Minette Marrin

Profile: Full name: Minette Marrin Area of interest: Society, family, education, crime Journals/Organisation: The Sunday Times Email: minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk Personal website: MinetteMarrin.com Website: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/minettemarrin Blog: Representation: jonnyg@curtisbrown.co.uk Networks:

Biography: About: Minette Marrin is a journalist, broadcaster and fiction writer. Formerly a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, she is now a columnist for the Sunday Times. More here Education: Career: BBC TV traineeship; co-presented ‘Saturday Review’ arts programm (a forerunner of the Late Show); columnist with Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph; has written for the Spectator, the Guardian, the Far Eastern Economic Review, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Observer Current position/role: Sunday Times' columnist also writes/written for: First Post, Standpoint Magazine, Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph Other roles/Main role: broadcaster and fiction writer Other activities: Contributed to 'Women in Hospital Medicine, Career Choices and Opportunities', a report of a working party of the Federation of the Royal College of Physicians', 2000/01; Trustee of The Home Farm Trust, 1996/2005; Member of the Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, until 2006; Member of the Centre for Policy Studies Council Disclosures: Viewpoints/Insight: Minette Marrin discusses her change of heart about the feminist movement Fifth column Broadcast media: Regularly contributions to TV and radio Video: Controversy/Criticism: Awards/Honours: Granta short story competition; Vogue Talent Competition; Shortlisted for Columnist of the Year - Press Awards, 2004 Scoops: Other:

Books & Debate: The Eye of the Beholder OCLC 18871349, 1989 Latest work: Speaking/Appearances: Current debate:http://www.intelligencesquared.com/people/m/minette-marrin

The Sunday Times: Column name: Remit/Info: Society, family, education, crime Section: Role: Columnist Pen-name: Email: minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk Website: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/minettemarrin Commissioning editor: Day published: Sunday Regularity: Weekly Column format: Average length:

Articles: 2013 Outlaw sugary drinks – that will put some fizz into the obesity war - On a train last Thursday, I sat opposite a man who was so fat he filled more than one sea - 3rd March Old woman living in a shoe? Lose child benefit is what she should do - According to the nursery rhyme, there was an old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn’t know what to do. That was then, in the distant past of folklore - 24th February To go on or to give in? Yes, the awkward age is here, boomers - At 63, a time of life when most women would be thinking about taking it easy - 17th February In my little red book, an idea for NHS cultural revolution - One of the worst things about last week’s Francis report on the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal was that it was all so horribly familiar. We’ve heard it all before, and it’s still going on - 10th February Power mothers can’t succeed without scars, just ask Birgitte - ‘OK everyone, wheest . . . it’s #borgen time.” Thus tweeted Nicola Sturgeon - 3rd February Save the Wales: set Harry free from royalty as Mr Normal - Poor Prince Harry - 27th January Hands off, lefties: calm, rational Austen was no Guardian gal - Like Shakespeare and Orwell, Jane Austen is a writer whose admirers all claim her for their own - 20th January Have a big helping of shame. It will stop you wasting food - There is, I admit, something appealing about the idea of extravagance - 13th January Under the swish of Grey’s cane is comfort reading posing as porn - ‘Call yourself a journalist,” said a fellow guest with festive aggression late one night - 6th January

Articles: 2012 Pesky clerics, Europhiles, nurses’ leaders – it’s all change for you - Since I am so bad at keeping my own new year resolutions, I always make them for other people - 30th December An easy way out of this marriage mess: divorce it from religion - Omnishambles is an annoying word but there is none better for the ridiculous mess the government has got itself into over gay marriage - 16th December Benefits or immigration — one of them has to stop - Put yourself for a moment in the position of a Romanian or Bulgarian. The effort will make you feel very glad indeed that you are a Briton - 9th December There is an unspoken fear driving our nurses to cruelty - It must be more than 20 years ago now that I started writing about the dreadful things that were going on in some hospitals - 2nd December The first law of social work: politics trumps parental love - How could any public servant in her right mind snatch three children away from good and experienced foster parents, just because they belonged to a particular political party? - 25th November Mourning is broken — they don’t want us to grieve properly now - ‘How am I getting on with my grieving process?” I was asked this a few years ago by a distraught middle-aged woman with a learning