Politoblog

Sweden has taught me a great deal about my own country, notably that the UK is far more socially conservative than I had ever realised. These lessons have mainly been conveyed through expressions of utter shock and confusion as I describe my school experiences to my Swedish friends. In general, my Swedish friends and I have shocked each other most when recounting our school experiences. In England, I went to a single-sex school. Whilst far from common, this is hardly a surprising or indeed particularly interesting fact about my life. In the UK, 12% of private schools are girls-only, and 10% are boys-only. However, when I tell Swedes that I went to an all-girls school, they just look baffled. The most common response is: “Those schools still exist?” One friend told me that a single-sex school would make headline news in Sweden. And indeed it did: in 2017, the media frantically reported that a school in Örebro had begun offering single-sex classes. My friends’ reactions have made me thin...

A man does something, it's strategic. A woman does the same thing, it's calculated. A man is allowed to react. A woman can only overreact. - Taylor Swift This November marks the moment Taylor Swift gained the right to re-record her first five albums after they were sold to Scooter Braun in June 2019. Swift says that this sale happened, "Without my approval, consultation, or consent, after I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright." Evidently outraged, Taylor Swift has been very vocal about the right of an artist to own their own work. Writing on Tumblr, Swift explains that "This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept. And when that man says 'Music has value,' he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it." Swift claims she was subsequently told she could not perform her old songs on TV unless she stopped tweeting about Braun and ...

When I was 11, my English teacher gave us all a newspaper clipping to teach us about persuasive writing. The article was about High Speed 2 (HS2), the UK’s proposal for a new highspeed railway line. The line will cut through people's homes and carve up ancient woodlands, destroying both livelihoods and ecosystems in its wake. I remember asking my teacher if “this was actually going to happen”. Nine years later, and it's worse than I ever could have imagined. After a last review of the costs, HS2 was definitively approved this year, 11 years after it was first proposed. Construction was given the greenlight in April. Britain might need to update its rail network – most of it dates back to the Victorian era, while most of Western Europe is already well-connected with highspeed rail links. Before we built HS1, which connects London to the Channel Tunnel, you could feel trains crossing the Channel from Paris slow down as they reached the British border. Highspeed rail might be nece...

Let's talk about a story that's been getting a lot of media attention lately, namely: ZOOM: @realDonaldTrump appears to be signing his name to a blank sheet of paper in this photo. pic.twitter.com/xlNX24CXn4 — Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 4, 2020 When I was 16, I was invited into school to take a photo with the Headteacher pretending to open my exam results. I was handed a blank piece of paper, which me and my headteacher grinned and pointed at as the cameras snapped away. Obviously, these weren’t my exam results. I had opened them online at 6am that morning – no one at my school got a letter with a list of their grades on it. The photo was an illusion, and no one cared. When you watch the evening news, do you actually think that the newsreader is reading from the sheets of paper in front of them? No, of course they aren’t. They are reading from a teleprompter, as newsreaders have been doing for decades. The paper is just there because that is the image the news ...

We are obsessed with opinion polls. Wikipedia lists 331 polls comparing Trump and Biden’s chances in the election this fall. 331 and counting. Research companies have existed since the 1930s – in fact, George Gallup founded the first one, the American Institute of Public Opinion. This is the same pollster who has since stated that “the Institute is in a good position to know how ill-informed, how prejudiced, how stupid are some voters.” But this isn’t how polls are used. They don’t serve to remind us how unformed the general population’s views are on many topics, they are used as political ammunition. We hold polls up as shining examples of “what the public thinks”, when in reality, we often don’t think at all. The US isn’t the only country whose politicians rely on polls to gauge public opinion. France is one of the biggest consumers of polls in the world – during the 2017 French presidential campaign, spanning just one month, 560 polls were published. So what? So we’re obsessed with ...

Although I am not a fashion expert, I am someone who recently made the decision to buy exclusively ethically and sustainably-made clothing. I made this decision after discovering that one in five cotton products sold worldwide is tainted by human rights atrocities against the Uighur minority in Xinjiang. Uighur Muslims are being tortured, sterilised, shackled and blindfolded - these are crimes against humanity, and by buying cheap clothing, I am complicit in them. Fashion historian  Karolina Żebrowska  recently brought to my attention a trend sweeping social media in the form of a strawberry-patterned midi dress designed by  Lirika Matoshi . Influencers are going crazy for it, but the dress has also been the subject of some controversy, notably regarding its $490 price-tag. Unsurprisingly, many high street fashion brands have jumped on the trend, creating their own, cheaper versions of the dress. TikTok users have been quick to point out the flaws of such dresse...

"Add now the communications between the peoples, today so numerous and more and more rapid; the navigation by steamship, the railways, and on top of that this happy tendency of the populations to visit each other, to mix, to merge, a tendency that seems to make of different peoples a sole and large family, and you will be forced to admit that for such a disease, so widespread and under these conditions, cordons and quarantines are not only powerless and useless, but they are, in the very great majority of cases, impossible." - A delegate to the International Sanitary Conference regarding cholera, 1851 The word "unprecedented" describes something that has never happened before. I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2020's Word of the Year. Politicians are constantly referring to the "unprecedented circumstances" we find ourselves in, and the "unprecedented measures" taken to combat the coronavirus. But, as Professor Deepak Kumar (perhaps sli...