More data on the performance of Scotland’s schools, more depressing news. It’s becoming increasingly hard to remember a time when Scottish education was a source of national pride. The latest indication of the decline came with this week’s exam results. The number of pupils achieving an A, B or C grade at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher dropped. The attainment gap – the measure of educational performance between children living in the most and least deprived areas, so favoured by Nicola Sturgeon - rose on last year and on pre-pandemic levels. Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth has said the results are “not good enough”, and she is of course right. Generations of children have been let down by a Holyrood parliament that ...

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. The events of this last week have been shocking – deplorable, even. And, they have come with a refrain: We need to finally, at long last, to have an open and honest conversation about immigration. This line has been the leader column in centre-right newspapers; it’s come from former academics who’ve had a funny turn. It’s come even from people who would once have defined as on the left. What baffles me about it, though, is the embedded assumption that we were not talking about immigration already. It often feels like we’ve spent the century so far speaking of little else. Pretending otherwise is a tactic that’s been around so long ...

Out running on Tuesday evening, I went past a goat, stood precariously on a cream pillar jutting out of the wall of a building. People bunched around, gawping at it and taking photos. Below was parked a car belonging to a private security firm. The goat was all black and two-dimensional – it was the first of four pieces Banksy has done in London so far this week. The anonymous Bristolian has been working his way east, then south. The goat was opposite Kew Bridge in Richmond, south-west London. Then Banksy unveiled two elephant heads, stretching their trunks towards each other from a pair of blocked-out windows in Chelsea. On Wednesday, he delivered a further three monkeys swinging across a railway ...

They came to fight, not mourn. That is the first thing to understand. The balaclava-clad, tanked-up, angry men who have marched the streets of Southport, Sunderland, Hull and so many other towns and cities over the past week did not come to pay their respects to Bebe, Elsie or Alice, or to share the pain of their heart-stricken families. They bought six-packs and boarded trains for a day out attacking an asylum hotel or a mosque, and then filmed the looting and arson as entertainment. This isn’t protest. It’s a form of anarchy. No tragedy, no grievance can justify the torching of a police station or the organised assault of a place of worship. Those throwing bricks and bottles at police ...

In a world that seems to make less and less sense as I get older, there are still occasional moments of crystalline sanity. One such occurred recently when I learned that Manchester’s only alcohol-free bar, Love From, was going out of business after eight months. A bar without beer, I thought when it opened a year ago – had the world gone mad? But then the planets rotate, the Earth moves and things return to some kind of harmony again. It’s not just non-alcoholic bars though. In recent years we have been deluged with products aimed at adults who don’t drink. But the public remains to be entirely convinced. The maddest moment came earlier this year with the launch of White ...

It is seven years since veteran feminist campaigner Linda Bellos was disinvited from a speaking engagement at Peterhouse College, Cambridge on the basis that her views on transgender rights were a threat to the welfare of students. Two years later, journalist Julie Bindel was physically assaulted by a protester as she left a talk she had given about male violence against women and girls at Edinburgh University. Since, there has been an escalation in the targeting of feminists in academia. In 2020, Professor Selina Todd revealed that her employer, Oxford University, was providing security guards to accompany her to lectures because of threats to her safety. In 2021, colleagues of Professor Jo Phoenix at the Open University published an open letter ...

If you were looking for a quote to sum up the predicament the new Labour government finds itself in, you need look no further than the musical Hamilton. In act two, Hamilton, still giddy with victory after the brutal war of independence, quickly gets frustrated with how hard it is to get things done in his new role as Washington’s Treasury Secretary. Washington warns him: “Ah, winning was easy, young man, governing's harder.” It is a bit unfair to suggest winning was easy for Keir Starmer, given the state the Labour Party was in five years ago and the amount of work that went into making it electable again. Still, by the time the election was actually called a Labour victory ...

Here’s what happened: Charli XCX – branded an icon from Essex by fellow pop iconoclast Lorde – wrote the most zeitgeist defining album of the past few years and released it at the beginning of the summer. Brat – coded by its instantly recognisable lo-fi lime green cover, boorish lyrics about cocaine and felonry and sex, its loud electronic club beats – was completely trend busting. After summer 2023 was defined by the so-called Clean Girl aesthetic (where yoga and sobriety and skincare were lauded as the foundations of the most aspirational lifestyle) in 2024 Brat arrived to say, “Enough! Let’s take drugs again” (“Don’t eat don’t sleep… shall we do a little line?”). Partying is back in vogue, Diet Coke ...