To think of queueing as morally superior is to confuse fairness with orderliness, a particularly British mistake. It is no coincidence that the golden age of queueing was when the class system was still rigidly in place. Queues offered reassuring images of egalitarianism when the reality was anything but.
ReadGovernments should be concerned with more than wealth, but they should steer clear of making subjective measurements of their citizens’ welfare. Rather than seek an alternative focus of measurement to wealth, we should instead seek to measure wealth better.
ReadThe banking crisis was a failing not wholly of others, but of our laws and our values. Some behaved worse than others, of course, but without a collective failure, these individual ones would not have been possible.
ReadCrime hard-liners were always fond of the simplistic slogan “Life means life”. What we’re now learning is that when the meaning of “life” changes, the meaning of life changes, too.
ReadThe antidote to nihilism does not require any appeal to the transcendent or the divine. I’d take the values expressed by all those who opened their doors in Manchester purely out of human compassion over the futile search for a higher meaning any day.
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