Published on
17 April 2019
Last week, Sir Roger Scruton was sacked from his role as Chairman of the ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission’ following an interview that he gave to the New Statesman. Scruton’s appointment in November had caused considerable controversy, so perhaps his deposition from his unpaid position might be seen in retrospect as all but inevitable. Nevertheless, […]
Published on
9 February 2017
Our last blog post started by describing 2016 as an atypical year. That year is now over – and it truly was exceptional in various respects. It seems pertinent to reflect with a little hindsight on what happened in the twelve months to 31 December last. Politically, socially, culturally – and even locally here at […]
Published on
8 November 2016
2016 was in many respects an atypical year. In the political arena, two events confounded and unnerved the grandees of establishment media: Brexit, and, in the U.S.A., the Republican nomination for the US presidential election. Donald Trump made headlines with his brash style, irascible temperament and often controversial statements – among which his denouncing of […]
Published on
17 May 2016
It seems as though last week was ‘gaffe week’ in Britain. First there was David Cameron describing Nigeria and Afghanistan as ‘fantastically corrupt’. At a reception in Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, the Prime Minister was caught on camera speaking informally to the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Speaker of the House of Commons. […]
Published on
3 March 2014
To the delight of secularists and ‘animal rights’ activists the Danish parliament last week passed a law banning Kosher and Halal methods of slaughter on the grounds that these violate the rights of animals. Dan Jørgensen, the Danish minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries told Denmark’s TV2 that ‘animal rights come before religion’. Unsurprisingly, Jewish […]
Published on
19 July 2013
The availability of pornography is nothing new, but reasons for prohibition need to be re-articulated, and sometimes re-discovered, as one generation succeeds another and re-evaluates what it has received of legislation and social mores from the past. There is no doubt that a certain public acceptance of pornography has grown significantly over the last twenty […]
Published on
20 March 2013
Posted in Civil Liberties, Ethics in the Media, Freedom, Liberty, Public Policy
The Royal Charter being set up in the wake of the Leveson Report marks an end to a period of 300 years in which government did not regulate the press. It is unprecedented in this country’s democratic history and should therefore be approached with great care. One does not have to look far to find […]
Published on
14 January 2013
Posted in Culture, Ethics in the Media, Music & Art
On Christmas Day 2012 Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, made its premiere. The film tells the story of an Afro-American slave in nineteenth-century America searching for his lost wife and of his efforts to achieve legal freedom. The historical background is bloody and the film is, as has been the case with many of […]