disability, a couple of weeks after her mother’s death - 11th November Child benefit, a crazy cashback turning us all into needy infants - Seen from a certain perspective, the better off will clearly put in more than they take out - 4th November There is another way to be a tiger mother: ambitious neglect - ‘How was A flat minor this morning, Naomi, darling?” carolled my Hampstead hostess many years ago as her daughter arrived at breakfast at half past seven one day in the school holidays - 27th October Frankel, my dear, you’ll never be better than the horse I knew - The astonishing Frankel is being widely celebrated as the greatest racehorse ever - 21st October Girls, I learnt to deal with the gropers, so must - It now seems that scores of people may have been sexually abused as teenagers by the late Jimmy Savile over many years, some of them on BBC - 14th Octoberpremises.you*A cocktail of tolerance and fear guarded Savile’s secrets - Why didn’t anyone say anything at the time? Why didn’t anyone do anything? Those were the questions people were asking after last week’s exposure of the late Sir Jimmy Savile as an alleged predatory paedophile over many years - 7th October Casual vacancy for gloomy snob: would suit JK Rowling - Whether or not the Tory chief whip called some police officers effing plebs, which he denies, the story hit a national nerve - 30th September Curb Britain’s welfare queens: limit benefits to two children - It is extremely rare to identify a simple solution to a complex social problem - 23rd September Ban prostitution and where does that leave trophy wives? - It takes a certain existential chutzpah to try to abolish prostitution - 16th September Yes, thank you, Naomi, we’ve all seen it. Do cover up now - It has been said that feminism will not have really triumphed until there are as many third and fourth-rate women in high places as there are men. Well, girls, our time is nigh. We have Naomi Wolf - 9th September Less rage, girls, and we can be reasonable about rape - public debate is always good, not least about the crime of rape, which for too long has been ignored, underestimated and even excused - 26th August Cameron’s no help against the Costa Coffee colonists - The winds of commercial change are blowing around south Devon - 19th August Sentences are a joke and young thugs are laughing the hardest - That such young people should be such vicious, persistent criminals, so remorseless and so without shame, is unsettling - 12th August The game’s up – our schools are enemies of the sporting ideal - If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, as Wellington supposedly said, that was because private schools of the time were acutely aware of the importance of sport in developing all-round character, competence and courage - 22nd July The maths is simple: it just costs too much to grow old - Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour chief secretary to the Treasury, famously left a note on his desk for his coalition successor - 15th July A girl’s life wasted for £250,000 a year and they dare to call it care - Charles Dickens had a great deal to say about a system of care for troublesome or unwanted children that shipped them up north, out of sight and out of mind, regardless of the outcome, to take their chances among wicked adults - 8th July 2012 Here’s one form of child abuse we simply have to live with - Nothing, in all my years of journalism, has aroused such frenzied responses among readers as the subject of circumcision - 1st July 2012 The family wisdom of our mother oh so superior - Cherie Blair’s clumsy foray last week into the mummy wars reminded me of Robert Burns’s lines: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie ... - 24th June 2012 Our supermarkets must put sugary foods on the top shelf - Fat is a class issue. Rich people and the well-off are not fat. Poor people and those on modest incomes often are, increasingly so — and not just fat but obese - 17th June 2012 Britain needs warrior Warsi to fight the sex-grooming gangs - Baroness Warsi is the kind of woman who gives tokenism a good name - 10th June 2012 This stodgy stew of a welfare system gave us 60-stone Georgia - In Aberdare, south Wales, lives an ill teenager called Georgia Davis who is so grotesquely fat that it took an army of 40 police officers, firemen, builders, scaffolders, social workers and paramedics to get her out of her house last week to take her to hospital - 27th May 2012 Even during sex iFreaks have intimacy on hold - Bewailing the evils of technology is a sign of ageing as well as being irrational and is best avoided - 20th May 2012 Our cultural cowardice tossed girls to the Pakistani sex ring - Many Muslims despise western cultures for our decadence, and with some reason - 13th May 2012 Sorry, oafs, no toxic tweet will stop the brainbox babes - Twitter has enabled people to say in public the nastiest things they really think - for the first time in history and with impunity. It is fascinating - 6th May 2012 If freedom means seeing our kids defiled by porn, I opt out - Freedom of expression is extremely precious. People all over the world who don’t have it envy those of us who do - 29th April Funny, but