An HGV Will Be Along One Day To Pass Sentence...

I plead guilty.

 Oh good...

I have loved and used the streets of London all my life, as a cyclist, driver and pedestrian. Touch wood, I have done so without accident, blemish or insurance claim. Yet now I find myself perpetually on the wrong side of the law. Regulation has become bureaucratic and chaotic.

That's not unusual for a cyclist, is it? But they usually aren't so remorseful and just why do you feel you cannot obey the laws around driving? 

When I try to drive at the authorised speed of 20mph on many through roads, I am hooted at and overtaken by vans, cars, coaches and buses. And when I sit dutifully on my bike at a traffic light, I am jostled by swarms of cyclists riding through on red, furious at being treated as if they were car drivers.

So? As my mum was wont to say 'If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it?' In fact, I bet it's something everyone's mum said, except apparently Simon's.

As for pedestrians, walking on many pavements is like taking a ride on the dodgems. Riders of ebikes and e-scooters ignore bans and expect everyone to move out of the way.

Bans which aren't enfoced might as well not exist, we all know this... 

I normally approve of anarchy. There is too much regulation everywhere. The great Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman boldly advocated “shared space” in cities. He wanted kerbs, road markings and traffic signals minimised and replaced by “human discipline”. All road users should navigate urban space by watching out for each other all the time.

In a cohesive and monocultural society such a thing is possible, but we no longer have one of those, do we? 

As a lifelong cyclist I admit to finding a certain exhilaration in riding a bike. I avoid main thoroughfares but like snaking through streets crammed with traffic, finding shortcuts through alleys and mews. But the essence of cycling is to keep moving. Hence I have to admit to sometimes doing what many London cyclists do at red lights. That is, look carefully, follow Monderman and “share” any unoccupied road space ahead by riding on.

And one day, you'll come a cropper. What a loss to journalism that will be! 

Ebikes now come in all shapes and speeds. It is astonishing that the sleek Freesky Alaska, with its 250W engine, can be treated as if it was just another manual pedal bike. To my mind, it is blatantly a motorbike. When a delivery driver on one careers past me in Hyde Park, I wonder if I took a wrong turning. These machines must be put on the roadway where they belong.

Since we can't uninvent them, I suppose that's the next best thing. 

She Can't Stay In The Closet, It's Not Big Enough...

As you might know if you read my columns, see me a mile away, or talk to me for five seconds, I am a card-carrying lifelong member of the Fat Lesbian Club.

I wonder what sort of cards they carry… 

However, ever since I first laid eyes on the television show Roseanne (very important to me) as a small child, the actor John Goodman has held a special place in my heart. It was confusing for me: did I want to be Dan Conner, or be with Dan Conner? I’m still not sure. He has always been so hot to me, from Dan on Roseanne to Fred Flintstone to Walter in The Big Lebowski. His body has now drawn attention in the last week or so, after a photo of him showing significant weight loss went viral.

He looked ill. Of course the media was rife with speculation. 

It’s not Goodman’s 74-year-old body (his choice) I want to discuss, but instead the arguments that broke out about how he lost the weight. On one side there were many people congratulating him on his hard work. Then there were people claiming he had taken Ozempic so it wasn’t actually hard work, and then there were people defending that by saying he’d been losing weight for years, so he’d done it the “right way”, actually.

I don’t know the details and I don’t care, but none of this is good.

For someone who ‘doesn't care’ you’re rather dwelling on it.

I’m a fat person. We are constantly badgered and tortured by a society that tells us to lose weight, at all costs. If you’re fat, that’s a moral failing: you’re lazy and unhealthy.

Society has spent decades telling fat people that our value depends on our ability to control our weight. Now there is medicine that can make that control easier, and suddenly the problem is not the weight but whether the person has suffered sufficiently to “deserve” it. People resent us for being fat, and they resent us for getting thin.

My god, ‘Not The Nine O’clock News’ was spot on, wasn’t it? 

And I Bet You Don't Feel As If You Played Any Part In Breaking It?

To call this Saturday the nation’s 250th birthday is to indulge a comfortable fiction. 1776 was a declaration, not a birth certificate – and the founders wrote its claims of human equality while this nation enslaved human beings

Says who? well, 'Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist' So you know what you’re in for.

