Category Archives: Risk and fear

Anthony Horowitz: ‘We’re afraid of our kids, and we’re afraid for them’

‘A child should be able to make up his or her own mind about an adult they are meeting without that adult having to wave a government-stamped piece of paper. The idea that the government can come in to the most fundamental of relationships – between an adult and a child – and somehow manipulate […]

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Turning teachers into objects of suspicion

One of the most pernicious prejudices of our time is that adults, given half a chance, will abuse the children in their care. This is the prejudice that lies behind the UK government’s out-of-control, increasingly unpopular mass vetting scheme, in which adults who want to spend time with, or take responsibility for, children other than […]

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Good v Evil need not apply

  • Posted by jennie
  • Posted on October 23, 2001
  • Risk and fear
  • Comments Off on Good v Evil need not apply

  For the second week running, I found myself watching BBC1’s Sunday War Report. Chaired by John Humphrys, veteran of Radio 4’s Today programme, this seems like the BBC’s latest attempt at information-populism, combining breaking news with interviews with feature reports with Peter Snow (famous for his election-time swingometers) gabbling breathlessly through an electronic presentation of what troops/planes/bombs […]

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Apologetic imperialism

If you want to understand the world as it really is not, it’s often a good idea to read some of the columnists in the UK press. This week, the Award for the Most Unreal Analysis goes to the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting. Bunting used her slot on Monday 8 October to launch a bitter attack on […]

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Growing up scared

As aeroplanes were crashing into New York’s World Trade Centre, I was halfway through an online quiz to find out if I am suffering from a ‘quarterlife crisis’. Sometimes, the news really puts things in perspective. The quarterlife crisis, apparently, is the twentysomething’s version of a midlife crisis. It refers to the condition of graduating […]

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Why do we love Big Brother?

Fifty-two years on from the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘Big Brother’ is best known as a cult TV programme in which a group of volunteers have their every move and word broadcast to the nation 24 hours a day. We do not live in a police state – far from it. People are not […]

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Forever – or a day?

‘Love and marriage, love and marriage/Go together like a horse and carriage’…. Not any more they don’t. The numbers of people getting married keeps on falling. In 1999, there were 263,515 marriages, and over half as many divorces (144,241) (1). The UK Office for Statistics’ 2000 edition of Social Trends reveals that approximately 25 percent of unmarried […]

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