I like learning disability being in the care of Ricky Gervais - It seems to be open season on Ricky Gervais: taking indignant pot shots at him is clearly still fashionable - 15th April Forcing the great equality lie into school has squeezed learning out - Some of the worst ideas of socialism refuse to die, despite having been tested to destruction - 8th April Hands up, all those who voted for welfare queens and kid gangsters - Looking at photographs last week of the young men who shot and paralysed a five-year-old girl in a shop in south London... - 1st April No tragedy is complete today without our hysterical emoting - The word unspeakable seems to have reversed its meaning. When truly unspeakable things happen, such as the shooting of... - 25th March Good work, Dr Woolly — if you meant to destroy your church - What is the Archbishop of Canterbury for? That is the question Rowan Williams leaves behind as he heads off to Cambridge - 18th March In our noisy, sexy world a wolf-whistle is almost polite - International Women’s Day came around again on Thursday and with it the startling news that wolf-whistling could soon be illegal - 11th March The mademoiselle killers have missed the point - So farewell, then, Mademoiselle! The French government has banned the word, according to headlines in Britain last week, because... - 26th February Rise up, quiet unbelievers, and drive faith from public life - It takes only a small spark to relight a smouldering fire. Such a spark was struck recently in Bideford town hall in north Devon - 19th February Talk her out of breeding and we’ll avoid the pain of taking her baby - There can be few things worse than having your baby forcibly taken away by someone who thinks you are not fit to care for it - 12th February Science says the left is smarter – guess who’s got common sense - What rejoicing there must have been last week, up and down the land, in left-wing and bien-pensant circles - 5th February We can have human rights or welfare – but not both - Fairness is the obsession of the moment. It constantly, ceaselessly dominates the news - 29th January No, m’lud, it’s not real remorse but can I avoid jail anyway? - Justice must be seen to be done. Even more importantly, perhaps, injustice must not be seen to be done - 22nd January Obese and useless, our state cannot even feed its children - It is hard to believe that in this country, in the 21st century, there are people who need food parcels. Food hand-outs. But so it is - 15th January Don’t sneer, pretty prigs, we don’t all get beauty free - People often praise a celebrity for avoiding cosmetic surgery, when in fact she (or he) has almost certainly had a lot of excellent work done - 8th January Don’t strike, cut council tax and kiss goodbye to Scotland - Learn from the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham, who has cut or frozen local tax for six years and nearly halved the council’s debts - 1st January

Articles: 2011 Dickens’s damaged outcasts lead us to real comfort and joy - The astonishing characters we find in Dickens mean that his work continues to uplift and enlighten, particularly at Christmas time - 25th December Tick all that apply: school exams are corrupt, easy, ripe for the axe - It is one of the greater mysteries of British life that people here are so slow to anger, even when their children are threatened - 11th December Does no one blame Gary Speed? Then we’ve found our humanity - The living victims of suicide were driven for generations into a furtive, uncomprehending solitude of guilt and shame, even into the late 20th century - 4th December Beware, the equality zealots are unfair and cost us millions - If people knew how much the equalities industry costs the country, they would question whether we can afford it and whether it does any good - 27th November The charity juggernaut that leaves the poor shivering - The world of charity has become a jobsworth’s jamboree which consumes, with the highest of intentions, much of the money that is given for the needy - 20th November The divorce plan dangling more reward before malicious mothers - Vicious disputes over custody are extremely distressing – the child’s welfare is more important than petty family politics will ever be - 6th November Call it indeterminate, call it life – just keep them locked away - It is often difficult or impossible to repair misshapen personalities – whether they were distorted by nature or by nurture - 30th October Bolt the door, granny, before they grab your spare room - Incredible though it sounds, people over 60 now stand directly accused of wasting space in the houses they own. Yes, wasting space - 23rd October My prescription to cure nursing - Take three bombs and put them under the training system and the two regulators that produce nurses who neglect their patients - 16th October Men are trailing in our dust – we’ve lost the gender war, girls - Surely it is not what feminists fought for. The battle cry was for equality with men — including equal pay — not for victory over them - 9th October 2011 Sorry, children, these zealots will never let you be adopted - We must challenge the institutionalised resistance to placing children in adoption if we are