Articles:
- A few people might have made the leap 40 years ago, but social mobility no longer exists - Normal service has returned, and the only way out of it is if you can buy an education or have the right parents - 24th May 2012
- The Second Sexism is just victim-envy - It is perfectly possible to understand that many men are suffering at the moment without blaming it on feminism - 17th May 2012
- TV's hoarders show us the dark side of consumerism - The stories in TV programmes such as Britain's Biggest Hoarders fascinate us because we glimpse ourselves in them - 10th May 2012
- If you live in a safe seat voting counts for nothing - That and the old DIY punk spirit was why I ran for election as an independent - 3rd May 2012
- The hunt for Hunt is overshadowing the real issues – the recession and the rule of an over-confident elite - The Murdoch circus is entertaining enough, but it shouldn't blind us to what is really happening under this government - 26th April 2012
- Breivik's ideology is all too familiar: that's our big problem - It's comforting to view the killer's horror of multiculturalism as deranged – but it is just an extreme example of what many feel - 19th April 2012
- No beautiful Malian music will make Marie Trintignant's death go away - How could Bertrant Cantat, the singer who killed his partner, be allowed to feature on Amadou and Mariam's new album? - 7th April 2012
- I have always compared myself to Madonna - She's the prism through which women and ageing is reflected, but refuses to play by the rules - 29th March 2012
- We should be less afraid of intervening in chaotic families - Linking educational success to parenting makes able parents anxious. But their children are not the ones we should be worrying about - 22nd March 2012
- Some meat is OK, as long as it's not the processed stuff that poor people eat - Whether we choose to eat animals or not, dietary advice that takes no account of class or budget is useless - 15th March 2012
- 'Family values' – the same old story about rewarding the rich - Austerity is being felt by all kinds of families, but the tax system is now being used to show us which families matter and which don't - 8th March 2012
- This level of healthcare privatisation is shocking - Compassion is crucial to good care, but the health bill will make it all the rarer in our diminished NHS - 1st March 2012
- I have stacked shelves and hosed down urinals. Unlike the elite who are now telling lazy scroungers to buck up - Get a suit. Drone on. You could be work and pensions minister. You just need to adjust your attitude - 23rd February 2012
- Instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves - Empathy has crashed. No more cruel to be kind. We must simply be cruel - 16th February 2012
- Despite its promises, this government can't make you happy. In times of austerity, you are on your own - The happiness agenda is just a way of making huge social problems seem personal - 9th February 2012
- What does the TripAdvisor furore teach us about critics? - people reviewing on TripAdvisor are incredibly petty, although mostly truthful. But is this what we want from all criticism? - 2nd February 2012
- The problem Tory 'feminists' face - Even a vibrant Conservative MP such as Louise Mensch can't avoid the fact that austerity is stripping us down to very old gender roles - 26th January 2012
- This growing culture of outrage doesn't extend free speech – it limits it - Suddenly, anyone, anywhere, is offended by everything - 19th January 2012
- Shoplifters say they steal because they need love. I need love too, but I don't wander around Tesco looking for it - Celebrity pilferers such as Antony Worrall Thompson are a source of hilarity, not outrage - 12th January 2012
- I'm not alone in feeling English, not British. But that has nothing to do with racism or Ukip - Englishness is not the preserve of the right - 5th January 2012
- The worst Christmas ever was when I took the kids to Bethlehem - Even the road signs for Sodom and Gomorrah didn't amuse them - 22nd December 2011
- Why pretend we know everything? It's time to embrace uncertainty - It is certainty that we need to worry about, as extreme ideologies prosper in these uncertain times - 15th December 2011
- Why women don't like appearing on TV - Many women – including me – are afraid of seeming unlovable and ignorant, even though men ooze such qualities in serious discussions - 8th December 2011
- If the summer rioters really were all criminals, why don't they rampage more often – and why did they stop? - The failure to explain the riots is a wilful political act by the right - 1st November 2011
- Poor Pippa Middleton. She's the object of our fantasies and then we go and punish her. But such is our cult of celebrity - The problem with the press fixation on Pippa Middleton is the same as the hand-wringing over the Leveson inquiry – the boundaries between public/private are blurring as we speak - 24th November 2011
- Where was the mention of Margaret Thatcher's victims? - Meryl Streep, who plays Thatcher in The Iron Lady, invited me back for apple pie after a screening. But that didn't lessen my hatred for the former Tory leader - 17th November 2011
- For News International as for the Stasi, the spying list just spiralled - The News of the World's hacking was on a scale that suggests the very act of surveillance corroded their sense of normality - 10th November 2011
- Two hundred people in tents outside St Paul's have created a body more effective than the Church of England - Protesters are no longer prepared to form an orderly queue. That is why occupations are the new demos - 3rd November 2011
- This coalition hasn't forgotten women. It's targeted them - We have a government that has socked it to women socially and financially, with worse to come, and yet is shocked we don't love it back - 17th September 2011
- Shopping is not a hobby and it's not a patriotic duty, either - In troubled times, society needs more than retail therapy to solve its problems - 10th September 2011
- It's the same old game. Get your rosaries off my ovaries, as we used to say - For all the liberal language, independent counselling is just an underhanded anti-abortion tactic - 3rd September 2011
- UK riots: don't shut these kids out now - Put the shutters up on the shops, but not in our minds. A punitive and condemning reaction simply mirrors the alienation so many already experience - 13th August 2011
