Saddam's hanging: why do we discuss everything but 'the thing' itself?
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Rob Lyons
The truth about organic food
It’s not healthier or Greener, and it's incapable of feeding the world. So why is it back in fashion?
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| Wednesday 10 January 2007 |
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Alan Miller
‘Something here stinks’
A report from smelly Manhattan on the various conspiracy theories about that New York 'gas cloud'.
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Nathalie Rothschild
A queer rally
The torch-lit protest by religious groups against gay rights regulations looked like a game of 'victim one-upmanship'.
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Mick Hume
How to create Africa’s Afghanistan
Just when long-suffering Somalis think things cannot get worse, along come US helicopter gunships.
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| Thursday 11 January 2007 |
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Tim Black
Apocalypto: Maya culpa
Mel Gibson's action-adventure depicting the fall of Mayan society is an anxious allegory about humanity today.
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James Woudhuysen
The EU’s post-industrial revolution
José Manuel Barroso's new energy policy represents a retreat from development driven by fear.
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Ethan Greenhart
How can we bring people back down to Earth?
Ask Ethan: Our eco-columnist disagrees with Tony Blair – it is practical to stop flying.
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| Friday 12 January 2007 |
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Mick Hume
Special needs are universal now
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's columns in The Times (London) this week.
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Duleep Allirajah
Sweet FA?
The FA Cup is little more than an enjoyable distraction from the serious business of League football.
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Emily Hill
‘If I am sent back, I will be jobless’
Emily Hill meets some of the highly skilled immigrants whose lives have been turned upside down by New Labour’s knee-jerkism.
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Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
The anti-MMR gravy train derailed
Revealed: How more than £15million of legal aid funding was spent by lawyers trying and failing to prove that the MMR vaccination causes autism.
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| Monday 15 January 2007 |
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Graham Barnfield
A very trying satire
Laughs and insight are thin on the ground in the wishful drama The Trial of Tony Blair, showing on More4 tonight.
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Josie Appleton
Life’s too short to be ‘carbon neutral’
Measuring everything we do by how much carbon it produces is a contemporary form of penance.
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Shirley Dent
Why I applauded the ‘BNP ballerina’
Who cares what Simone Clarke thinks in private? Her performance as Giselle was sprightly, springy and brilliant.
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| Tuesday 16 January 2007 |
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Rob Killick
Should we be afraid of State 2.0?
When it comes to state surveillance, the problem is not the computers but a climate of fear and insecurity.
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Brendan O’Neill
Iraq: now it’s a ‘gesture invasion’
President Bush's surge of an extra 20,000 troops is a political stunt rather than a military tactic.
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Daniel Ben-Ami
We’ve never had it so good
Interview: Indur Goklany, author of The Improving State of the World, slaps down today's voguish pessimists with some eye-opening facts.
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James Heartfield
A United Kingdom of Britain and France?
Revelations that the British and French discussed a merger in 1956 have been greeted with guffaws. It’s not that shocking.
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| Wednesday 17 January 2007 |
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Nathalie Rothschild
Ghosts in the immigration machine
Nick Broomfield’s film about the Morecambe Bay tragedy is emotive, but it fails to ask any probing questions.
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Cheryl Hudson
In praise of the IVF ‘miracle maker’
A mother treated at Mohamed Taranissi’s groundbreaking clinic in London defends him against the Panorama/HFEA witch-hunt.
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| Thursday 18 January 2007 |
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Ethan Greenhart
Is it ethical to build a new bathroom?
Our columnist offers advice on the green alternative to wasteful washing, brushing and flushing.
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Duleep Allirajah
Beck where he belongs
Los Angeles is filled with people who are more famous than talented. David Beckham should fit right in.
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Mick Hume
Look at the State they're in
Why is the Home Office demonstrating all the smooth-running efficiency of an Iraqi hangman?
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| Friday 19 January 2007 |
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Robin Walsh
Get a First Life
The desire to escape the real world and 'live' in online games like Second Life is no longer limited to lonely geeks.
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Mick Hume
All the world’s a reality TV studio
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's columns this week in The Times (London).
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Brendan O’Neill
Celebrity Big Brother: a Zzzz-list scandal
What’s behind the international handwringing over ‘Jade v Shilpa’?
