Author: Nathan Akehurst and Jack Matthews

Last week,  Mick Duthie, head of the Met’s Sex Crime Unit, Sapphire, unveiled a new set of initiatives. As a flagship force, the Met sets the standard for policing across the country. Unfortunately, in the case of Sapphire, the standard has hardly been glittering. Sex crimes reported to Sapphire have dropped by 14 per cent […]

As the onslaught of the coalition’s neoliberal agenda continues and savage cuts to public services deepen, a whole generation of young people are losing vital education services. Saddled with debts up to £50,000, questions of job security have never weighed so heavily on the minds of the student body. Lying in waiting, ready to pounce, […]

Let me say this as clearly as possible, without pretensions of politeness or gratitude: the graduate admissions system at Oxford, by which the candidates are assigned to a particular college, is nothing short of scandalous and dictatorial. Where the process is not clandestine and irritating, it is downright impolite and arrogant to the point of […]

  God the world is terrible. If it’s not work or rain falling on me, it’s the knowledge of all those people out there having fun – standing in all those flashy pointless clubs swaying their heads from side to side, jetting off to some distant land, talking with others. Arseholes. I just think of […]

Venezuela’s President Chávez was re-elected last Sunday after 13 years in power with 55% of the vote on an incredible 80% turnout. Confounding expectations in the Western press that the election was going to be close, he cleared the opposition candidate by 11 points and actually managed to increase his number of supporters by 830,000 […]

The vicious Taliban attack on a 14-year old schoolgirl on 9th October in the Swat region of Northern Pakistan has prompted global outrage, but the question remains – was this the result of a localized battle or is it part of a far bigger issue? Malala Yousafzai became an internationally-recognised name when she began writing […]

On the 21st of September a life-long red emerged as a green. At a World Green Building Week meeting Gary Neville spoke of how building his own home led him to develop a green conscience. So strong is this zeal now that his new eco-home is on track to reach the lofty heights of Level […]

  Most people have probably had little interaction with the UK foster-care system. Many might know a family who foster or seen an advert on TV, and we’re all outraged when children who have been abused, such as Baby P in 2007, are splashed across the news, exclaiming ‘Why didn’t the social services do more? […]

Publicly funded anti-rape campaigns centred around victim-blaming are nothing new. They have already been run by several police forces, notably West Mercia, whose ‘Don’t be a victim’ posters warning not to ‘let a night full of promise turn into a morning full of regret’ by getting so drunk that their night ends in ‘regretful sex […]

During his speech to the Labour Party Conference last week, Labour leader Ed Miliband, having taken a jibe at the aristocratic Conservative front bench, began to narrate his own family history: “Both of my parents came to Britain as immigrants – Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis. I know I would not be standing on […]

Facebook, iPads, ringtones, clicks. The advent of instant communication has made it ever easier to keep in touch with our friends and family. We receive the latest news straight away. We track down academic research far faster than our forebears. Yet they also spell serious trouble for the way our minds work.  Numerous studies suggest that […]

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the verbally dynamic Henry Wotton has some words that seem to resonate particularly strongly today: “In the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a […]

With both candidates almost neck and neck only one month away from the 2012 presidential election, the televised debate between Obama and Romney on Wednesday was supposed to be a loyalty-swinger. Yet instead of having an aggressive face-off over issues such as the economy and health-care, the two rivals took it in turns to politely […]

So, it’s party conference season again. That time of year when a circus of second-rate politicians to decamp to some concrete monstrosity in the middle of a post-industrial swamp to pretend to be in touch with the poor. Three days are then spent in the glorious democratic ritual of making over-prepared speeches introducing policies that […]