BERLIN – France's president is not ready to make concessions. Emmanuel Macron’s first public appearance since forcing an unpopular increase in the retirement age through parliament on 16 March may have been intended to calm a seething nation. But little about his statements will reassure those still livid about the reform and his means of passing it. Macron gave an interview to French public television at 1pm today (22 March), French time, a time of day that was interpreted as being targeted at the elderly, the president’s core electorate and the most favourable to the retirement reform, according to polls. Working-age people – far more likely to oppose raising the pension age from 62 to 64 – were also the ...

The former prime minister Boris Johnson will take an oath on the bible at 2pm this afternoon (22 March) and saddle up for a four-hour grilling by the Privileges Committee on whether he deliberately misled parliament on the partygate scandal. He accepts that the Commons "was misled by my statements" but will argue they "were made in good faith and on the basis of what I honestly knew and believed at the time". In a 52-page dossier outlining his defence yesterday, Johnson admitted "it is now clear" there were parties in Downing Street during Covid but "however they began, went past the point where they could be said to have been reasonably necessary for work purposes". More WhatsApp messages between him and No ...

The tragic death of Ruth Perry, the headteacher of Caversham Primary School in Reading, has reopened the debate about the role of Ofsted. Sadly, some reporting and comment has ignored the Samaritans guidance that “speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and should be avoided. Suicide is extremely complex and most of the time there is no single event or factor that leads someone to take their own life.” Nevertheless it is unsurprising that such a heartbreaking incident would lead the profession's growing frustration about the role of Ofsted to boil over. Even though it has been around for more than 30 years, the schools sector has never fully accepted Ofsted. There are occasional peaks ...

For decades, as a litany of scandals has unfolded, the Metropolitan Police, which employs around a quarter of police officers in England and Wales, has focused on making excuses for itself. The problem, we have repeatedly been told, lies not with the institution but with a small number of unrepresentative officers – the so-called bad apples. There is always someone, or something else, to blame for systemic failings. The 363-page report by the crossbench peer Louise Casey – which was commissioned as part of a review following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met police officer, Wayne Couzens – should mark the end of such apologias. It concludes that the Met is institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic. ...

The Metropolitan Police is “institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic” an investigation into its culture and standards has found. The report makes for depressing reading. The child protection service has “major inadequacies”. Female officers and staff face misogyny on a routine basis. The vetting process for police officers is inadequate. “Predatory and unacceptable behaviour has been allowed to flourish,” the report says. “Eye-watering force” is used against black people. Louise Casey, a crossbench peer and former victims’ commissioner, found that Britain’s largest police force was more concerned about protecting its own reputation than protecting Londoners. There will now be a debate over how to respond to the report. The Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, said the revelations in the report were “ghastly” but that ...

Back in December 2019 Russia announced a plan: the birth of the RuNet. This cordoned-off internet would allow the Kremlin to tighten its control over what Russians saw online, curtailing free speech and blocking certain Western sites and platforms. I had thought then that the "splinternet" would be the sole preserve of authoritarian states like Russia and China, and that it would involve installing the internet infrastructure equivalent of roadblocks in the cabling that connects our planet. To create a splinternet (a portmanteau of “splintered internet”) would require significant technical know-how and plenty of infrastructural work. Three-and-a-bit years on, I realise I was wrong. TikTok is being banned from government devices around the world, and other organisations such as the BBC are ...

Two things are true about the photo of Suella Braverman doing the rounds after her trip to Rwanda at the weekend – head thrown back, mouth wide open, cackling like the villain in a children’s cartoon as she stands in front of a site that could be used to house asylum seekers deported from the UK. The first is that the version of the photo that went viral on social media has been edited. The original, uncropped version shows some other people standing beside Braverman (her guides around the Bwiza Riverside Estate construction site, according to the Daily Mail) smiling and laughing with her. The context shows that this is a photo of three people sharing a joke, not of the ...

Top trolling, Oxfam. Short of demanding a ban on common sense, warm beer and Fawlty Towers, it could scarce have done more to endanger blood vessels in the anti-woke faction by publishing its 92-page “inclusive language guide” for staff and contributors. Incorporating sections on “feminist principles for language use” and “race, power and decolonization”, as well as an acknowledgement that “this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation”, it met with predictable uproar and ridicule from, among others, the Mail, the Telegraph and GB News.  These outlets seemed especially exercised by the idea that the gender-neutral “parent” might be preferable to “mother” or “father” in certain contexts, and by advice to avoid terms such as “headquarters” and “field trip” because of their colonial connotations. Suitably damning comments were ...