to safeguard this crucial public service - 2nd October 2011 We bite our tongues and let Nurse Woeful blunder on - To put an end to the disgracefully bad treatment of patients, nurses need hospital training — not university degrees - 25th September 2011 The 40 little words bringing sense back to the classroom - There is no clearer predictor of social mobility, in the negative sense, than reading — those who can’t read are condemned to downward mobility - 18th September 2011 Scrap this childcare subsidy – it’s no use to mothers - Although things have improved since the industrial revolution, affordable childcare still remains out of reach of most parents - 11th September 2011 Beware this MP’s senseless and sinister bid to curb abortions - With her remarkable comments, Nadine Dorries undermined her own credibility and that of her campaign on abortion counselling - 4th September 2011 I didn’t need a politician to mentor my Norland nanny - Across the country there are many people who quietly try to help people get on — yet they don’t need to be given a title - 28th August 2011 You say you’ll flee higher taxes, Mr Filthy? We call your bluff - The mega-rich may have everyone else over a barrel for now, but perhaps it’s not long before they belong to the controllable classes - 21st August 2011 Stop wallowing in Norway’s grief – it was not our tragedy - The obsession of the media and public with every detail of the Norwegian massacre is sickening, it's reminiscent of Dunblane - 31st July 2011 Crisis solved: ship the poor out of their costly homes and sell them - There is evidence to suggest that residents of social housing may do better without it — but selling it is a political impossibility - 24th July 2011 Face it, Clegg — you must choose between your kids and country - The Cleggs should stop complaining about their work-life balance and give up their huge ambitions for a while — or hire a nanny - 17th July 2011 The useless don’t deserve jobs just for being British - There seems to be two Britains. One is full of hard-working young people, but then there is the other, the Britain of those who can’t - 3rd July 2011 Dr Bully wants to snatch granny’s sip of sherry - No doubt there are geriatric problem drinkers — but that does not justify this puritanical mass bullying - 26th June 2011 An eviction notice to the well-heeled Labour traitors - Frank Dobson’s council flat demands are yet another example of the greed of Labour politicians which is one of life’s many mysteries - 19th June 2011 Take your church from the lords’ house archbishop - Rowan Williams's attack on the government made it plain that the Church of England no longer belongs in Britain's political establishment - 12th June 2011 Without blame, carers are free to go on being cruel - This week's care home scandal has demonstrated that cruelty to the vulnerable and the elderly demands urgent redirection - 5th June 2011 Our flawed NHS is a self-inflicted wound - Reform of the NHS is politically nearly impossible because of the inflexible, deeply held beliefs about it that much of the public holds - 29th May 2011 Last gasp of the seigneurs - Both Ken Clarke and Dominique Straus-Kahn owe their current predicaments largely to the same thing — an indifference to women’s feelings - 22nd May 2011 SlutWalkers betray the liberty of women - There is no universal human right to dress and behave like a sluttish streetwalker touting for sex, without occasionally being taken for one - 15th May 2011 The family rules giving immigrants easy entry - It is understandable that a refugee fleeing from oppression and shock needs his close family, but the rules are too generous - 8th May 2011 Has Kate got a behaviour prenup? - It would be disastrous for the monarchy if Will and Kate's marriage were to end in divorce, which is why a prenup would have been a good idea - 1st May 2011 The grey cuckoos’ life or death decision - Given the unbearable pain and loneliness many elderly people face, the taboo against suicide or assisted suicide seems incomprehensible - 17th April 2011 Striking teachers can make education better - We may be about to see a new education spring of revolutionary reform from a strike by educators in Lancashire - 10th April 2011 Granny’s love is binding enough - Some grandparents are wonderful, others are monstrous. It would be disastrous for all to have automatic rights of access to their grandchildren - 3rd April 2011 Our immoral pretence at an ordinary life for people like Josie - It is a high-minded and wrong-headed state of denial to refuse to acknowledge the serious problems caused by learning disabilities - 27th March 2011 Cupboard is bare, save for those fantasists on the left - It is disgraceful and wrong for an opposition frontbencher to accuse the government of deliberately driving ethnic minorities out of London - 20th March 2011 The angels of scrounging will claim us all - For too long, the better-off have been rather relaxed about scrounging, seeing it as the price of a civilised state - 13th March 2011 Three royals only — save us from Andrew - His antics are not good for the House of Windsor but, luckily for it and for us, there is little chance of his succeeding to the throne - 6th March 