The Critical Commentator

  In recent decades, public service careers have suffered a loss of status. Where the Victorians built grand hospitals, town halls, law courts and schools for their public servants, our estimation of the prestige of these jobs can be inferred from our decaying parliament building, structurally endangered schools and shabby hospitals. It is no accident that the grandest buildings we moderns will leave to future generations are the glittering central London phalluses that house investment banks and City law firms... The current crisis in teacher recruitment and retention can be traced not only to the profession's declining real-term's pay but also to its declining social prestige. It was once a guarantee of middle-class status but the teachers I know in London live in cramped flat-shares well into their thirties - a way of life recognisable to the capital's underpaid Uber drivers and baristas... Meanwhile the prestige of professions like banking and commercial law has dramati...

  A new survey by the pollster Lord Ashcroft has found that 72 per cent of his sample - including more than half of 2019 Conservative voters - agreed that people were getting poorer, nothing seemed to work properly, and that big changes were needed to the way the country is run... Yet far from viewing government primarily as an expensive nuisance, clear majorities, including most 2019 Tories, thought it should control the water, rail, electricity and gas industries. More than two thirds thought people had a right to housing, healthcare, education and enough to live on, and that the government had a responsibility to deliver these. The Untouchables James Ferrier Pryde (1866-1941) Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [Public Domain}  Although they thought government was failing, they believed the private sector was worse. Most blamed companies for putting up prices to boost their own profits. Yet many held it was the government's job to do something about this, either by helping con...

  I consider myself a natural adversary of Dr Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist and lifestyle guru... I will never ingest exotic collations of dietary supplements before breakfast, nor do I plan to manipulate my circadian rhythms by confining myself to a room illuminated by red lightbulbs. I bristle at Huberman's view of human beings as little more than organic machines requiring carefully calibrated inputs to attain maximum efficiency. My favourite Hubermanism is his advice to watch the sunset every evening, not because it is beautiful but because when the sun is "at a low solar angle, blue and yellow wavelength contrast is enhanced... activating the biological circuits that support mental and physical health." Sunset Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) Photo Credit: Tate Britain [CC BY-NC-ND] Huberman's mechanistic view of our bodies and minds appeals to an age that is insecure about the human condition and its limitations. As machines become ever more frigh...

  In the past ten years, we've suffered no fewer than four international social manias: the transgender craze, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns, and post-Floydian Black Lives Matter. Having accelerated from scientific hypothesis to fever dream, climate change apocalypticism now displays all the markers of another mania. Suddenly everyone thinks the same thing. The media, politicians, celebrities, the arts - they're all in tell-tale accord. No dissent is allowed, and the few kooks who differ are denounced as murderous heretics who must be silenced or imprisoned. There is only one "truth". Ironically, governed by an extreme, emotive, absolute "truth", some politicians, journos and experts just start making things up. Sheep Richard Ansdell (1815-1885) (Follower of) Photo Credit: Grundy Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA] The governor of Hawaii claimed that thanks to climate change Maui was subject to a "fire hurricane". There's no such thing as a "fire hurrican...