The Joy of Six 1575

Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."

Abandoning the triple lock on pensions  is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.

Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.

"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.

"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today. 

Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."