2011 Closed minds will thwart mixed-race adoption - Michael Gove’s efforts to make it easier to adopt children from different ethnicities are justified, but do not address a range of issues - 27th February 2011 Mr Cameron — the other lot want that big idea - The big society is a great idea, an expression of what has traditionally been best in the Conservative party and in the human spirit - 20th February 2011 Don’t pretend all poor students are up to university - The coalition should forget university access and concentrate all its energies instead on this country’s failing school system - 13th February 2011 An easy fix for unmarried couples - There is already a simple way for heterosexuals to have the legal privileges and protection of marriage. That is to get married - 6th February 2011 To save the World Service, we need dynamite - Both the BBC and the government are starting from the wrong place. The World Service does not need to be cut. It needs to be expanded - 30th January 2011 It’s not a phobia — it’s rational to fear Islam - Baroness Warsi's inflammatory comments were unfair. Britain is strikingly tolerant towards Muslims, despite some understandable anxieties - 23rd January 2011 Now we have two kinds of elderly - As the elderly work for longer, two classes of old people will emerge — those that employers want and those that employers don’t - 16th January 2011 We're allowing white girls to become 'easy meat' - The silence surrounding the sexual crimes of British Pakistani Muslims against hundreds of white teenage girls is reverse racism - 9th January 2011 Smash the charity establishment and real giving will bloom again - It isn't enough to simply talk about cutting red tape, we must root out our country's pointless bureaucracy and burn it in the name of the big scociety - 2nd January 2011

Articles: 2010 Poverty can’t end without the notion of stigma - You cannot target the neediest in order to raise them out of poverty if you refuse to target anyone at all for fear of stigmatising them - 4th December 2010 Welfare does encourage 'breeding' - Howard Flight may have phrased his opinions in an unfortunate manner, but his argument about 'breeding' had some validity - 28th November 2010 Our MPs are too timid to act on immigration - It does matter whether or not white Britons become a minority, and our current government must have the courage to address this problem - 21st November 2010 Glory be – a benefits system that’s fair - It is unfair that people who struggle to work are often little better off, or even worse off, than people on benefits, who avoid work because it doesn’t pay - 14th November 2010 The injustice that shelters in housing benefit - By what right should people entiled to housing benefit have better, more expensive accommodation than hard-working people? - 31st October 2010 The comic novel crushes the puritans - We all bleed, but we all burp and take pratfalls too, stumblebum clown and countess alike. Comedy is an acceptance of all of life - 17th October 2010 The truth about schools from a repentant leftie - Gove said we now have the best teachers we have ever had. What he bases this on, apart from political courtesy, I don’t know - 10th October 2010 One thing we daren't say – racism is declining - Multiculturalism and positive discrimination have been divisive. They have promoted a culture of anxiety and resentment about race - 3rd October 2010 Bin the antenatal class and shame gymslip mothers - Any inadequacy in antenatal care for pregnant schoolgirls should be made good by the existing agencies whose job it is - 26th September 2010 Britain needs to fire bad teachers - People have been saying for years that special educational needs have been misused to excuse bad teaching and underachievement in schools - 19th September 2010 Britain’s taming of the Mad Men - The guest list at the Saatchi's party this week demonstrated the extent to which ad men have become members of the establishment - 11th September 2010 Hawking has proved religion is revived - The furore caused by Stephen Hawking's new book has demonstrated that religious indifference may well be a thing of the past - 5th September 2010 We must ban first-cousin marriage - Closely related first cousins face greater than normal risks of having babies with serious recessive genetic disorder - 29th August 2010 The magic circle of networking must be broken - All public figures should declare all the parties they go to. They might become more careful of the company they keep - 8th August 2010 Pity the lost boys of privilege - Today’s lost boys are practical enough to cook a bit but otherwise it seems pure luck that they can cope at all, given their general incompetence - 1st August 2010 Marriage vows are obsolete - I think prenups should be compulsory, as well as legally binding: everyone should have to make one of some kind, not necessarily about money - 25th July 2010 Isn’t a graduate tax just plain dumb? - Vince Cable's idea for a graduate tax is yet another of the statist insanities which have brought many universities low - 18th July 2010 If we are honest, billions have a case for asylum - And how many of these entirely deserving asylum seekers can we actually take