The Critical Commentator

 ...  We think we can have the low tax levels of the Anglosphere with high northern European levels of public services, and we can't. In Britain, the tax take - tax as a percentage of GDP - at 33.5 per cent is closer to the Anglosphere than to northern Europe. In the US, it is 26.6 per cent, in Australia 28.5 and in Canada 33.2. In Germany, meanwhile, the tax take is 39.5 per cent, in Scandinavia it is 43.7 per cent on average and in France it is 45.1 per cent. Britons, however, have high expectations of what the state will provide for them. - in some areas,  higher than those of the Europeans. Even the French are required to contribute to the costs of their healthcare, but no politician in this country dares suggest Britons should fork out a penny to see a doctor because they know they would be out on their ear at the next election. Health and Wealth Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) Photo Credit: Yale Centre for British Art [Public Domain] The reach of British public s...

Many children could be misdiagnosed with dyslexia as almost half of experts believe myths about the learning difficulty, research suggests. A study led by Durham University has found that many of those diagnosing children believe that letters jump around or words appear in different order for those with dyslexia. These indicators have been discredited, the research says. Academics say there is significant variability in the methods used by professionals for identifying dyslexia. They conducted an investigation of 275 UK professionals involved  in assessing students for dyslexia - including educational psychologists and specialists. This probed their assessment methods and what they believed to be signs of dyslexia, which mainly causes problems with reading, writing and spelling. It found that almost half of dyslexia professionals who were surveyed believed at least one unproven indicator for dyslexia...  The study ... warned that the misconceptions could influence assessors' j...

  A recent viral meme involves asking OpenAI's ChatGPT to scrutinise - or "roast" - our Instagram feeds. According to NBC, over 310,000 people have participated in the meme, which is shared through an Instagram Stories template... It's pretty fun. Not too mean, but it doesn't go easy on you either. The desire to be "roasted" online isn't totally new. We all want an unvarnished, un-sugar-coated opinion of who we really are, and the internet is one of the better places to search for answers. Whether it's asking Reddit to roast us or taking personality quizzes, we're always looking for hidden aspects of our character.   With AI, it's like we finally have the opportunity to ask: "Do I look fat in this?" and receive what seems like an honest answer. A Fat Man Pointing to a Woman with Her Hands Clasped Pieter Huys (c. 1520-1581 (after) Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] Personality quizzes, in particular, have long been...

  The television presenter Kirstie Allsopp tweeted this week that she was proud of her 15-year-old son for having just spent three weeks travelling in Europe with a 16-year-old friend. It ignited a fierce debate, with Kirstie alternately denounced for letting her child travel independently too young or praised for giving him choice and experience. I'm with Allsopp. The danger for this generation doesn't come from encountering life but from being shielded from and reluctant to engage with it. We're so preoccupied with children's physical safety that we've discouraged them from taking risks. At the same time we've gifted them an online universe which is so addictive that many of them would rather mediate most of their interactions with other people through it... We are trapping the young and cutting them off from what was normal for millennia; the overriding need to relate to the human beings around them and to learn  how to move confidently through the physical w...

  Taxpayers have been funding development projects in parts of the world that are richer than some areas of the UK, a report claims. The study by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) found that, over the last five years, British overseas development assistance had been spent in wealthy areas of China, Mexico and Malaysia. Some of the money was spent after a decision by the previous government to reduce Britain's overseas aid budget from 0.7 per cent of GDP, which resulted in big cuts to aid budgets in countries such as Yemen, Syria and Somalia. The IEA described the spending as "Robin Hood in reverse" and said that the government needed to "urgently re-evaluate our aid priorities". The Bund at Shanghai Chinese School Photo Credit: World Museum Liverpool [CC BY-NC]  Among the funding identified by the think tank was a £200,000 project in Shanghai funded by the Department of Business to "foster creativity in Chinese communities". The British Council a...

