End of Innocence
Most young kids have normal summers; they either holiday with their parent's in some grotty Butlin's caravan in Skegness or, when they reach that mature grand old age of 16, they head off to the Mecca of all underage teenagers: Ibiza. In my 16th summer I was paid for sex. OK, this ain't some embittered "I had such an unfortunate childhood and now look at me" beef, it's more of an irreverent reflection on my weird and, let's say, alternative childhood....
Comment: Ian Dougal-Smythe
The figures are unclear. It's somewhere between two people, three people or eight billion who marched last Saturday. Some were even middle class. Most were hippies, though. I've previously laid out the case for why we should go to war on Iraq on these pages, but this week I've been mostly concerned with the over-arching war against terror....
Comment: A brush with death
If someone had told me before I met Sean O'Callaghan that he had murdered a junior British police woman and a part time female soldier as a fully fledged member of the IRA, it would be hard not to imagine some tattooed bearded gruff old Irish man with anger in his voice who commanded fear from everyone he spoke to. If I then went on to describe another man who helps the Irish government to procure thousands of tonnes of armoury from the IRA for their terror campaigns, who would you think of? ...
Comment: The view from the pew
In its recent article on a very personal and private crisis in a young man's monastic vocation, Cherwell has succeeded in "outing" one of Oxford's finest and best kept secrets. St. Benet's Hall is one of those places everyone seems to have heard of, but nobody quite knows where it is or even if it really exists at all. Well, the Cherwell has exposed to you all that we are here and now I would like to respond to their leading article 'Student out for being gay' and to tell you even more about our Hall. ...
Comment: Looking for Shelter
Few issues are more likely to incite the pent-up fury of middle England and the right-wing press than asylum and immigration in general: it is, and in all likelihood will continue to be, one of the defining issues of our time. The tabloids have predictably added fuel to the flames with their nationalistic rhetoric and images of Britain being swamped by hordes of scrounging, disease carrying, potential terrorists, but what is more surprising is that the government seems to have bowed under the pressure of the conservatives and announced that one of their aims is to cut the number of asylum seekers by half, withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights if needs be. For their part, the Tories have a cunning plan up their sleeve to lock up asylum seekers in pseudo-prisons until their claims have been processed. ...
