Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 103

Page 3’s demise smacks of censorship | Simon Jenkins

The Sun’s Page 3 was about as arousing as an ankle at a Victorian dance. It has outlived its editorial purpose. Yet sex still sells

• The Sun calls time on topless models after 44 years

So it’s farewell nipples. They are to vanish – from the Sun’s Page 3. So they will remain online, except in the Daily Star, except in a hundred magazines and a thousand “tasteful” fashion shoots. So what next?

Children are already pixelated. What about female (and male) bottoms, singers’ crotch shots, David Beckh...

The Labour party of my dreams would stand up for poorer people. Where is it? | Simon Jenkins

The nation surely deserves a party of the left – and a real choice when it goes to the polls

There is the moment in an election campaign when I crave a choice, not an echo. That moment is now. For starters, I want a real Labour party. I know what the Tories are about. I have watched them at it for years. But against them the nation surely deserves a party of what is conventionally called the left. Where is it?

The new politics suggests we focus not on policies but on groups, tribes, interests....

Cancer drugs will always be emotive but the government is right to restrict them | Simon Jenkins

Drug companies and critically ill patients cannot be left to dictate how the NHS allocates its scarce resources

Another NHS chicken comes squawking home to roost. Cancer drugs are effectively free at the point of use, so the relevant government agency, Nice, must ration which ones it licenses for prescription.

This rules out the most expensive and least cost-effective. Along comes politics in the form of David Cameron at the last election, pledging a separate “Cancer Drugs Fund” (CDF) to pay fo...

Charlie Hebdo: Now is the time to uphold freedoms, not give in to fear | Simon Jenkins

Terrorists can kill and maim, but they cannot topple governments. We must not hand them victory by treating this massacre as an act of war

Why does it happen? Whenever a political outrage is committed, the sensible question is to ask: what does its perpetrator want? What reaction does he seek, and what does he not seek?

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The NHS can’t survive without payment for frontline treatments | Simon Jenkins

Rationing supply of care by payment may offend tradition, but rationing by chaos is cruel

• NHS A&E crisis worst ever, new figures show: Politics Live blog

Politicians have gone mad. The NHS is to be rescued with £2bn from the banks (Tories), with £2.5bn from cigarettes (Labour), with £1.5bn from London mansions (Labour), with the same £1.5bn for Scottish nurses (Scottish Labour) or with £8bn “from the proceeds of growth” (the Lib Dems). Or it can always be res...

Easy to sneer at arts graduates. But we’ll need their skills | Simon Jenkins

Creative types have the confidence to take risks. And they understand that money isn’t everything

Anthony Ward Thomas, of Ward Thomas Removals, has a problem that he shares with the public. After a life spent turning a man with a van into a multimillion-pound firm, he finds his children are not interested in taking over. “They have different interests,” he says. He is sad, but agrees “there should be no divine right that they get the business”. They should make their own way in the world....

Let’s mark Debbie Purdy’s death by legalising assisted dying | Simon Jenkins

The best way to honour the right-to-die campaigner would be for MPs to push through Lord Falconer’s dignity in dying bill

• Poll: Should assisted dying for the terminally ill be legalised

The life and death by starvation of the right-to-die campaigner, Debbie Purdy, should be celebrated by the Commons passing the House of Lords’ “dignity in dying” bill forthwith. An overwhelming majority of the public – 60-70% – wants it. The weight of legal and ethical opinion wants it. Eighty of the great an...

Heroes of 2014: Dylan Thomas, a poet brought back to life | Simon Jenkins

He may have died in 1953, but the BBC dramatisation of Under Milk Wood brought Thomas’s work afresh to a 21st-century audience

Dylan Thomas’s 2014 centenary saw a predictable gush of adjective-drenched, misanthropic verse. Much did not go fast enough “into the dying of the light” for my taste. But one tribute stood out amid the gloom: BBC Wales’s dramatisation of Under Milk Wood, with a gathering up of 37 Welsh celebrities. The casting was absurdly glamorous: Tom Jones as Captain Cat and Kathe...

Glasgow’s disaster shows we find it easier to grieve for places than people | Simon Jenkins

Collective grief is a strange emotion. Why is it we reach out to suffering communities yet individual pain is not our concern?

The people of Glasgow are today grieving for six people who died as a result of a traffic accident in their city centre. A year ago they grieved the 10 deaths in the Clutha Vaults helicopter accident. Last week we grieved for Sydney and for Peshawar, as we once grieved the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or those of Dunblane, Penlee and Aberfan.

Any comfort of...

We must heed calls for self-rule, or the union is doomed | Simon Jenkins

The UK is stumbling chaotically down the path to disintegration, guided by an inept Westminster

It’s not fair, cries every child. “Life’s not fair,” retorts every parent. Both sides then wrestle with the crooked timber of mankind to decide who gets the first piece of cake. The purpose of politics is to help them, to minimise unfairness and to fashion a path to compromise.

September’s Scottish independence referendum is coming to seem anything but definitive. It was not the final answer to a que...