So I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250”, and I’m not alone.

The affection is thin this summer: the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction early this year. That is not ingratitude. Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision.

Without the context, this statement is worthless. There's no definition of 'the country's direction' to say exactlt what they were dissatified with - it might as well have been the march of progressive ideas as the return of conservative ones.

Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts.

Wait for it, wait for it… 

The president tried, by executive order, to read the children of undocumented and temporary residents out of the 14th amendment. The court blocked him, six to three – though only five justices joined the chief justice’s full constitutional reasoning. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, concurring, called the Reconstruction amendments “an anticaste, antisubordination reset”, not “a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery”. The citizenship clause was not a gift the founders left us; it was a repair, built after Dred Scott, slavery and war to overrule a court that had made blood the measure of belonging.

Birthright citizenship is proof that the founding promise did not preserve itself; it had to be rebuilt into the constitution after the country’s own highest court exposed the lie beneath the celebration.

Does this man realise that the Founding Fathers were facing a much different world when they wrote that into the Constitution? 

The victory did not last the afternoon. Within hours, the president called the ruling “too bad for our Country” and told Congress to “start TODAY” on ending birthright citizenship, insisting no amendment was needed. That is not how the constitution works – ordinary legislation cannot rewrite a constitutional guarantee. But he is reaching for a door a sixth justice left ajar: Brett Kavanaugh wrote that Congress could carve out exceptions by statute. A repair can be upheld in the morning and marked for demolition by nightfall.

Repair also means seeing people as people. The court upheld state laws barring transgender girls from girls’ sports, and in the West Virginia case it let the category decide without asking whether excluding one child – who socially transitioned in grade school and took puberty blockers before she ever competed – actually served the state’s stated interests. That isn’t equal protection. It’s permission to discriminate.

The court upheld state laws banning BOYS from girls sport as the voters in that State evidently wanted...but discrimination is a 'bad' word, even when it's the right thing to do to protect the integrity and safety of female sport. 

Celebration will not house people, protect voters or repair what power is trying to break. A country can be taken apart slowly, lawfully, one ruling at a time – and the people taking it apart are not vandals but officials: a president who cancels a housing signing by lunchtime, a court that clears the way for the largest checks, all of it done in the name of patriotism. The answer is not fireworks, and it is not despair. It is to name plainly what is being damaged, and by whom – then to get busy fixing it.

Trump has named it - it's people like you, with an extreme progressive agenda - and he's getting busy fixing it.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Opines....

...on the subject of water. And a column from the most vapid of the 'Guardian's' stable is always a treat, eh, Reader?

Like many who saw it, I was saddened and shocked at the disregard for animals: people were clambering over nests, and trying to reach an island specially safeguarded for birds. Yet I also wondered what a polarised, emotive debate is going to achieve when, lurking behind the justified anger, is another question about our access to water.

Eh?  

“It’s like nothing is free any more and that’s not fair for us as well. We don’t want to pay for … natural water” – this comment, given anonymously by one of the swimmers to the Times, was telling. There’s a feeling, I think, nationally, that our water no longer belongs to us. It is being cynically polluted, fenced off, or monetised.

Well, too bad, you have to pay for everything worth having in this life! 

It’s great that we are seeing new designated swimming spaces, but demand is only going to increase as the climate continues to heat up.

Maybe, or maybe we'll switch to demanding aircon on the taxpayer's dime?  

The well-known bathing ponds on either side of the wildlife pond on Hampstead Heath used to operate on an honesty system. Now you have to pay, and in hot weather the queues are long. At the same time, temperatures are getting hotter and hotter, and city life is becoming less bearable. There are not enough accessible places to swim.

Well, gosh, its almost as if honesty systems don't work anymore when you transition from a high trust society to a multicultural one! 

On the one hand, wild swimming has become totally fetishised, tweely marketed as a middle-class lifestyle choice and a cure-all, and spots where you can swim are more and more swamped. On the other, you have “no swimming” signs but very little clarity about why they are there (at the wildlife pond in Hampstead Heath it’s not made clear why that one, of the three, is off limits, and there was scant information about the birds and their habitat), let alone a proper national conversation about what our rivers, seas, lakes and ponds are for.

