Back in the 1990s, I recall watching a comedy sketch by the fantastic Jasper Carrott, in which he recalled growing up in Birmingham during the ‘Swinging Sixties’. His opinion was that if you remembered just how ‘great’ and ‘swinging’ the Sixties were, you were never really there. It was probably fantastic if you were growing…
When I was growing up in the 1980s in London’s largest geographical borough, the opulence and general orderliness of life there was so pervasive, the question of feeling unsafe on the streets of Bromley rarely encroached into one’s consciousness. Bromley, at the beginning of the 1990s, was listed as the eighth richest local authority in…
‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ is one of my favourite wartime movies. This 1957 classic, with an ensemble cast including Sir Alec Guinness, is far more fiction than reality in terms of its depiction of the construction of the Siam–Burma Railway. Nevertheless, it is a tour de force of cinema, winning 7 Oscars including…
Yesterday afternoon, the sickly whiff of clichéd promises emanating from the chamber of Stormont like the gravy trail we used to see on the old Bisto adverts meant one thing: The Northern Ireland Assembly was back in business. Yes, Europe’s most pointless and dysfunctional seat of government had reconvened, and with a party dedicated to…
If there are any followers out there who’ve read about my scholastic childhood before, I’ll first offer my sincere apologies as I’m going to recite the story once again for the purpose of this article. I was baptised into the Church of England. My father, an Anglican, made an informal prenuptial agreement with my Mum,…
Ever since Boris Johnson was unceremoniously dumped out of the Conservatives, our governing party has been making a concerted effort to alienate itself from the voter coalition that put it into power with an impressive 80-seat majority just four years ago. It will insist on hammering nail after nail into its electoral coffin – with…
Isobel Oakshott points finger away from real culprit Note the blatant and rather transparent attempt to shift blame for the mass immigration to Wagner, and by extension Putin. The West is the architect of it’s own destruction when it comes to mass immigration and Putin need only sit back and not interrupt his enemy while its making a mistake. Let’s look at…
When Tony Blair’s government launched their crusade to bring devolution to the United Kingdom after their landslide election in 1997, there was not shortage of voices urging caution. One of the most notable of these was the late Labour MP Tam Dalyell, most famous for coining the ‘West Lothian’ conundrum on the democratic deficit faced…
One of the political campaigns I was proudest to be involved in was the effort to retain the name of the Royal Ulster Constabulary at the turn of the Millennium. I flew to Northern Ireland twice that year and attended meetings organised to securing the great name of a force that had been instrumental in…
Following the decision of the Labor Party in Australia to pass a motion endorsing what they call ‘the reunification of Ireland’ (actually it means the break up of the United Kingdom in legal and constitutional terms), I decided this day to pen a letter to the appropriate department at the Australian High Commission in London….
According to the UK media (never paragons of accuracy), Monday will herald the beginning of the most visible manifestation of the government’s unwillingness or incapability (delete as appropriate) to control our borders. Portland Port, near Weymouth, will be blighted by the presence of the giant Bibby Stockholm barge (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/bibby-stockholm-asylum-seekers-robert-jenrick-dorset-cornwall-fire-brigades-union-b1098924.html) where the government will begin housing…
It was an exciting atmosphere down in the newsrooms of Sky and the BBC on Thursday evening. The usual commentators were getting ready to give their usual analyses; Jo Coburn’s voice positively quivered with excitement as the counts at the various centres were taking place; John Curtice was wheeled out like a mature bottle of…
Hamtramck. It’s a place in the United States most on here will not have heard of. In the heyday of car production in Detroit, this small city in the suburbs was notable for its huge Polish-American population who mostly worked in the motor industry. Since the decline and fall of Detroit (with de-population rates unparalleled…
When I look at the fate that has befallen the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, I feel obliged to see it through two separate lenses: firstly my own, and then that of the millions of other voters who elected the Conservatives with an 80-seat majority back in 2019. The reason I wish to make this…
If you’ve driven on the roads in Britain during the summertime, you’ll be familiar with a process road workers call ‘surface dressing’. This involves spraying bitumen binder (a sticky tar-like substance) on a clean, dry road surface, over which stone chippings are spread (small, consistently-sized aggregate). The surface is rolled to embed the stones into…