|
|
James Heartfield
Pervez Musharraf: Mau-Mauing the flak-catcher
The Pakistani president exploits Western fears of radical Islamism to boost his standing at home and abroad.
|
Rob Lyons
‘I want to hear human voices reacting to something’
Liverpool fan Tony Evans, author of Far Foreign Land, berates the sanitisation of modern football.
|
Kirk Leech
‘If the gold mine doesn’t happen, our village will die’
Kirk Leech reports from Rosia Montana in Romania, where green NGOs are trying to halt the building of a mine that locals desperately want.
|
 |
| Tuesday 3 October 2006 |
 |
Neil Davenport
A blog standard leader
Cameron's 'webcameron' stunt suggests he can only engage with the electorate as atomised teens behind a computer screen.
|
David Chandler
Whose Kosovo is it anyway?
The Serb government's restated claim over Kosovo was more a symbolic gesture than 'war talk'.
|
Mick Hume
The Not-Norman-Tebbit Party
Can Cameron's Conservatives pull off the remarkable feat of appearing even more of an empty shell than New Labour?
|
|
| Wednesday 4 October 2006 |
|
Ken McLaughlin
Why mental healthcare is a mess
It is the authorities' own ever-widening definition of what it means to be mentally ill that is straining resources.
|
Rob Lyons
Mums who sell junk food? Arrest them
In London last night, mayor Ken Livingstone outlined his radical agenda for punishing parents who dare to eat 'unethical food'.
|
Nathalie Rothschild
‘The police can’t tell satire from seriousness’
A member of Jewdas, the tongue-in-cheek Jewish community group, slams the arrest of Jewdas members for handing out 'offensive' leaflets.
|
|
| Thursday 5 October 2006 |
|
Neil Davenport
Politics for dummies
The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, a new BBC drama about a housewife-turned-politician, is childishly simplistic.
|
Duleep Allirajah
Turn the other cheek
Why were Everton fans so offended by Joey Barton's 'blue moon'? Flashing your buttocks is a noble tradition.
|
James Panton
Infantilising students
'Good behaviour contracts' for university students undermine the informal relations that make higher education possible.
|
Josie Appleton
Just 17? Then forget university
Paranoia about child protection means that brainy pupils who skipped a year at school are now being kept out of the ivory towers.
|
|
| Friday 6 October 2006 |
|
Mick Hume
Now New Labour bases health policy on old jokes
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London).
|
Emily Hill
Don’t junk kids’ TV
BAFTA-winning producer Anna Home says bans on junk-food ads are stifling independent children’s programming.
|
Brendan O’Neill
Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech
The demonisation of 'climate change denial' is an affront to open and rational debate.
|
|
| Sunday 8 October 2006 |
|
Patrick Hayes
‘It is like things are now, but worse’
Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic drama Children of Men may be set in 2027, but it is self-consciously 'about today'.
|
Ellie Lee
The wrong debate about abortion rights
Images of 'smiling' fetuses are no basis on which to judge what to do about unwanted pregnancies.
|
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
Autism: lack of services is the cruel joke
'Autistic' joins the lexicon of lazy political insults. So what?
|
|
| Tuesday 10 October 2006 |
|
Rob Lyons
A liberal porn movie
Death of a President provides little in the way of drama or enlightenment.
|
Nathalie Rothschild
Windsor: A town divided by race hate?
The media spotlight has left the royal town but the portrayal of minor skirmishes as race riots has left behind resentment.
|
Josie Appleton
A veiled debate
British women who wear the niqab have more in common with hoodies than with Islamic tradition.
|
Mick Hume
End this Muslim-Mania
The frenzied obsession with veils and all things Islamic looks like a distraction from facing up to some home truths about our society.
|
|
| Wednesday 11 October 2006 |
|
Robert Latona
A Spanish CSI story?
