Tony Blair is back. His #FutureOfBritain conference yesterday (30 June) promised a "new policy agenda" transcending the outdated left-right divide. So far, so "third way". The stated intention is to inject ideas into the public debate and revitalise the sensible centre of British politics. In reality, however, his aspirations amount to a thinly disguised attempt to hijack the left once more – bending the "arc of history" in the direction of a broad progressive alliance that owns the future. Technology has superseded globalisation as the driver of historical evolution, but the Blairite playbook remains the same: scientifically determining the true path towards enlightened modernity. At the heart of Blair’s thinking is the blind belief in progress underpinned by technological innovation. Yet, ...

At my first ever Pride, it pissed it down. I was in my late teens, and central London was one big (PG-rated) gay sauna. My hair frizzed, which would usually make me self-conscious, but no one there – queuing for the portaloos in Soho Square, or day-drinking outside the Angus Steakhouse – seemed self-conscious about anything. Self-consciousness was passé there. So, for a blissful few hours, I decided to be a proud lesbian. A lot has changed since then, queer rights-wise. My personal pride came and went. The Equality Act was introduced, same-sex marriage came in 2013, Prince William appeared on the cover of Attitude, and increasingly, every corporation from Barclays to BAE Systems is desperate to show off (in Pride ...

At a hen party I was at recently, some attendees were surprised when another guest queued up Kate Bush’s 1978 debut single “Wuthering Heights” on the karaoke machine. No one in that small, dark room had been born earlier than 1995, and there were a few raised eyebrows when the bride and one of her bridesmaids began their warbling (“Out on the wily, windy moors” was quite the contrast to the Beyonce and Taylor Swift lyrics we had otherwise been singing). But the moment spoke to the brilliance of the contemporary music era: that nearly every song ever recorded is available to discover and enjoy, to find your own interpretation of, and to make important in your own relationships – even ...

“Wouldn’t it be more freeing to let [sex] be irrelevant?” wrote Marie Le Conte for the New Statesman a couple of weeks ago. Le Conte was considering heated debate over what role sex should play in modern feminism. No role, she argued. In fact, she suggested that feminists have been too preoccupied with this question for too long and that there should be "a space for a feminism that doesn’t care much about sex”. While it is a tempting conclusion, the problem is that it is impossible to talk about, or understand, sex without acknowledging the context in which it exists. You cannot separate the act from its meaning, a meaning which is crafted in a world of misogyny and ...

Anyone who did an arts or literary degree will be ruefully familiar with the tease from family members, friends or just a random bloke in the pub. “Media studies?” “Art history?!” These are maligned as Mickey Mouse degrees – easy to coast through, containing no inherent value (although I’ve never really understood the analogy, given that Mickey Mouse is probably one of the most enduring symbols of corporate success and capitalistic value in existence). There’s nothing original about such gentle ribbing, however; what is a new, and now a deeply worrying trend, is the gradual disappearance of creative subjects and social science degrees from colleges and universities, as demonstrated by the suspension of a dedicated English literature degree this week by ...

If you wanted a single image to sum up why the Metropolitan Police has been put under the special measure known as “engage”, you couldn't do much better than the one in which two uniformed men are physically pinning a woman in her twenties to the ground simply for attending a vigil for a woman murdered by a serving police officer.  Patsy Stevenson was just one of hundreds of women attending the vigil for Sarah Everard in March 2021. It was held on Clapham Common, very near to where the Met officer Wayne Couzens “arrested” Everard for breaching Covid regulations, before driving her to Kent, raping and strangling her. Couzens, it later emerged, had been nicknamed “the rapist” by his colleagues ...

Bill Clinton once said that "abortion should be safe, legal and rare". At the time of his presidency, the darling of the Democrats could get away with this fairly reserved opinion. Clinton could not have predicted that within two decades a generation of young Americans would be pushed to extremes – conservatives on the one hand, raised on “abortion debunked in four minutes” videos, and an increasingly hyperactive, purple-haired brand of pro-choice liberals on the other. Contrary to popular liberal opinion, you cannot put the overturning of Roe vs Wade down to a wave of increasingly active conservative teenagers, even if the number of them is increasing. They represent only one side in a shrill culture clash, and a look at the other might ...

At the last election the Conservative Party won 64 per cent of the vote of those aged 65 and over – and only 19 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds. As one of the few zoomers – ie, members of Gen Z – who voted Tory (I'm 22), I have despaired over recent announcements that suggest my party is more interested in pandering to wealthy boomers than it is in winning over the next generation. Last week the government refused big pay rises for strikers. Broadly, I agreed with this – rail workers tend to get paid above the national average anyway, and avoiding a wage-price spiral is crucial as inflation approaches 10 per cent. Yet I was incredulous to see ...