As if anyone from the most selfish generation would read it, or care if they did! 

The many campaigns against the pollution of our rivers and seas have been excellent, but as well as those, and teaching children to swim, we should be discussing how we navigate risk and educate people about the potential impact of open water swimming both on human and animal lives. By all means issue more fines – but also put up boards explaining why people shouldn’t swim, just as “no swimming” signs in danger spots should explain the actual risks.

If organisations were to put up signs warning of the danger of drowning, they would get complaints  about them being that most overused modern word, ‘triggering’ and if they were to put up signs noting the prevalence of drowning deaths amongst ethnic minorities , that too would attract campaigners whining that water is racist! 

They can’t win, so the only sensible move is not to play the game!

In some ways, the Hampstead Heath saga reminds me of the visceral response to the felling of the sycamore gap tree: valid anger about the environment or animal welfare escalating to an irrational point, with outraged comments online wishing diarrhoea and vomiting on the swimmers.

As an island nation, swimming is encoded in many of us from a very young age. As people continue to lose their lives, education and investment are more urgent than ever.

Only if the people we were losing were worth saving, Rhiannan.... 

People With Disabilities Worst Affected, Says Guess Who...

I used to love a heatwave. I was the sort of British person who acted like I was in the Mediterranean if the sun was slightly visible, coercing friends to take the outside restaurant table and eagerly working in the garden until my MacBook started to overheat rather than my internal organs. That was until I developed post-viral fatigue from the flu nine years ago.

Yup, it's Frances Ryan, the 'Guardian's perennial disability whinger.

Now, the heat means suffering rather than pleasure: less energy, more pain and worse breathing. This has only increased as heatwaves across Europe have soared. I have spent this week of record-high May temperatures in the UK largely in bed, with the blinds drawn and two 5ft-high fans looming over me like security guards at a club no one wants to get into.

How nice for you, the rest of us were at work. Someone has to pay for your benefits, after all. 

And yet there is a fact that many have not yet wrestled with: the millions of homes now enjoying air conditioning don’t house most of the people who really need it.

Well, who do they house? After all, the fact they bought aircon surely shows they do need it? 

While the wealthy and healthy can find tens of thousands of pounds to kit out their houses with built-in AC systems, disabled and chronically ill people – who are disproportionately on low wages or out of work long term – must make do with an Argos fan.

Even the lower-cost portable AC units, which cost hundreds of pounds, are out of reach to many people relying solely on disability benefits. And then there are the swathes of disabled people who rent (if you have a disability, you’re less likely to own your own home) who won’t have the right to upgrade their properties.

🙄  

Every time I see a reel on social media of chronically ill people wearing eye masks in bed during the day because the sunlight physically hurts them, I wonder exactly how many “record hot bank holidays” we plan to put marginalised communities through without support.

Do you have a solution, or just a grievance? 

There is, of course, a short- and long-term way of tackling this, if there was political will. As climate activists reluctantly argued this week, AC needs to be urgently installed as an emergency measure in schools, care homes and other places where people vulnerable to heat live.

Oh, I should have been more specific - do you have an affordable and sustainable olution? 

And yet AC is not sustainable for ever. Its environmental impact means it is as much a cause as a solution to climate breakdown.

It is also fundamental – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – to address the climate crisis that is actually causing our heatwaves, for example through reducing emissions and shifting to renewable energy.

So that’s ’No’ then…. 

I have bought AC for my bedroom that will be ready to use soon. I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky that I can afford it. Unlike millions of others, by the next heatwave, I will have a room to stay safe in.

If only it was soundproof and had nice soft walls…. 

Most Of Us Don't Fall For This, Emma

When did food become medicine? There’s all the pseudoscientific supplementary stuff, but even normal food has started to feel functional, mere units of nutrition. A tally runs in my head of things I “need” to eat: am I getting enough oats, beans, leafy greens? What about nuts?

The edible sort, or your equally neurotic fellow columnists at the 'Guardian', Emma? 

I’m not sure I remember what I actually enjoy eating any more. I’m certain no one on earth enjoys eating flaxseeds – they have all the personality of polystyrene packaging chips – but I choke them down daily, for my cholesterol and gut health.

