Society
Student Loans: A Mis-Selling Scandal Or A Graduate Tax?
It’s September and the students are going back to Uni. Half a million new graduates will be getting their student loan documents. I have been writing about student loans for a while. Back in 2018 I wrote The Great Student Loans Swindle, followed a month later by Student Loans Swindle 2: Cash from Chaos. Earlier … Read more
The Strange Decline in Small Boat Crossings — One Year On
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a slightly tentative blog about small boats crossing the Channel. Something odd appeared to be happening. In August 2025, the number of people arriving in Britain by small boat had fallen by around 40 per cent compared with the previous month. It was the lowest August figure for … Read more
Muslim Europe? It’s Been Here for Over 1,300 Years
I’m in Albania, one of the European countries with a Muslim majority. When people talk about Islam in Europe, the conversation often starts in the 1950s or 1960s, with immigration from former colonies and labour migration into countries such as Britain, France and Germany. Increasingly, it degenerates into conspiracy theories about Muslim invasions or the … Read more
Where Have All The Loyalists Gone?
This summer I visited Northern Ireland for the first time in more than twenty years. The last time I had been there was shortly after the Good Friday Agreement. I worked for a while with Mo Mowlam when she was MP for Redcar, and my memories of Northern Ireland were inevitably bound up with that … Read more
What Happened To GPs?
We all know what GPs used to look like. Mostly men with beards, they made house calls, wore tweed jackets and carried their patient notes around in battered Lloyd George envelopes. Those days have largely disappeared. Home visits are now rare, many practices no longer have a single full-time partner, and patients are often more … Read more
Make America Healthy Again? Obesity And The New Health Divide
The Trump administration has made MAHA – Make America Healthy Again one of its defining domestic initiatives. The movement promises to tackle chronic disease, improve diets and reverse the decline in Americans’ health. Some of its proposals have attracted widespread criticism and may well make matters worse. Central to the MAHA world view is the … Read more
Horden and the Miners’ Gala
Two sets of photographs 24 hours apart. One was at the Durham Miners’ Gala. The other was in Horden, a former pit village a few miles from where I grew up. At first glance they seem to tell completely different stories. One is a celebration of brass bands, banners and working-class history. The other has … Read more
Works Fortnight: the forgotten casualty of deindustrialisation
Clacton is back in the news a few months after I visited it. Once again it’s politics are a matter of national debate. When we think about deindustrialisation, we think about pit villages, silent steelworks and abandoned shipyards. We picture rusting blast furnaces, boarded-up factories and communities that lost the industries on which they had … Read more
Christianity and the Far Right. The strange journey of the British Israelites
I promised myself that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference would be my last encounter with the organised far right for a while. Then I remembered that one of Britain’s oldest far-right religious organisations meets only a few yards from my house. For years the British-Israel World Federation held meetings in Durham. Today it meets … Read more