The Critical Commentator

                                          Sport: “In football as in life, events occur at the juxtaposition of noise and signal, contingency and agency.” (Matthew Syed, The Times – quoted in Private Eye 1491                                   What? Any Wintry Afternoon in England ,  Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] * Liverpool and Tottenham fans are being charged sky-high prices to attend the Champions League final next month. The price of scheduled flights from the UK to Madrid has increased to more than £1,300 return. …Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram expressed his anger at easyJet’s prices, tweeting: “Hiking up prices by 683 per cent for return flights to Madrid is quite simply profiteering from the pass...

                                         Food Banks Charity (The Seven Acts of Mercy) Bartolomeo Schedoni (1578-1615) (copy after) Photo Credit: Blairs Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] A record 1.6m emergency food parcels were given out by the Trussell Trust food bank network last year – more than 500,000 of them to children – as benefit cuts, universal credit delays and rising poverty fuelled the busiest year in the charity’s history. The trust demanded urgent changes to the UK benefit system – including major reforms to universal credit - as it recorded a year-on-year 19% surge in the number of food bags it gave out – the biggest increase for five years. …The trust’s chief executive, Emma Revie, said it was unacceptable that people had to use food banks in the first place, and that the state should not rely on them to fix its shortcomings. “We do not want to be a part of the ...

                                    Modern Life … “But peacocking productivity pervades, especially in big-city jobs. The Toilet , Paul Falconer Poole (1807-1879) Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection [CC BY-NC-SA] You take 14 minute lunch breaks and send your first email at 6.24am, four minutes after your alarm pealed, two hours before you are expected in the office, while you squeeze Colgate on your toothbrush with your spare hand and keep an eye on the mirror: if you’re multi-tasking and no one was watching, are you even multi-tasking? …It’s not just work. Arranging plans with friends involves a subtext of one-upmanship (Ah, six doesn’t work – I don’t leave work until seven”), with the upshot that you end up having a drink at 10pm on a Tuesday evening, so neither of you loses face. Don’t mistake the impulse for Stakhanovite: it’s more self-important than that.”   ...

                                            Questions [A] In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? 1. 20% 2. 40% 3. 60% [B] Of the world population what percentage live in low-income countries? [C] Where does the majority of the world population live? 1. Low-Income countries 2. Middle-income countries 3. High–income countries [D] In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has….   1. Almost doubled 2. Remained more or less the same 3. Almost halved [E] What is the life expectancy of the world today? 1. 50 years 2. 60 years 3. 70 years [F] There are 2 billion children in the world today, aged 0 to 15 years old. How many children will there be in the year 2100 according to the UN? 1. 4 billion 2. 3 billion 3. 2 billion [G] How did the number of deaths per year...

                                             Astrology Jupiter's Dream , Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham (1912-2004) Photo Credit: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham Trust [CC BY-NC-ND] …A surge in the popularity of astrology among young people has turned a New Age pastime into a multi-billion-pound business. New businesses in trendy offices in London and New York offer apps that promise tailor-made horoscopes for smartphone users, as well as individual consultations. Women aged between 20 and 35 are the driver of the trend and are said to be reading the stars to deal with the stress of their daily life. …Banu Guler, 31, co-founder of Co-Star, said that  people were using the app because “technology impacts our lives and you are seeing more chaos on the political stage. I think there are a lot of good things that are really calming about astrology, having this narrative...

                         Smartphones and Wellbeing Sleep , Robert Gemmell Hutchinson (1855-1936) Photo Credit: City of Edinburgh Council [CC BY-NC-ND] Using smartphones and other screens has little impact on the wellbeing of teenagers – even before they go to sleep, according to a study. Despite the common belief that screen time could damage young people’s health, researchers at Oxford university have found little evidence to support these fears, using data from more than 17,000 teenagers. Results suggest that the total amount of time spent on screens per a day had a limited impact on teenager’s mental health, regardless of it being a weekend or a weekday. (The i, 2019)                     Perhaps it’s not the using of them that matters but how they are being used? * My phone knows where I am, how many steps I took to get there, the whisper of a thou...

                                               Tax Monte Carlo and Monaco from Cap Martin, Laurits Bernhard Holst (1848-1934) Photo Credit: Russell- Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] The billionaire founder of Phones4U has threatened to leave Britain and move to Monaco if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister. John Caudwell, 65, who sold his mobile phone business for £1.5 billion in 2006, said that if the Labour leader won a general election “we’d just go and live in the south of France or Monaco. Why stay here and be raped?” …Labour has proposed a 50 per cent tax rate on people earning more than £125,000 and a 45 per cent rate for those earning over £80,000 a year. At present the higher rate is 40 per cent on earnings between £50,000 and £150.000, and 45 per cent above £150,000. In 2013 Mr Caudwell said that he had paid £253 million in t...

                                 Public Services Spending on public services in Britain would be higher by £2,500 per person each year if the government matched comparable European levels of funding, an analysis shows today. The Institute for Public Policy Research found that Britain spends about 40 per cent of GDP on public services, down from 47 per cent in 2010. European spending has also fallen, but comparable EU countries still spend an average of 48 per cent of their GDP on areas such as health, education and welfare, the think tank said. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and Sweden were classed as the comparable countries. Britain’s tax burden is also lower than the European average. Employee taxes amount to about 11.6 per cent of average income in the UK, compared with 15.4 per cent in the EU. The total burden of taxation in Brita...

Foreign Intervention The Libyan Desert, Sunset ,   William Blake Richmond (1842-1921) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] … So I return to Libya. In that single sentence from Cameron’s 2011 victory speech in Benghazi – “Your city was an inspiration to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom” – we can find the answer to the question “why then, the debacle of the new Libya?” Our prime minister was making two assertions. First, “you threw off a dictator”. This was true. Second, “you chose freedom”. This was false. The cheering mob had not “chosen” freedom.   They’d chosen only to be rid of somebody. They weren’t focusing on the future. It would not be long before some of them would “choose” one militia, some another, and many, terrified choose to cower. Some would even be missing their former dictator. It was not they but we, their supposed liberators, France and Britain, who had chosen freedom for them. It never took root. …Foreign intervention te...