Then more fool you!  

A twentysomething man I know told me he knows the protein content of every food, which conjures the spectre of the generations of women unable to erase calorie counts from their brains. We’re making food a source of anxiety, not enjoyment.

I refuse to belive any  normal red-blooded chap would, but then I realise the sort of circles Emma likely runs in... 

It’s a luxury problem...for those with means, dietary neurosis is whipped up and egged on by companies and influencers, convincing us we need “immunity shots”, “brain food” packs and protein bars.

Indeed it is, most of us look askance at this sort of ultra-processed crap and wouldn't eat it if we could afford to.

Could we stop seeing eating as another way to self-optimise and remember it’s a daily joy? With Lent coming up, I’ve decided to observe what I’m calling “anti-Lent”. I’ll be giving up consuming anxiety-inducing nutritional content and instead eating food I love every day. It definitely won’t include sea moss.

Congratulations on joining the majority of people at last!  

For Once, You're Right, Rhiannon - Why Should I Care?

What do James McAvoy and my three-year-old son have in common? Very little, you might think, notwithstanding their shared awareness of the book The Dinosaur That Pooped a Planet. Yet their lives overlap in a more tangible way, because they, along with Benedict Cumberbatch, patronise the same cafes on Hampstead Heath. Both actors have signed a petition protesting against the takeover of four family-owned north London cafes by the Australian-inspired chain Daisy Green. It’s a move that has dismayed the local community, leading to protests, and threats of legal action against the landowner, the City of London Corporation, whose new funding model for green spaces prioritises “income generation”.

You’re probably wondering why you should care, either about what Hollywood actors think, or about this notoriously chi-chi part of London.

Yes, you're right.  

And yet, like them, and like me, you probably have a favourite cafe, one that feels very special.

OK, back to wrong again! My, that was quick. I certainly don't.

The UK used to be full of cafes such as this: often immigrant-owned, and serving a combination of cuisines. On the surface they seem basic, perhaps even a little scruffy. They are certainly not Instagrammable. Yet what they offer – friendliness, inclusivity – is worth more to the clientele than social media kudos.

So why are they threatened? Is it because in Labour's failing economy, they are unsustainable? 

This isn’t just a story about gentrification and the homogeneity that comes with it, but one of social atomisation. As more and more chains dominate high streets all over the country, truly mixed, inclusive spaces become rarer and rarer.

If mixed, inclusive spaces were so desirable, wouln'y these high street chains offer them?  

I know I am not alone in not wanting my local cafe to turn into what so many others have across the UK and beyond: a list of signifiers, part of a corporate, global language that masquerades as friendly and laid-back but is – in its aesthetic and its pricing – tailored only for a certain demographic, and is indistinguishable from a thousand other similar places.

It sounds as though Rhiannon doesn't consider herself part of the demographic that patronises chains like Costa and Starbucks. Is that maybe the real issue. Certainly, every one of these chains I've been in is full of immigrants serving the coffee and cakes, so it can't be that. It has a name, you know - snobbery. Why not use it? 

The Perfect 'Rebellion' For The Modern Generation...

Fan fiction is democracy in its purest, most chaotic form. It’s the people seizing the means of production. Every “what if?” is a tiny revolution.

Yes, some blue-haired nose-ringed creature leeching off a genuine creative to make up a wish-fulfillment screed is a sign of the times, of course. And it's only fitting the 'Guardian' should consider it worthy of a column. 

Because fan fiction isn’t just rewriting, it’s repairing. It’s giving yourself the closure you need when the author won’t.

How very DARE an author write the story they want to write!  

It’s deciding that pain can end differently, that love can be louder, that characters who were doomed in print get to live this time. It’s literature written by people who refused to move on and sometimes these people spell really badly (and that is completely OK). And yes, it’s rebellion.

No it's not. The people of Iran are showing you what rebellion is. It's risk and heartache and peril, not scribbling a different ending to a classic or popular story because it didn't end the way you wanted.  

Against gatekeeping, against prestige, against the assumption that stories only count when they make money. Fan fiction exists because readers loved something so much they refused to let it die.

Who IS this moron, anyway? 

Urooj Ashfaq is a Mumbai-based comedian, writer and actor.

