Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 105

100 Buildings, 100 Years review – ‘A battle between modernism and tradition’

What are the best British buildings of the last century? And do the critics’ favourites match those of the people?

In the summer of 1980 a group of us from the newly formed Thirties Society drove out of London along the Great West Road. We were told demolition squads had arrived at the splendid art deco headquarters of the Firestone tyre company. The planning minister, Michael Heseltine, was intending to list it for protection but had first informed the owners, Trafalgar House. The company sen...

100 Buildings, 100 Years review A battle between modernism and tradition

What are the best British buildings of the last century? And do the critics favourites match those of the people?

In the summer of 1980 a group of us from the newly formed Thirties Society drove out of London along the Great West Road. We were told demolition squads had arrived at the splendid art deco headquarters of the Firestone tyre company. The planning minister, Michael Heseltine, was intending to list it for protection but had first informed the owners, Trafalgar House. The company sent...

MPs should stop behaving as if they were at an ancient public school | Simon Jenkins

The fiasco over the European arrest warrant debate shows MPs supine before outmoded tradition and party machines

Sly, underhanded, contemptuous, mendacious, double-dealing, cheating democracy. You guessed it. Another jolly evening in the mother of parliaments. Monday nights antics, with a prime minister in tails, a lord chancellor in pantaloons, a home secretary in fake leopard and whips in a panic, would have been implausible as a staging of The Mikado. And all because MPs had been promised a...

Our addiction to criminalising human behaviour makes a mockery of private responsibility | Simon Jenkins

From drinking while pregnant to urinating on a war memorial, the laws ambition has no limits

If poisoning your foetus with alcohol is a crime, why is it not a crime to abort it? If alcoholism in pregnancy is attempted manslaughter, as a QC told the court of appeal this week, surely abortion is murder. Indeed if alcoholism before birth criminally harms a babys life, what about alcoholism and a dozen other cruelties after birth? How many are the misdeeds we inflict on our children to which Brita...

Is Ukip the only party that cares about the British countryside? | Simon Jenkins

Using brownfield sites for new homes and offices shouldnt be a question of left or right: our rural environment must be preserved

For the first time in history more people live in towns than in the country. In Britain this has had a curious result. While polls show Britons rate the countryside alongside the royal family, Shakespeare and the NHS as what makes them proudest of their country, this has limited political traction.

A century ago Octavia Hill launched the National Trust not to rescue...

Norman Baker has sacrificed his career for a worthy cause | Simon Jenkins

Baker is taking a stand to provoke a sane debate on drugs, after Theresa Mays failure to act on his report on legalisation

I was a cuckoo in the nest kept on a tight leash forced to walk through mud. The Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker resigned on Monday in a flurry of metaphor abuse. All unhappy coalitions, as Tolstoy might have said, are unhappy in their own way. As in this case. Baker wanted a Home Office that worked as a coalition. His boss, Theresa May, wanted a Conservative one. T...

Ministers high on their war on drugs need a speedy cure | Simon Jenkins

A psychology of macho law-making dominates British drugs policy in defiance of both public opinion and common sense

The government should ban all reports on drug legalisation. They get you hooked on rage. Evidence-based reform is a gateway substance to common sense. Just send a message: no thought means no.

Parliaments response to this weeks report on the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act shows that psychoactive substances are the last taboo to afflict Britains elite. It has got over past obsession...

Pavements are risky public spaces – David Cameron has to live with that | Simon Jenkins

The Leeds jogger who jostled Cameron has shown it’s impossible to protect anyone who wants to lead a reasonably normal life

None of us is secure. We dice daily with death. Somewhere is a bullet or a tree or a double-decker bus with our name on it. When David Cameron was allegedly jostled by a Leeds jogger on Monday it “could have been” much worse. Everything could always be much worse.

The story is indeed puzzling. The Met police’s famously overstaffed and underworked VIP protection mafia were...

Pavements are risky public spaces David Cameron has to live with that | Simon Jenkins

The Leeds jogger who jostled Cameron has shown its impossible to protect anyone who wants to lead a reasonably normal life

None of us is secure. We dice daily with death. Somewhere is a bullet or a tree or a double-decker bus with our name on it. When David Cameron was allegedly jostled by a Leeds jogger on Monday it could have been much worse. Everything could always be much worse.

The story is indeed puzzling. The Met polices famously overstaffed and underworked VIP protection mafia were sunn...

Can England really walk the road to devolution? | Simon Jenkins

The Tories must offer more than words if they are serious about giving local councils more power

Is the revolution to hand? Is devo met for real harbinger of the one true decentralist shift of power from London to provincial England since, well, Magna Carta? A merchant banker, Jim ONeill, this week claimed that George Osborne has accepted his city growth proposal to move fiscal and other liberties to Britains 15 big cities. With a statisticians phoney exactitude, ONeill says this could bo...