  Neurodivergence has become a bandwagon, so overladen as to devalue cruelly  the plight of the much smaller numbers of adults and children whose sometimes grave mental difficulties struggle for definition   amid the careless use of words and phrases such as autistic, clinically depressed, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar. You now hear people talking about these things in pubs and coffee shops...   In its reach into our popular culture, "mental health" is an exploding branch of the discipline it believes itself to be  a part of: medical science... But is psychiatry ( the study of diagnosis and treatment) a science at all? Does psychology (the study of the mind and behaviour) deserve the name of science? These questions matter as government struggles for ways of pushing, pulling or nudging our fellow citizens back into work. More than nine million of us are now "economically inactive" - choosing not to work. There are many good reasons ...

 We idolise them. Overanalyse them. And project our own relationship ambitions and anxieties onto them... And for Gen Z, well, it's Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury. Or at least it was until this week. On Wednesday the young couple who came second in ITV's Love Island in 2019, announced that they were splitting up... Adieu Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-1922) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]  To the uninitiated, this might seem like just another  reality-TV-star-turned-influencer break-up. It isn't... It's hard to know why we care quite so much. Possibly it was because Hague and Fury were chief operators of the digital world - they laid almost all of their lives out online - and yet their love-story seemed real. We watched as they travelled the world together, with Hague vlogging as they hopped from the Maldives to LA, and built their dream home together in Cheshire after a major burglary in 2021. I'm 30 and I should know better, but I'm invested a...

  The BBC has defended Mishal Husain, a presenter on its Radio 4 Today programme, after she was accused by an Israeli government spokesperson live on air of "blindly repeating what terrorist organisations ... feed you.". In a tetchy interview on yesterday's programme, David Mencer said Husain warranted the "pro-Palestine reporter of the year award"... The Question James Torrance (1859-1916) Photo Credit: Museums & Galleries Edinburgh [CC  BY-NC-ND] The interview began with Husain asking Mencer about an Israeli strike on a school compound in Gaza. The BBC interviewed Dr Khamis Elessi, who said the casualties had included elderly people, women and children. The Israeli army claimed the school compound was being used as a Hamas command centre. Mencer rejected Elessi's account, saying Israel was "extremely sceptical about pseudo medical staff" who had "inflated" casualty figures throughout the war in Gaza. He said 19 Hamas fighters were...

Memory-holing speaks to a broader trend to cleanse history by erasing all that is now considered distasteful. Again, the BBC leads the charge. The comedy series Little Britain, popular in the early Noughties, has been removed from iPlayer, Netflix and Britbox "because times have changed". Although men impersonating women are widely lauded today, "blacking up" and impersonating another ethnicity is most decidedly not. Mad Men also falls foul of this injunction: recently released on Netflix in Australia and Canada, viewers have discovered that the episode in which Roger Stirling dons blackface has been carefully omitted. In recent years we've seen old music, films and novels either quietly dropped or revised. The Pogues' Fairytale of New York Christmas anthem is routinely edited to delete what's considered to be a homophobic insult, while books by Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl have been rewritten with antisemitic tropes and racial slurs re...

 Recently I had a sudden urge to update my keyring situation - a random impulse I justified with the notion that the set to my new home deserved something pretty and shiny. A colourful bead vibe, perhaps, or something pearly to match my phone charm. In My Lady's Chamber Frederick Bentz  (1853-1936) Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Museum & Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] Now, after some deep self-reflection and significant time browsing £20 iterations (stringtin.com), I realise I have just fallen victim to luxury fashion's latest obsession. Am I silly to want a silly-cessory? You tell me. But take a look at your collection before you answer. Are you wearing a friendship bracelet or two; Is your phone, like mine decorated with with some gingham ribbon or a charm? Do you wear lurid-hued Crocs strewn  with the pop-on stickers known as - oh how I hate this word - Jibbitz;   has your laptop got stickers on? If the answer to even one of these is yes then you too are a silly-cesso...