Ah.  

And Yet, Aditya, It's Not The Muslims Afraid In Their Places Of Worship, Is It?

Aditya's been sampling literature for talking points, his usual ones no longer working as they used to...

An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he thinks, how festive. Soon he learns the truth. So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision.

Does it, Aditya? Does it really? Let’s read on, eh? 

Amid this yawning suburbia, Pearson starts to come awake. One evening, he sees an old Volvo up in flames, and an angry mob about to storm a “shabby house”. Inside, he supposes, must be “a released murderer or a paedophile exposed by the local vigilantes”. But no. Out come Muslim women, who have been praying in a makeshift mosque and who must rely on a police line against violence from their own neighbours.

And yet, you seem not to realise that, far from being some Nostradamus-like predictive text, it’s rather got things the wrong way round about exactly whose places of worship are under threat, and who is bearing the brunt of the terror. 

'Not Over', Nesrine? When Did It Ever Actually Start?

A “dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal”, is how Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, described this post-ceasefire period. Israeli authorities have reduced attacks and allowed some aid into Gaza, she said, but “the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

The 'genocide that never was', you mean? The 'genocide ' that the Israils aren't carrying out, or the one Hamas itself is doing it's level best to slip though the fog of war, unnoticed by the MSM?

Is There Anything More 'Anti Science' Than The Left, Polly?

That number will stay fixed for ever in public memory: 23,000 people died because Boris Johnson resisted locking the country down in time.

How many of those woulfd have died of 'normal' flu anyway, Polly? Will we ever know?  

But this is not just about one narcissistic politician. It’s about his entire rightwing coterie of libertarians and their lethally dominant creed in the UK media.

Ah, yes, the 'vast rightwing conspiracy again'... 

They have a long history of rejecting things that save lives – seatbelts, speed limits, smoking restrictions, sugar taxes, vaccination, benefits, sewers, clean air, the NHS itself and, of course, stopping climate breakdown.

Some of those lives being saved there are those of the people indulging in risky behaviour, which isn't quite such a noble endeavour as you make out, Polly, is it? 

Recall that during the 1980s and 1990s, the Sunday Times under the editorship of Andrew Neil promoted the strangest gay plague theory, publishing pieces suggesting that Aids wasn’t caused by HIV, and that it was almost impossible for heterosexual people to contract it.

It was. It was strictly a gay disease at first, and targetting the people most at risk, and not everyone, was percieved medical wisdom at the time. 

That anti-science tradition is alive and well today. Lockdowns are the quintessence of everything rightwing science-sceptics abhor: what misfortune that a tribe least equipped to cope was in power during the pandemic. In the circumstances, the interventions from those in charge were “too little, too late”. Hard to imagine, but Covid in the UK could have been even more deadly, had unavoidable facts about the pandemic not eventually overwhelmed their fact-free ideologies.

Could have been even more deadly for whom? The people who were never at risk from it, and who now see their children's education ruined, their country's economy trashed, and are about to see a thick token who would be out of his depth as a parking attendant in Islington but is somehow elevated to the status of a British Cabinet member use it as a lever to wreck our justice system even further? 

Sweden is the country constantly quoted by the right, as it relied entirely on a voluntary advisory approach, never compulsory lockdowns. In terms of deaths per capita, many fewer Swedes died than Britons: case proven? Hallett trounced? Alas, we are not Sweden in social structure, national wealth, vulnerable deprivation, health or social care, mainly due to the longterm malign influence of the right fighting tooth and claw against Swedish-style social democracy.

Funny the 'Guardian' never remembers that when it's praising Sweden for something or trying to suggest we need to be more Swedish.  

The precautionary principle, putting safety first when the science is uncertain, is as alien to these ideologues as risk registers.

And to those supporting the trans agenda and demanding chemical sterilisation for mentally ill children, Polly. Frankly, you don't get more 'anti science' than that!  

'Journalistic Ethics? Never Heard Of Them' Says 'Guardian' Columnist...

 

An extraordinary thing to have published in a major newspaper, even one as blatently biased as the 'Guardian':

The resignation of the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, over accusations of bias comes as a shock...

