Politics

Dear Green Party, Look, I’m an anarchist, and voting isn’t something I do any more. But sometimes, I look at the Green Party and think “they look like they might stand a chance and they’d probably be the least terrible. Maybe I’ll vote for them.” It was growing inside me, the knowledge that you, at least, might make things tolerable rather than terrible. All that’s gone now, because you’ve made yourselves look no different to the others. I’m talking, of course, about your Cambridge candidate, Rupert Read. It turns out he’s a really, really nasty piece of work. The clues came when he tweeted the sort of dogwhistle comment which alerts the wise to transmisogyny: he went for the old “don’t call me cis” type bollocks. Digging deeper it turns out that yes, he’s a transmisogynist, and...

I was in Berlin a year after the wall came down and asked an East German journalist how it felt to young people to now be free. He replied: “It’s great – the problem is we don’t know how to use that freedom.” My community of Marlborough has had a 32-year relationship with the Muslim community of Gunjur in The Gambia. In conversation with friends there since the events in Paris, they have said they are all appalled at the murders that took place, supposedly in the name of Islam. At the same time, they are confused by the demands for the protection of freedom of speech when that speech is gratuitously offensive, not even humorous and is fundamentally about making money through the sale of a magazine. Hands up, those who do not think that with freedom comes responsibility. Dr...

The murder of the Charlie Hebdo journalists was shocking and repulsive, and has rightly been condemned. Nevertheless, it is undesirable that this tragedy should be elevated into a heroic defence of freedom of speech. Such freedom is a privilege which must be exercised responsibly. It is not an absolute human right. The law of civilised nations does not protect defamation, plagiarism, blackmail, harassment and other forms of bullying. There has to be a sense of balance. It is legitimate to lampoon living public figures such as politicians and celebrities for their politics and lifestyle. It is also legitimate to criticise religious leaders for extreme beliefs, pomp and ostentation and perhaps, above all, for child abuse. This is not the same as lampooning the founders of Islam and...

Dear Chris Bryant MP, You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. I bought my first guitar with money I saved from holiday jobs (sandwich packing!). I was taught the only four chords I know by a friend. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker. So alien was it, that people laughed at the idea of me going into the music business, and certainly no one was of any use. In the army, again, people thought it was a mad idea. None of them knew anyone in the business either. And when I left the army, going against everyone’s advice, EVERYONE I met in the British music industry told me there was no way it...