Friday, August 06, 2021

The Joy of Six 1020

Geoff Mulgan looks at the Spectator’s grip on the Conservative Party - its weakness over wokeness and overreliance on wordsmiths.

"The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift." Diane Bolet explores the links between pub closures and the rise of Ukip.

Sophia Alexandra Hall explains why Good Law Project has launched a legal challenge on the high numbers of children in care being placed outside their local area.

"England is no more a single country than Great Britain or the UK. The “Jurassic divide” in our geology - traced by the Trent-Humber river - has split England since before it was England." Regularly falling to foreign takeovers and perennially divided, England is a nation that never was, argues James Hawes.

Sarah Lawson talks to Melvyn Bragg about how he has spent more than 50 years championing the joy, value, and fascination of knowledge.

"How extraordinary to glimpse on the horizon, then, amid the unrelenting horizontality of everything, a vertical shape, a tower aimed straight at Heaven, built in a style which took as its fundamental principle precisely the emphasis, the exaltation of verticality." Dominic N visits Boston and the tower of St Botolph's - Boston Stump.

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