Only in the sense that the ones at the top of any corporate shit heap usually cling on by their fingernails, Jane…

...and leaves a gulf at the top of the corporation when it needs leadership most. Davie stressed that the decision was his alone – neither the board, nor even many of those who led the coordinated attack among rightwing press and politicians expected it.

’We’d have got away with it if not for you pesky kids rightwingers’ eh? 

Leave to one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC coverage, and the BBC’s own baffling inability or unwillingness to defend itself over the past week.

 How exactly can it defend itself when the evidence is there for all to see?

But the row obscures the context that explains what is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin and distortion.

Aiming...yet missing the target by a country mile. That's not incompetence, that's deliberate. 

None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection. The BBC is expected to apologise on Monday over the Trump edit. That should have been enough.

For The Donald? No. And it wouldn't be enough for me either. 

Given the sheer volume of the content it airs and criticism it receives, the BBC can sometimes be forgiven for not wanting to stir passions further. But by spending days insisting that it did not comment on “leaked documents”, the corporation has simply looked weak and cowardly, just when it needs to be robust and brave.

Because it is, like all bullies, weak and cowardly when it faces stiff opposition. 

These are difficult times for the BBC. About to enter into negotiations to renew its charter after more than a decade of licence-fee cuts, it is also caught in political and economic headwinds. Johnson’s threat to cancel his licence fee comes after 300,000 more households did so over the past year.

And this is merely going to increase the rate of withdrawal.

This article is so extraordinarily bad that the 'Guardian has seen fit to add a disclaimer: 

Jane Martinson is professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. She writes in a personal capacity

Translation: 'Please don't sue us too Mr President!' 

Another ‘I Don’t Understand. Nobody I Know Voted For Nixon!’ Moment In The ‘Guardian’

 

I’ve worked with the super-rich my whole career. I worked for more than a decade as a lawyer advising high net worth individuals, and many of the people I worked with had assets worth more than £10m.

And now you're writing articles in 'the Guardian'? My, I guess you weren't all that good at it... 

Many of the super-rich have ties all over the world, decamping to homes in the south of France in the summer, or their Alpine chalets for ski holidays. Some have constructed more contrived connections to places like Singapore or Bermuda to reduce their tax bills. But regardless of their undeniable worldliness, the super-rich love living in the UK.There is a prestige to owning property in the UK. A bolthole in London allows you to visit the Frieze art fair in Regent’s Park or sit on Centre Court at Wimbledon. On the practical side, many are enticed by how easy it is to set up and conduct business in the UK. Of paramount concern to certain ultra-wealthy families is that the UK offers peace of mind in terms of affording them refuge from those who might otherwise see them as a target for kidnapping in other jurisdictions.

Is it just me, or is there a faint whiff of envy emanating from this article? 

This hasn’t stopped the Times from publishing endless doomsday prophecies of a wealth exodus on an epic scale. The endlessly repeated trope is that the ultra-wealthy will flee at the first signs of higher taxes, taking their tax revenue and business investments with them, and having the overall effect of lowering growth. However, recent research by Tax Justice Network, with Patriotic Millionaires and Tax Justice UK, discredited previous, similar claims as vastly overexaggerated.

Ah, I see where we are going now.... 

We have an economy in which work doesn’t pay – the income of people who work for a living is taxed at higher rates than that of those who earn money from simply having money.

Any normal person would therefore suggest the answer is to reduce the amount of tax on people, but of course, this is the 'Guardian', and so their solution is to rob from the rich. 

Before becoming a private wealth lawyer, I hadn’t realised that the way the ultra-wealthy earn their income is quite different from the majority of us. While the average person earns money from their daily work, the ultra-wealthy make eye-watering sums simply from owning assets. They generate wealth from investment funds and rent and sales profits from their property empires.

And do investment fund mean that the money disappears? No, it's invested in other businesses! 

I now work with people focused on giving away their wealth.

There's a big need for prople like you? What do you do? Hold their hands as they write a voluntary donation cheque to the Treasury? 

They recognise the privileges they have and acknowledge that they have benefited from a tax system that protects their wealth at the expense of ordinary people. Many of them tell me they see their responsibility of paying higher taxes on their wealth as merely practising good citizenship and contributing to the benefits of living in the UK.