in? - 11th July 2010 Today, class, we'll throw away our lunchbox poison - The failure to combat the appalling spread of obesity starts at home, and emanates from a lack of aspiration amongst parents - 27th June 2010 Oh Diane, you are Labour's Palin - Just because Diane Abbott is a woman and black, she has been forced by her own party into a position that is humiliating - 13th June 2010 Fair pay can’t be defined - There is no such thing as a just price. That is what my O-level history teacher said years ago, shocking me - 6th June 2010 Free schools will mean better schools. Nothing unfair in that - What is truly unfair is stopping the creation of good new schools simply because a lot of children are still at bad old schools - 30th May 2010 Name rape suspects and justice becomes the victim -T he law should treat men and women equally dispassionately, or equally protectively - 23rd May 2010 Here comes the new austerity chic - Like the public services, most of us could be far more economical, as they used to say, and even feel better for it - 16th May 2010 Cut Scotland loose to have a fair voting system - The election has convinced many that our electoral system needs reform: English and Scots can't vote together any more - 9th May 2010 Best tip for wanting it all is: don’t bother - Trying to excel on every front is impossible and is bound to drive almost any woman to distraction, if not to depression - 2nd May Surrender now - – the army’s no place for you, Private Single-Mum - 18th April Tolerance has put a fatwa on our moral nerve - Religion has turned out to be different from what tolerant people of my monocultural childhood understood by it - 11th April 2010 Science is close to erasing minds - Individual recollections also contribute to folk memory, and there are things that cultures perhaps should not forget - 28th March 2010 We can’t forgive the sins of your church - The church still gives the impression that its kiddie-fiddling priests are not half as Satanic as stuff like condoms and socialism - 21st March 2010 The new university challenge is to unravel Labour’s mess - The Blair-Brown years have demonstrated that it is quite easy to bring down standards in universities - 21st March 2010 Women want an end to hectoring by feminists - Somewhere along the way feminism in this country has turned into something many women cannot identify with. I can’t - 14th March 2010 Unwanted men, we need you to curb the welfare Amazons - What we need now in society is not feminisation, but a new masculinisation. Otherwise yet more men will become institutionally redundant - 7th March 2010 Bullying Brown is a dangerous weirdo - I am completely unpersuaded by Peter Mandelson’s oily account of the prime minister’s high-minded good nature - 28th February 2010 Public servants wallow at our expense - We have a centre-left establishment in the public service that gives every impression of being obsessed with inequality - 21st February 2010 Brown betrays us all to deliver his Diana moment - Instead of pointing true north, Brown’s moral compass now seems to be jittering in the direction of ravening ambition - 14th February 2010 Competition for the most imaginary friends - How cross some of my smartest acquaintances would be if it were suggested to them that they had only 150 Facebook friends - 7th February 2010 The insidious triumph of the facelifting classes - It is bad enough getting old. What makes it worse is the constant pressure, these days, to deny it or disguise it - 31st January 2010 Target radicals - before they target us - Only by careful targeting of the few can we avoid indiscriminate, mass intrusion into the freedom and the privacy of the many - 10th January 2010 Bring on the pills that make us smarter - Top scientists are popping pills to bolster their already bulging brains. Why not, if the drugs are safe and effective? - 3rd January 2010

Articles: 2009 Fix Britain by doing nothing - One of this country’s most serious (and most expensive) problems is that there is too much that doesn’t matter going on - 27th December 2009 Our darling freeloaders may actually like us, you know - A student hovel or a broken sofa in a Brighton squat was far preferable to the most cosseting of suburban luxuries with mum and dad - 13th December 2009 Toff-baiting, the dangerous sport that will hurt you too - Is there something about being rich, highly educated and well travelled that makes toffs unfit for office? - 6th December 2009 Hospitals may be bad but our regulators are worse - NHS policies bring to mind an interfering child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - 29th November 2009 Sadly, most people with a learning disability should not have children - It is hard enough to be an adequate parent with supposedly normal intelligence. For someone of very low intelligence it is even harder - 22nd November 2009 Nursing degree a silly initiative - Tony Blair once declared that we are all middle class now; today he could almost as well say we are all professional - 15th November 2009 MPs have lost their real purpose - Generally, we need fewer MPs, much less of their time and a great deal less of the expense of them. That is a cheering thought - 8th November 2009 