- What's worse than colonic irrigation? The know-alls queueing up to laugh at it - Plenty of detox therapies may be nonsense, but we shouldn't automatically slam anyone who veers from the mainstream - 6th August 2011
- The end of spin? Don't be daft. We've forgotten how to do without it - Don't expect the phone-hacking scandal to clear up politicians' messy relationship with the media - 23rd July 2011
- I still like the redtops - Bawdy tittle-tattle has always been part of our press – let's not lose it - 16th July 2011
- The right want to set the clock back on abortion and gay rights. I say: hands off - Why is allowing people control over their own sexuality something that so many conservatives do not like? - 9th July 2011
- A world with too much freedom is better than one with not enough - We need to understand a generation that defines privacy differently. As LulzSec, Twitter and the rest show us, boundaries are changing - 2nd July 2011
- I suspect Blue Labour is just another great moving-right show - This new 'blue' ideology seems more conservative than radical, but at least Labour is acknowledging how bad things are for the party - 25th June 2011
- Yes, our children are growing up too soon. But blame capitalism, not sex - What really makes kids grow up 'too soon' may have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with poverty - 11th June 2011
- Debating the word 'chav' is irrelevant to the working-class experience - Extending choice for the poorest will achieve more than defining who they are - 4th June 2011
- It's a baking-and-Bunnygirls backlash: we're going back to the 50s - What we are seeing is just how far the Tories' liberalism goes - 28th May 2011
- Like many women, I've been raped, but I still agree with Ken Clarke - Rape is not a party-political issue and I am disgusted that it has been treated that way this week - 21st May 2011
- Being a slut, to my mind, was mostly fun – wearing and doing what you liked - To see a movement such as SlutWalk that brings together women who say "hands off our bodies, and our clothes" is fabulous - 14th May 2011
- The Middletons were the stars of the show, but it was still a royal stitch-up - The values of the Middletons' class – hard work, respect for property and insular family life – are actually at odds with those of the aristocracy - 8th May 2011
- Quotas and women-only shortlists aren't popular, but they work - The push for equality stopped years ago. Women need to wake up to what has really happened - 30th April 2011
- More stuff does not make us happier. Doing stuff, especially for others, does - Despite all its encouraging homilies and self-help jargon, I don't want the new organization Action for Happiness. I want Action for Things to Be Basically OK - 16th April 2011
- Speak to us peasants, posh boys, for we know all about social mobility - Why am I being lectured about social mobility by people who were born at the top? - 9th April 2011
- Dirt is everywhere – in sex, in class, in art and, yes readers, in my home - We shell out for antibacterial wipes and Cillit Bang while third world children die because of a lack of basic sanitation – that's the real dirt - 2nd April 2011
- If you earn less than the average wage, you're not middle class. It's all a scam - I don't know what class will be protesting today – squeezed, strugglers. But will they resist the fiction that class no long matters? - 26th March 2011
- The scale of youth unemployment scares me. It's like before … - When I was 14, stacking supermarket shelves earned me money to buy cider and black. But is work indisputably good? - 19th March 2011
- Whatever we learn about Andrew, people will still cheer the happy couple - Whatever we learn about Andrew, people will still cheer the happy couple - 12th March 2011
- Robert Winston sawing a pig is fine – but give me a trained teacher any day - Jamie's Dream School is a vast insult to the teaching profession in that it assumes that subject expertise is enough to teach - 5th March 2011
- What's the nicest thing a man can do for a woman? Shout at a bigot - I have inevitably been called a man-hater. The obvious response is, 'Men? Look at me, can't get enough of them!' - 26th February 2011
- Why does nobody want to feel like a natural woman anymore? - We now have a new aesthetic of femininity where everything is meant to be as fake as possible - 19th February 2011
- If marriage is so damn good, why does it need propping up with tax breaks? - Iain Duncan Smith may be promoting National Marriage Week, but if the issue really was children, then support for single parents would be paramount - 12th February 2011
- If the Left is to rise again, it must lift the official silence on race and culture - The EDL are using a language of libertarianism, modernity and fake inclusiveness. They know what they are doing - 5th February 2011
- Comedians are taking over the world, but funnily enough, I'm not laughing - Comedy is not the new rock'n'roll. It's the new Muzak. It's always there in the background - 29th January 2011
- After school I went on the dole, but crucially I got off it. Sadly our kids won't - Youth unemployment is on the rise, and everything that could help struggling young people back on track is subject to cuts. This could lead to the long-term exclusion of a generation - 22nd January 2011
- It's time to get angry - All this polite and smiley feminism is getting us nowhere - 15th January 2011
- Anarchy rules! But it's about a lot more than just lobbing things at police - It's more often used now as a jibe against someone who throws something at a protest, but anarchism has a long, complex history, and it's never really gone away - 18th December 2010
- You think David Cameron's bad, Morrissey? Most of them don't even like music - The Smiths are half-right to disown the PM's fandom. But it's people with no musical convictions who are most suspect - 12th December 2010
- Why aren't we supporting the students? Maybe we've been psychically kettled - We live in a society in which we are told there is no money and yet see it washing around the upper echelons - 4th December 2010
- Royal wedding? It's the bland leading the bland - Kate Middleton is the perfect people's princess for this dull, conservative land - 26th November 2010
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