The New Conservative

Roger Watson

I’m a Platinum Party pooper

“Dear me” is all I can say having watched the Platinum Jubilee Concert broadcast from outside Buckingham Palace and the Mall. The highlight was definitely HM The Queen exchanging views on marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear. Why she felt the need to do this or got talked into it however remains a mystery. It was […]

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Ireland: the 51st State

I hold dual Irish and British nationality and have lived and worked in Ireland. For many years I have regularly visited, and have friends north and south of the border. I read The Irish Times and have read several books about the place. But frankly, I’m buggered if I understand what’s going on there. However,

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Dragging kids to the library

The nation’s children have recently endured two years of social and educational deprivation. They are now more depressed, less able to socialise, behind with reading and counting and very young ones are having problems with facial recognition and communication. Scare the bejeebers out of them about a virus that they were unlikely to become infected

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Room for all in the TARDIS

So, The Doctor in Dr Who is going to be played by Ncuti Gatwa, who is a black Scot of ambiguous sexuality. That’s three oppressed minorities ticked off in one. And before Humberside’s finest boys in blue are round here to ‘check my thinking’, let me fire off a sincere virtue signal. There were rumours

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Question Time: then and now

A few days ago, someone uploaded a whole episode of BBC programme Question Time from 2002 up on YouTube. I have long given up on Question Time as there are now so many better programmes to watch. Gradually, the programme has transformed from a cutting edge forum for debate between intellectual leviathans into something more

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Cock-birthing

It seems, by a miracle of modern medicine that men can have babies. Real men, that is according to advice recently given to midwives at Edinburgh Napier University. The guidance was given that a person making the transition from being a man to being a man with boobs who presents at the maternity unit may:

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Scouting for girls

My late mother, always the mistress of the malapropism, once referred to the ‘Gouds and Skites’ when, in fact, she meant to say the Guides and Scouts; what we used to refer to as the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. The clue to the binary gender distribution between the two movements was in the name.

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Google my @r$€

“Everything is brutal, now we’re being watched by Google” sang the Leicester based indie rock group Kasabian. It may not necessarily be brutal, but it is watching everything we do, making a record of the websites we visit, what we purchase, collecting our demographic details and sharing that information with others to whom it may

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