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Tony Gilland
Behind the IVF ‘trial by television’
There is more to the HFEA regulators' pursuit of top infertility doctor Mohamed Taranissi than meets the viewer's eye.
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| Monday 22 January 2007 |
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Emily Hill
Tagged as a nuisance
Following the death of two ‘taggers’ in east London, chattering graffitists want a clampdown on those who give their art a bad name.
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Stephen Bowler
The open-air health scare
BBC TV's Street Doctor shows that there's nowhere to hide from today's tyranny of health advice.
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James Woudhuysen
Gambling addiction: a panic at odds with reality
Top doctors, business consultants and officials reckon we could all end up enslaved by the slot machines. Wanna bet?
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| Tuesday 23 January 2007 |
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Neil Davenport
Time to evict official anti-racism
The row over Celebrity Big Brother shows that hysterically witch-hunting 'racists' is a new British sport. Plus: Brendan O'Neill on Pete Burns.
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James Heartfield
Not-so-positive discrimination
Kevin Yuill’s enlightening new book shows that ‘affirmative action’ arose not from an optimistic vision of the future, but from despair.
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Mick Hume
Get the police out of politics
…and put some politics back in.
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| Wednesday 24 January 2007 |
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Philip Cunliffe
Serbia votes, the West decides
The people have marked their ballots, yet the region's future is more likely to be decided in New York than Belgrade.
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Anna Travis
Why the baby boomers have bombed
Michael Bywater's rage against the infantilism of modern life is insightful, but ultimately immature.
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Brendan O’Neill
Collusion ‘revelations’: disturbing but not shocking
Ten-year-late handwringing admissions that the NI security forces were in cahoots with loyalist gunmen are like therapy for the British state.
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| Thursday 25 January 2007 |
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Emily Hill
Skins: a skinful of stereotypes
E4's new teen drama Skins is, unfortunately, all it's cracked up to be: teen TV made by a committee of teenagers.
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Duleep Allirajah
Fantasy football racism
Football provided the template for the racialisation of trivial incidents that led to the 'Jade v Shilpa' debacle.
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Ethan Greenhart
Is it ethical to commemorate just one Holocaust?
Ask Ethan: Our eco-columnist offers advice on how to make Holocaust Memorial Day less speciesist and blinkered.
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| Friday 26 January 2007 |
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Mick Hume
Salvage some sense from Branscombe Beach
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London).
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Alan Miller
Another small freedom goes up in smoke
Some American states are now banning smoking in cars, as legislators creep ever further into our once-private lives.
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Nathalie Rothschild
A red light against enjoying food
Do the Food Standards Agency’s ‘traffic-light’ labels take the pleasure out of eating? We ask some grocery shoppers.
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Rob Lyons
A diet of misinformation
John Luik, co-author of Diet Nation, tells Rob Lyons that the obesity panic is being fattened by savvy interest groups and junk science.
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| Monday 29 January 2007 |
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Mick Hume
Mick Hume moves on – new editor for spiked
Six years after we launched spiked, I am vacating the editor’s chair.
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| Tuesday 30 January 2007 |
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Emily Hill
Over-protecting children? Bleurgh!
Interview: Kids’ TV icon Timmy Mallett hammers today's sanitisation of children's programming, but swallows the ban on junk food ads.
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Neil Davenport
Wanna be a worker?
Describing yourself as 'working class' has become a way of snobbishly dismissing materialism.
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Brendan O’Neill
Hands up if you’re suffering from Islamofatigue
Why spiked takes neither side in the ‘great political divide’ over whether Islamophobia or Islamofascism is the biggest threat.
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| Wednesday 31 January 2007 |
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Philip Cunliffe
'Popcorn politics'? It sticks in the throat
Blood Diamond, the Hollywood human rights thriller set in war-torn Sierra Leone, patronises both Africans and Western cinemagoers.
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Kevin Yuill
In search of a 'good death'
More people may support the 'right to die', but they often change their views when their own time comes.
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Frank Furedi
Denial
There is a secular inquisition that stigmatises free thinking.
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Munira Mirza
Mediating the Muslim experience
The co-author of a report that caused a transatlantic stir over Britain’s ‘militant Muslim youth’ puts some of the explosive headlines in perspective.
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Rob Lyons
Why the Home Office can't keep its house in order
A paranoid government that wants to put every citizen on a list and every criminal in a cell? No wonder the system seems swamped.
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