Recent conspiracy theories about the Madrid bombings are being used to settle scores in politics and the media.
|
Kevin Yuill
Foley’s follies
The downfall of Republican congressman Mark Foley may be rich with irony, but the obsession with personal behaviour is bad news for American politics.
|
James Heartfield
A secular version of Kingdom Come
Environmental polemicist George Monbiot's new book asks why people do not act on their fears of climate change. Good question.
|
Jennie Bristow
Get the inspectors out of our nurseries
Government regulation of childcare is making life difficult for parents, children and carers.
|
|
| Thursday 12 October 2006 |
|
Duleep Allirajah
Don’t give up the day job
Footballers should stick to tackling opponents, not obesity.
|
Emily Hill
Rotten boroughs
Maggots in bins and fines for non-compliance: the joys of recycling in suburban London.
|
Mick Hume
A North Korean Bomb? Not the end of the world
What this nuclear crisis reveals is not the 'power' of Kim Jong-il, but the impotence of Western foreign policy.
|
|
| Friday 13 October 2006 |
|
Ben Pile
Debunking the debunkers
There should be more to scepticism than angry rants about stupid religious people or New Age mysticism.
|
Mick Hume
Why is Madonna treating Africa like a little orphan that needs adopting?
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London).
|
Helene Guldberg
Publish, and you can still be damned
An 'historic' judgement in the House of Lords might make it easier to defend a libel case, but leaves press freedom subject to a bad law.
|
Brendan O’Neill
‘Get your hands off my balls’
Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London, says he'd like to give the 'self-appointed custodians of men's health' a bloody nose.
|
|
| Monday 16 October 2006 |
|
David Clements
Every Child Matters – but so does our privacy
We must not accept state intrusion in our private lives in the name of children’s ‘well-being’.
|
Josie Appleton
The case against vetting
A new report reveals the damage done by the never-ending expansion of criminal records checks for anyone involved with children.
|
Jack Shenker
Nothing’s simple in the Big Easy
The rebuilding of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina is a mixture of racial tensions, conspiracy theories and indomitable spirit. Jack Shenker reports from the Crescent City.
|
Dave Hallsworth
The day I stopped being a Stalinist
One Communist veteran recalls the impact of the Hungarian revolution on the British left.
|
Frank Furedi
My Hungarian revolution
What it was like to be a nine-year old 'class enemy' when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
|
|
| Wednesday 18 October 2006 |
|
Dolan Cummings
‘Free speech’ is more than a slogan
Those who suggest limits on free speech are in effect opposing rational debate - and painting a dim picture of humanity.
|
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
The new priesthood of the kitchen
The authors of Eating want food to be an ethical issue so they can sit in judgement on us all.
|
Mick Hume
Generals Against the War?
The head of the British Army giving the elected government its marching orders over Iraq is nothing to cheer about.
|
|
| Thursday 19 October 2006 |
|
Alan Miller
Debating Islam
The thorny issue of the West's relationship with Islamic countries and people provided lively debate at the New Yorker Festival.
|
Rob Lyons
How to become SPOTY
From sponsored swimmers to grieving golfers, being crowned BBC Sports Personality of the Year has less and less to do with being good at sport.
|
Emily Hill
Politics as therapy
You don't have to be mad to work for New Labour, but it helps.
|
Neil Davenport
Doesn’t this government know its limits?
The latest campaign against 'binge' drinking shows New Labour desperate to connect with, and control, young people.
|
|
| Friday 20 October 2006 |
|
Daniel Ben-Ami
The teenage face of Bush and Blair
The world’s leaders have hijacked a popular teenage character to give voice to their flawed views on global poverty.
|
Tristan Edmondson
The drugs policy don’t work
The expulsion of pupils from a Hertfordshire school for taking drugs during the holidays illustrates the mixed messages government gives to schools and young people.
|
Mick Hume
I want a divorce from the McCartneys
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London).
|
Nathalie Rothschild
All cash and no culture
Goldplated dips into the champagne lifestyle of the infamous Cheshire set.
|
Anna Travis
In defence of ‘stuff’
It’s the tales of pathological consumption that are dangerously out of control, not our spending.
|
Helene Guldberg
‘There’s no such thing as “stress”’
Angela Patmore has been branded a 'heartless bitch' for her attack on the stress management industry. Calm down and get a life, she tells her critics.
|
|
| Monday 23 October 2006 |
|
Nancy McDermott
Lonely adults, lost children
Todd Field's Little Children, showing at the London Film Festival, opens a window into America's soul.
|
Guy Rundle
You’ve been hoaxed
'Trauma memoirs' like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces may be written as true stories - but a suffering author is not the same as an authentic one.
|
Dan Travis
Treating volunteers like criminals will kill community sport
A tennis coach tells how burdensome regulations are putting volunteers off.
|
|
| Tuesday 24 October 2006 |
|
Neil Davenport
Are Muslims a threat to free speech?
