With her MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival on August 24 Emily Maitlis proved that while she may have left the BBC for the private sector, she is not done with public service. How else are we to describe Maitlis finally making public and explicit what has been known – and despaired of – inside the BBC for the last few years? In her speech, which largely tackled dealing with populism, Maitlis spoke of the challenges for the public broadcaster in remaining truly impartial when an “active agent of the Conservative Party” held a place on the BBC’s board, acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”. It is telling that it took someone who has left the BBC to state the ...

Imagine if a black MP argued that working-class kids should be taught with strict academic rigour. That fathers should play a more prominent role in the lives of their sons to curb the crisis of masculinity. What party would you think this black MP represents? The Conservative Party, you probably assume. But that would be wrong. In an interview with the Guardian this week, Festus Akinbusoye, Britain’s only black police and crime commissioner and a Conservative, argued that “when you look more closely at the values of African and Caribbean communities, they actually align more with Conservative values than otherwise is [assumed]”. Although the article doesn’t explicitly spell out what he claims these values are, I think he means things like ...

After a summer of skirmishing, marked by intermittent walkouts and the exchange of tetchy letters, the dispute between criminal barristers and the government has become existential. From next week barristers representing legally aided defendants will be on strike. Without defence advocates, defendants cannot be tried or sentenced.   Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, has refused to negotiate with barristers at all, although he did briefly break into his summer holiday to write a few tendentious paragraphs in the Daily Mail, accusing barristers of holding “justice to ransom”. Yet it is not barristers who have produced the dilapidated and underfunded justice system, or the vast backlog of cases that leads to witnesses and defendants waiting years for their trials. Nor can the surviving ...

Calls for the reform of our exam system have been gaining momentum, motivated in part by the disruption of Covid. This month, two independent reports on the future of national assessments in England have been published. One, released today (23 August) by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, calls for the replacement of GCSEs and A-levels with international baccalaureate-style continuous assessment and assessments of "collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity". The other, by Sam Freedman from the Institute for Government, unpacked the trade-offs in dismantling or reforming assessments – which are high stakes for both schools and students. It argued that, despite their problems, the costs of major reforms to exams are likely to far outweigh any reliable benefits. Freedman ...

In July a TikTok megastar and former kick-boxer whose entire personality is based around virulent misogyny was searched for more times on Google than Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump. Once hidden in the dark corner of the internet inhabited by the far-right, incels and so-called red pill followers, Andrew Tate and his ilk are now in the mainstream, and their brand of violent hatred towards women racks up billions of views on TikTok (from which he has now been banned, as he has from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube). Given TikTok’s target users are teenagers, many of those viewing Tate’s videos will have been young, impressionable boys. As a secondary school teacher, I’m worried about what this could mean for a ...

In a month’s time Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy is likely to become the first female prime minister of Italy, already prompting fears for abortion rights due to her party's "post-fascist" reputation. Meanwhile, the gay Israeli MP Amir Ohana, once one of Binyamin Netanyahu's staunchest allies, has performed well in the primary vote to select his right-wing party's candidates for the country's general election in November; Ohana, a former justice minister, is seen as a likely future leader of Likud and prime minister. These developments are part of a broader trend whereby women and LGBT people have become more prominent among national-populist political parties. At present more than half a dozen right-wing populist parties in Europe are led by women, ...

The return to normal exams after Covid disruptions has led to anguished front pages about students missing out on their university offers. This was always going to happen. The most selective universities have taken up more students than they could cope with over the past few years and need to regularise numbers again as grades drop back. But Covid readjustments are not the only thing putting pressure on places at selective universities, and competition is likely to get significantly tougher in the coming decade. First, because we are in the foothills of a demographic bulge that has been working its way through the education system. Between 2002 and 2012 the annual number of births in England and Wales went up by ...

Living through this summer’s Tory leadership contest is starting to feel like entering the “upside down” in an episode of Stranger Things. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak's response to soaring bills, inflation and drought seem to operate in a world in which logic is reversed: instead of supporting policies that could help lift the country out of its economically crippling dependence on fossil fuels, the two candidates are shooting them down. First, it was the green levies. Truss has said she would “strip out” these taxes on energy bills. Yet an analysis by Carbon Brief suggests that these will only constitute less than 3 per cent of the staggering £5,277 energy bills that could arrive in April. They also support the ...