Labour’s multicultural Britain - To frame a radical social policy, just to embarrass and marginalise the opposition party, is grotesquely immature and irresponsible - 1st November 2009 BBC mob were the BNP's best recruiters - To abandon reason and to adopt emotion in attacking Nick Griffin is entirely counterproductive, as we can already see - 25th October 2009 Whenever children start school, teaching will be dire - The system has been brought low by poorly qualified, trained and motivated teachers, supported by their unions - 18th October 2009 Barack Obama should never have accepted this tainted prize - It is both foolish and wrong of the President to accept the Nobel peace prize for something he has obviously not achieved - 11th October 2009 Glitterati throw halos around Polanski - I wonder what Roman Polanski's showbiz friends would think if he penetrated their daughters. Actually, I don’t wonder. They'd go insane - 4th October 2009 Dinner lady Carol is a victim of Labour’s weasel mindset - If such a thing happened to my child, I would be tempted to tie up the headmistress and vicar and whip them senseless - 27th September 2009 Religious tolerance has gone too far - The truth is that many religions have certain beliefs that are not merely irrational but sometimes dangerous and unacceptable - 20th September 2009 We are all child abusers now - We are no longer innocent until proved guilty but guilty until certified innocent by the state - 13th September 2009 Enforced adoption will stop this evil - Perhaps it might really be best if babies who are at risk from disasterous mothers were compulsorily taken away at birth and adopted - 6th September 2009 Nightmare nurses protected by silence - This bad and cruel nursing is completely unacceptable. Is there no one bold enough to do something? - 31st August 2009 Nightmare nurses protected by silence - This bad and cruel nursing is completely unacceptable. Is there no one bold enough to do something? - 30th August 2009 Failing pupils on all fronts - The Gordon Brown Academy is well meaning, industrious, although often arrogant and resistant to evidence. Unlikely to improve - 23rd August 2009 Near-death encounters have put me right off my bike - Bicycling seems to be suitable only for the reckless, nerveless unwashed and it’s a public menace too - 16th August 2009 Women aren’t equal to men - It is Harriet Harman’s misfortune that she is the sort of woman who gives feminism a bad name - 9th August 2009 It’s not pushy parents we need, it’s pushy schools - What will save our schools is a recognition that the world is a painfully competitive place - 26th July 2009 Mud-slinging can guard our freedoms - When eating in the street was strongly condemned, there was far less obesity, drunkenness and litter - 19th July 2009 A hymn to him - Are men really necessary? If they are no longer needed for producing sperm, perhaps they are no longer needed at all - 12th July 2009 Baby or career: young women cannot have it both ways - However much one wants children, for an ambitious woman there is never a good time to have a baby - 21st June 2009 A tax on junk food will offset NHS cuts - I think what’s needed now is a quick fix or two – something simple and fast-working - 14th June 2009 Labour’s greatest disgrace - Students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez died in agony because the system that should have protected them has collapsed - 7th June 2009 No privacy and no power – there’s no way I’d be an MP - We are about to see the deliberate abandonment of privacy in a tragic overreaction to the current scandal - 31st May 2009 One TV channel and three radio stations, that’s all the BBC needs - The BBC should do what commercial producers don’t do, can’t do, can’t do equally well or won’t do properly - at the moment it is doing too much - 24th May 2009 When today’s left speaks it is right-wing bigotry we hear - Like poverty, it is always with us. It is just not often in this country that you see bigots bare their vicious teeth - 17th May 2009 Time to bulldoze this equality maze - Surely it would be better to rely on the earlier legislation, pre-Macpherson, and on the goodwill of public servants - 10th May 2009 With friends like Harman, women don’t need enemies - What we need is MPs and cabinet ministers of the highest possible quality, regardless of sex or race - 3rd May 2009 Breaking the grip of this sneering world - Susan Boyle’s experience has all the symbolic power of a fairy story - 19th April 2009 Public opinion gets burnt to a crisp by the Chelsea Toaster - The proposal for Chelsea Barracks is a perfect symbol of the contempt in which the Establishment holds us - 12th April 2009 (see also: The Big Question: Why is Prince Charles angry about a development at Chelsea Barracks?) Divorce, the one bad bet a City tycoon is unable to shrug off - Brian Myerson has just failed to renegotiate his divorce settlement with his ex-wife - 5th April 2009 Forecast the fate of your marriage - The whole of marriage seems to me to be institutionally unstable: men and women change - 29th March 2009 We buy into beauty even as the state wields its ugly stick - British postwar housing and inner cities, down to the bullying