  Last year's annual poll for the best joke of the festival was Lorna Rose Treen's one-liner: "I started  dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah." In 2019 Olaf Falafel, not his real name, won with: "I keep randomly shouting out 'broccoli' and 'cauliflower' - I think I might have florets." (Day one: joy and acclaim. Day two: outrage from Tourette syndrome charities.) A Capital Joke unknown artist Photo Credit: Preston Park Museum & Grounds [CC BY-NC-ND] In 2017 he was nominated for the 'Funniest Joke of the Fringe with: "I wasn't particularly close to my dad before he died - which was lucky, because he trod on a landmine." Boom Boom! In 2023: "Getting mythology wrong is my Hercules ankle." Some other jokes: 'I took out a loan to pay for an exorcism. If I don't pay it back, I'm going to get repossessed.' 'My dad used to say to me, "Pints, gallons, litres" which I thin...

  Sir, Duncan Gardham calls for better citizenship classes "to tackle the extremist messages enticing our young", but education could go further than one subject in schools. From the first years of primary, pupils need to learn critical online thinking so that, equipped with the right tools and sources, it becomes instinctive for young people to query, check and verify what they read, see or hear. AI may provide solutions, even though it creates its own issues. Socrates unknown artist Photo Credit:Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford [CC BY-NC] The rest of us would benefit from a public information campaign to explain what misinformation and disinformation are and how they spread. It needs to be on the scale of the Covid health messaging because the risk to democracy is equally grave. I have known serious, intelligent postgraduate journalism students who believe the moon landings were faked because they'd read an apparently authoritative blogger making the case...

  The Italian luxury fashion house [Dolce & Gabbana] has identified a new market: dogs. For £85, owners can spray their best friend with Fefe, a scent developed by the master perfumier Emilie Bevierre-Coppermann. It is the first time a big fashion brand has diversified into dog perfume. Prize Winning Sheep Dog Joseph Hardman (1893-1972) Photo Credit: Lakeland Arts [CC BY-NC-ND] D&G describes the scent - a blend of ylang-ylang and sandalwood named after Domenico Dolce's dog - as "an olfactory masterpiece". A vet dismissed it as a waste of money. Fabian Rivers, a welfare ambassador for the RSPCA said that most dog toiletries were "lowbrow products" costing less than £15, though Aesop sells a shampoo in the US for $43 (£33). "The fact that they're coming into this market at such a high price is an interesting way of having people spend their money on things that have very little merit, " Rivers said... The designers consulted vets, animal beha...

 With 25 chefs, a kitchen recently renovated for €15 million and a wine cellar containing 14,000 bottles, the French presidency should be able to organise a decent dinner party. At a Hong Kong Dinner Party David Alan Redpath Michie (1928-2015) Photo Credit: Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture [CC BY-NC-ND] Yet when the King paid a state visit to France last year, President Macron decided that the Elysee was not good enough and instead held the reception in the Palace of Versailles. The cost of the evening came to €474,851, according to a report published this week by the Court of Accounts, which  oversees French state spending... The disclosure is damaging for Macron at a time when France is under pressure to adopt austerity measures to reduce a national debt of more than €3 trillion... When the visit finally went ahead in September more than 150 guests were invited to Versailles ... They were served drinks including a 2004 Chateau Mouton Rothschild and a 2013 Pol...

  The new, and some might say tedious, vanity fad is celebrities making videos of themselves showering and looking as if it's literally the most amazing and sensual thing that has ever happened to them. It has a name - the power shower pose - and is a way to "validate nudity or near nudity". "Self-touching and preening" looks "classy" when under water apparently. Does it? I worry for JLo to be honest. In her video she stands in a fountain furiously rubbing her body like the poor woman has fleas. Feast of Fools Frans Floris the elder  (c. 1517-1570) Photo Credit: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust [CC BY-NC-ND] It's exhausting to be a celebrity. Have pity on them. Look at Beckham. When the TV went on the blink in his New York hotel room this year, he set about fixing it - lying on the floor naked, save for a pair of tight Calvin Klein underpants. His wife swiftly posted the photo on social media, a fish thrown to clapping seals. See? They work hard for th...