Well, nothing to stop them. The Treasury accepts donations, after all. But of course, it's not enough for those motivated by the politics of envy... 

The moral and pragmatic case for a wealth tax is clear. Those with the broadest shoulders can and should contribute more.

And if they don't want to do it voluntarily, they must be forced to.

I Suppose Watching Your Offspring Like A Hawk Isn’t An Option?

The news that a child damaged a £42m Mark Rothko painting at a museum in Rotterdam last month had me wondering how I’d feel if my toddler was the culprit.

Probably delighted to have material for yet another tedious 'Look, I've reproduced, worship me!' column... 

This story has brought out two categories of people that I’ll admit I struggle with: people who don’t get the work of Mark Rothko, and people who dislike kids.

Oh, give me strength…. 

...it’s the usual calls for children to be banned from public spaces. They shouldn’t be allowed into galleries if they can’t behave, and their parents should be made to pay – that sort of thing.

And you can see why! 

Children respond instinctively to art. They have not built up defences, or preconceptions about it, and the earlier you take them to galleries and expose them to different styles and mediums, the more open and receptive they will be to things that are experimental, unusual or transgressive.

Or maybe children are just unsocialised little animals that shouldn’t be allowed free rein in society? 

Children explore the world through touch. My boy loves to scratch his fingers against woodchip wallpaper, to stand with his palms flat against the rough bark of a tree. Anyone familiar with kids will be able to imagine what went through that child’s mind as they stood in front of Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8. Something about the unvarnished, slightly chalky surface of the paint made them want to feel it. And so they did. Arguably, in doing so, they connected with the work of Rothko on a deeper level than many adults.

🙄

Either way, I hope that the child wasn’t made to feel too bad. Perhaps it’ll be a funny story that the parents tell someday, and I bet they watch their child a bit more closely in future. I don’t want to add to the shame they are probably already feeling, but I do wonder if it’s time modern parents had a think about rehabilitating the much-maligned toddler reins of the 1980s and 90s, even if just for occasional use.

But wasn’t it your type of progressive mummies who demanded their use be curtailed as they stifled ‘free expression’ in the first place?  

Well, Andy, I Guess They’ll Have To Elect A New Population, Then, Eh?

He doesn't mean 'us', of course. This is the 'Guardian' - he means you lot.

With British politics fragmenting, voters are now being wooed by five national parties – an unprecedented situation, made even more unpredictable by an electoral system designed for serious competition between just two. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that we are all swing voters now.

The increased pace of British politics over the past decade, with extra general elections, parties frequently changing leaders and ideological directions, and sudden electoral surges and collapses, suggests that politicians have become more scared of voters – and that voters have become less deferential towards them.

I'm not sure it's possible to get less deferential to this mob, but why should we ever be deferential? 

But is this voter-dominated politics an entirely welcome development? Recent history suggests not.

Oh dear. 

One way to picture a healthier democracy is as a place where voters and politicians have frequent clashes but also a degree of mutual respect – and an awareness that they are co-creators of a political culture. It may be optimistic to expect grumpy old Britain to become such a country, not least because so much of our media has a vested interest in voters angrily believing that they are badly governed.

Yes, if not for the media, we'd all be happily thinking this was the best government ever! 

Beneath the nonstop call for political change, moreover, is often a demand that change be minimised for voters themselves. Drastically reducing immigration, dropping diversity targets and other socially conservative policies especially popular with supporters or potential supporters of Reform UK – the minority group around which our politics currently revolves – are essentially intended to slow down, halt or even reverse social trends that some Britons believe are too disruptive. Thus much of the feverish quality of British politics these days paradoxically comes from a desire for the country to stay the same.

The pace of change - especially with regards to demographics and the enforced tolerance of bizarre ideas - has been noticably too fast  for most people. 

If and when the current era of voter dominance ends, perhaps with a government that combines great confidence with a big majority, we may look back on it nostalgically. Politicians easily become too sure of themselves and too distant from reality, and punishing them for those flaws is one of the main points of democracy. But voters can develop those flaws, too. Until more of us realise that, our fickle and unhappy politics will continue.

No they can't. The voters have to deal with reality (Green voters excepted), they cannot escape the consequences of it.