Polanski admitted his crime before he ran away, and for years afterwards, he boasted from exile that every man wants to do what he did. He chuckled to one interviewer in 1979: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But... fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!"

The 'special relationship' is completely one-sided with the US choosing their own interests at every point where they trumps British interests. This can be traced back to World War 2 when the USA had to make a choice about whether support the British Empire as they saw it, or the Russian empire. They chose to support the Russian empire and plunged much of eastern Europe into the most squalid dictatorships. I am much more skeptical about this so-called special relationship and think Britain can offer more in foreign affairs than this futile pretence.

Frank Field.

These paramiltary gunmen (the police , that is) are strutting around airports and the streets of our cities , intimidating the law-abiding and itching to shoot someone, anyone , since they are volunteers who chose to carry firearms for the purpose for which they are intended ; lethal force.
The Facebook episode , notwithstanding the deluded woman's motives, is about the public's detestation of the police far more than any admiration for Moat.
The Police are a shambles and a disgrace. They recruit cowards and they are managed by limelit narcissists (various press conferences) who haven't got a clue.
Vile and corrupt. Strutting arrogant bullies. Loathsome and crooked....not the Moats of this world; I refer to the 'Police Service'.

Once upon a time, there was something the poorer members of society mostly had which they lack today, as well as christian values, patriotism, two-parent families, an education that taught them to be properly deferential, etc. They mostly had jobs. Unemployment was held well below a million from 1942 to the 1980s;
These days it is officially about two and a half million. The definition of what constitutes unemployment has been revised over thirty times since 1980, always to make the figures look lower, so the true total is much higher. Add in the sections of the workforce dependent on low-paid part-time insecure short-term work, and anything up to a third of the population comes within the definition of “underclass”.
A proper, steady, secure job, even a low-paid one, confers enormous benefits. It gives a person the priceless feeling that they are making their own way in the world. It supplies discipline. If you don’t get up in the morning, if you clock on late too often, you don’t have a job any more. A person’s life has structure, predictability and a sense of self-worth. Pay and working conditions were not always terribly good, but at least life was not chaotic.
In contrast, life on the dole is extremely chaotic. It doesn’t matter what time you get up in the morning. The system of payments is capricious. If you are good at working the system, you can get much more than you are entitled to. We read the stories regularly. But (and this is less widely reported), if you are not good at working the system, or if the system is inefficient and loses your papers, or if someone lays an information and lies about you to officials, or an official simply doesn’t like you, then you can end up getting much less than you are entitled to. The way it is set up positively encourages chaos and corruption.
At the same time, we are all constantly told, day in day out, that the only true source of happiness is endless consumption; buy more and more showy gew-gaws. “Retail therapy” really can make you feel better, for a while. If you’re feeling low, a new toy can put the gloss back on life, for a while. But the chances are it will have ceased to amuse you long before you’ve paid off the store-card loan you raised to buy it. So you’re deeper in debt, which is worrying and depressing; “oh, but I must have one of those, it’s so cool, it will make me feel better”….. so the cycle repeats, not so much retail therapy as retail addiction, and about as hard to break as heroin.
If you’re a member of the underclass, these delights are denied to you. It’s no wonder so many become disaffected, drunk, drugged, angry and dangerous.
In such a society, going on about “traditional values” is as useful as putting elastoplast on cancer.

The stable two-parent families in which children learned manners and morals were more or less abolished, so that a household with two contin­uously married parents is now a luxury item, as is an orderly classroom.

French politicians insisted on Tuesday that women need to be liberated from the full veil.

Its always a cause for concern when elites talk about liberating some group or other from something or other.

‎"a small minority – might find the pervasive sexualisation of western culture deeply offensive, and might want to signal by their clothing their disengagement and alienation."- this argument confuses me, doesn't the veil objectify women as much as a mini-skirt would? They both encourage a fixation on image- wrapping yourself up from head to toe seems to be a rather strange reponse to the objectification of women.