street furniture, are an international disgrace - 22nd March 2009 Betrayed because mum is a writer - For a woman to cast out her adolescent son, and then to write a novel about it, is astonishing - 8th March 2009 Send the filthy rich culture packing - Fred the Shred is not ashamed to demand huge sums of money from taxpayers on modest incomes - 1st March 2009 If children can’t read, lives are ruined -If the word "institutionally" means anything, this country’s education system is institutionally unfit for purpose - 22nd February 2009 Labour bares its appeaser’s teeth to unbending Muslims - Geert Wilders’s visit was a disastrously missed opportunity. Keeping him out will anger many of the silent majority - 15th February 2009 Watch out, quangocrats – our patience is running out - If Britain throws billions at the public sector, with little result, then what would you expect? - 1st February 2009 Our best hope is that Barack Obama can resist the rabble-rousers - Mythologising, gabby ignorance and emotional incontinence. The president has been subjected to this in unprecedented volume - 25th January 2009 Clumsy Charles leaves a Sooty stain - It is wrong to call a man Sooty, when that does or might refer to the colour of his skin - 18th January 2009 Where Rachida Dati went wrong - Pictures of France’s justice minister striding back to work only five days whipped up an astonishing flurry of reaction - 11th January 2009 The hellish mindset of Cuba-enthusiasts - It is a rule of thumb that anyone given to praising Cuba under Castro is a person of poor judgment - 4th January 2009

Articles: 2008 Pinter and the odd literary law of geniuses with crazy politics - It struck me as a child that people with a way with words often sounded much cleverer than they actually were - 28th December 2008 Finally, we've more sense than money - The recession has reversed the phrase "cash-rich, time-poor" - a phrase that sums up the skewed priorities of our period of wealth - 21st December 2008 Betrayal all around from the guardians of democracy - The apparatchiks of the European Union have one thing in common with serial rapists. They cannot accept that no means no - 14th December 2008 Parents of a Down’s child must make painful choices - 30th November 2008 Slithery Smith wants a backdoor ban - Could any punter find out for sure that the prostitute of his choice is with him by her choice as well? - 23rd November 2008 Even in death our organs are not for the PM to snatch - 16th November 2008 Forcing birth control on unfit mothers - The cost of bad parents to an individual is terrible, but it is also very high to the rest of society - 9th November 2008 BBC's chance to return to what it’s good at - It would be a great national loss if the Ross-Brand scandal were used as an excuse to destroy Auntie by all those who would love to see her brought down - 2nd November 2008 Freedom given a dirty name - That is what Britons do. They belch, vomit, copulate and barge their way through public spaces - 19th October 2008 A black police association - that's racism in action - Public disloyalty like this is unacceptable to any organisation; it is profoundly damaging - 12th October 2008 English is our prize but teachers are tossing it away - Any self-respecting country would insist that all children learnt to speak the country’s language before anything else - 5th October 2008 Even child murderers may deserve pity - People who don’t have a disabled child may not understand how difficult and overwhelming it can be - 28th September 2008 The mistakes of school sex education - The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and STDs - 21st September 2008 Easy ways to cut immigration - A vast army of state sector employees should be redeployed as social care workers - 14th September 2008 Cynical choice leaves McCain in shreds - In choosing a woman he doesn’t know or understand John McCain reveals a dishonourable lust for office - 7th September 2008 Leave the fat alone – bullying won’t curb obesity - What prevents obesity is a good income, a good education and good opportunities. Prosperity, in short - 31st August 2008 Glitter: mad, bad or just dangerous to know? - Few deny Gary Glitter should be on the sex offenders list but he's suffering media martyrdom - 24th August 2008 I’m not religious, but there’s something about funerals - Funerals are a traditional rite of passage and even non-believers find that religion can rarely be removed from them - 17th August 2008 To beat extremism we must dissolve religious groups - Separatist Muslim belief is growing among the young and the moderate, tolerant majority must be alarmed by this - 27th July 2008 Deliver us, minister, from your dreadful incompetence - The Sats fiasco is just one of many eye-stretching recent examples of government incompetence - 20th July 2008 Britain is creating youths who have nothing to lose - For a young, vital, angry man an Asbo often seems better than Asda - 13th July 2008 Tolerate sharia, yes, but never respect it - I feel that this constant demand for respect makes a great many people privately very resentful - 6th July 2008 archive

News & updates:

References:

Links: Extensive archive of articles at minettemarrin.com