So asked Channel 4, in a programme which revealed the real problem is the West’s own politics of inoffensiveness.
|
Rob Lyons
What ever happened to humane medicine?
It is scandalous that doctors are refusing treatment to patients who smoke, drink or eat junk food.
|
Mick Hume
When celebrities rule the Earth
It might seem trashy and trivial, but sometimes it is important to trash celebrity culture.
|
|
| Wednesday 25 October 2006 |
|
Tara McCormack
Benn against the big bad Wolfowitz
Ignore UK development minister Hilary Benn's posturing against the World Bank: both agree that Africa is incapable of self-government.
|
David Chandler
Aid: more about aiding the West than ‘the rest’?
Two new books by former World Bank officials argue that aid to Africa is driven by gesture and narcissism rather than concern for the poor.
|
Munira Mirza
Let’s have a heated debate
Officialdom's calls for a 'gentle, nuanced' debate about race, veils and multiculturalism is just another way of policing public discussion.
|
|
| Thursday 26 October 2006 |
|
Duleep Allirajah
Biting comments
Jermain Defoe's little 'nibble' inspired yet another round of jaw-dropping moralising about footballers.
|
Guy Herbert
Prisoners at the bar
Having a drink in one English town means everyone knows your name – including the authorities. Cheers.
|
Sandy Starr
The inspirational debate
Concluding views on 'What inspired you?', the spiked/Pfizer survey of key scientists ranging from 19- to 93-year-olds and from new talents to Nobel laureates.
|
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
Children: they aren’t what you feed them
Dogma trumps science in a new book telling parents how they can improve their kids’ mental health by changing their diets.
|
Brendan O’Neill
The phantom occupation of Iraq
Coalition leaders are not fighting a war with Iraqi insurgents; they are fighting a war among themselves, with Iraq as the unlucky backdrop.
|
|
| Friday 27 October 2006 |
|
Alan Miller
A transitional phase
New York's ban on trans fats shows how politics has gone from changing the world to changing our lifestyles.
|
Tristan Edmondson
Reawakening the ‘yellow peril’
An exhibition at the Battersea power station reveals the West’s double standards when it comes to Chinese modernisation.
|
Mick Hume
Who needs Borat when we’ve got the CRE chief?
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times.
|
Stuart Waiton
The roots of ‘paedophobia’
A new report, Freedom's Orphans, shows that adults are afraid to challenge children. But its proposed solutions would make matters worse.
|
Brendan O’Neill
‘The left has been infected by the disease of intolerance’
American free speech warrior Wendy Kaminer on liberals, hate speech and how students have become 'Young Authoritarians'.
|
|
| Monday 30 October 2006 |
|
Nathalie Rothschild
A film out of place
Lukas Moodysson’s Container is not so much a film as a weird modern art video. So what’s it doing in the cinema?
|
Alex Standish
Is there still room for the ‘huddled masses’?
Mid-term elections: a missed opportunity to debate the role of immigration in America today.
|
Brendan O’Neill
Who’s afraid of flag-burning?
Police proposals to ban the desecration of flags should be shot down in flames.
|
|
| Tuesday 31 October 2006 |
|
James Woudhuysen
Transport innovation: slowing to a standstill
New Labour’s deep-seated hostility to popular mobility is holding back advances on roads, railways and in the air.
|
Daniel Ben-Ami
How about building nuclear reactors in Africa?
The proper response to climate change is a massive expansion of energy supply rather than Scrooge-like curbs on demand.
|
Mick Hume
A Stern lifestyle lecture
Now taxing our behaviour is promoted as the way to save the planet from humanity.
|
