Opinion

Education is in crisis. The government don’t want you to know this, just in case you start to doubt that we have a ‘strong and stable’ country. The government has slashed funding for the education of the masses. It doesn’t take someone who’s just aced their Year 6 Maths SATs to realise that more kids due to increasing population = more staff to pay to teach, support and equip these children. Add to that routine inflation each year and the...

Four years ago, I saw four young men going through the bins on the estate by my office, looking for food. I was staggered to discover that they all had jobs, but had only just started work and had to wait 5 weeks for their first pay cheques. After being on benefits for some time, these young men had got off their backsides and secured work, yet the state was refusing to help out in the period between the stoppage...

This week has seen the French political landscape change significantly on two fronts. Emmanuel Macron was elected the youngest President ever as head of a new party that exists outside of the dominant Parti socialiste on the left and Les Républicains on the right, an achievement that would have been considered impossible in a normal political environment. But these ain't normal times. The early years of the 21st century have been characterised by vast amounts of change which has been amplified by digital technology...

By Andy Irwin One hundred days ago, I stopped drinking alcohol. I stopped because, for ten years, my dependence on booze meant that I lost a lot of time. I made bad choices and lost touch with a bunch of people I cared about, and who cared about me. I frequently made a scene or woke up far away from where I was supposed to be. ‘Alcohol-dependent’ is a strong phrase; ‘alcoholic’ is a strong word. ‘Problematic drinking’ is the phrase...

Not to sound ungrateful, but inheriting a country that is awash with unaffordable housing, mega inflated education fees, toxic air and a juicy divorce case with its biggest trading partner is a pretty shoddy settlement as far as young Brits are concerned. MPs last week warned that young Brits will be priced out of the housing market for years because of a lack of urgency from “unambitious” ministers. The powerful cross-party Committee panned the Department of Communities in a scathing report for...

Night after night the misery of war is pumped out across our TV screens, our social media and on the pages of our newspapers, and yet, even in the face of war, people are driven to show extraordinary acts of courage and humanity. Like Antonina and Jan Zabinski, the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo who helped to save hundreds of people and animals during the German invasion and whose story is told in the film The Zookeeper's Wife that was...

Plans revealed by Labour this week to ban all zero hour contacts, put a halt to unpaid internships and end the cap on public sector staff may have been received as dreamy leftwing rhetoric by most political commentators, but they are in fact our only chance of rebalancing the spiralling levels of inequality that currently exist in Britain. Included in the 20-point blueprint is commitments to double paid paternity leave to four weeks, promises to increase the minimum wage to...

My old economics teacher used to say that regardless of what other big issues might be surrounding a General Election the thing that really sticks in the back of people’s minds when they head to the polling stations is whether they can put food on the table. Labour’s chances of winning this election have been predicted at slim to none by the pollsters, a factor largely based on their muddled approach to Brexit which is seen to be a decisive...

By Kate Grant, CEO of Fistula Foundation Last October in Kenya, a woman named Elizabeth bid farewell to her family and friends. She told them she would not return home until the incontinence she’d suffered for 21 years was cured. She set off to a nearby town, where a local community outreach group had organised a screening for women like her, who had symptoms of obstetric fistula, a devastating injury caused by childbirth that renders women incontinent until they can...