31 h. ago I am sick of seeing the rich and powerful on my screen. Where are all the TV shows about normal people? | Rebecca Shaw

I personally don’t really want to watch another movie about a billionaire – unless he is in some sort of trapGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIt’s important in any healthy relationship to be able to “call each other in” – gently point out issues you are having with behavioural patterns, and ask for some space when needed. I’m thinking particularly about a good friend of mine. Always there when I’m in need, even there when I’m not in need (rarely). That’s right, I’m talking about television (I’m normal).I love my television and everything it brings me, but I do have a gripe I need to get off my chest, while I’m lying down on the couch. Mrs TV, love you girl but I’m calling you in: I need TV shows to stop focusing on satirising class only via the lives of rich white people (and occasionally the people around them). This issue has become more obvious since the latest season of The White Lotus, but is not at all restricted to The White Lotus. Recent years have seen TV and movi...

Culture

4 d. ago Group concealed kilos of cocaine and heroin in generators and engines

Anthony Sheridan, 45, Keith Shea, 53, Mark Peers, 61, William Armstrong, 44, Mark Pickthall, 40, and Andrew White, 45, each deny importing class A drugs

Politics

1 week ago Anger as Met moves local police in Rotherhithe to site 45 minute walk away

Local politicians claim senior officers were offered the opportunity to open a temporary hub nearby but snubbed the idea

Events

1 week ago Trump’s political bullying of Harvard will do nothing to foster diversity of thought | Kenan Malik

Substituting liberal biases with conservative will only serve to subvert academic objectivityFew people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” – that to truly know one’s own argument, one must also know the arguments of those who disagree.How to create a culture that encourages more fruitful engagement between those of differing political views has become a key question in contemporary public debate. Nowhere more so than in universities, where there has been much debate about “viewpoint diversity”, the aspiration to nurture differing and conflicting perspectives within an institution or group as a means of sharpening arguments and teasing out truths. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class review – a complicated class portrait

Journalist Joel Budd travels around Britain demolishing Brexit myths in a nuanced study of a social group too often reduced to a cartoon by politiciansOn 13 November 1968, a 35-year-old Labour politician got to his feet in the House of Commons and had a go at the ranks of Conservative members who faced him. Six or so months after Enoch Powell had delivered his infamously racist “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, David Winnick – who was then the MP for Croydon South – had decided to attack the Tory fashion for bemoaning immigration to the UK from such countries as India and Pakistan and expressing faux sympathy with deprived communities in British cities. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants,” he said, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white working class.”As the Economist journalist Joel Budd points out in this nuanced, enlightening book about the people and places Winnick was referring to, this ...

Events

2 w. ago The identity politics of many Muslims, and critics of Islam, are deeply corrosive | Kenan Malik

Condemning them as ‘sectarian’ is only adding to the clamour that they have no place in the westA poll suggests that most British Muslims identify more with their faith than with their nation. The head of the Saudi-backed Muslim World League counsels British Muslims to talk less about Gaza and more about domestic issues. Labour MP Tahir Ali is criticised for campaigning for a new airport in Mirpur in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir; he claims the criticisms have led to “Islamophobic” attacks. After push-back, the BBC changes a headline describing converts to Islam as “reverts”, a term some Muslims use to suggest that Islam is the natural state of humankind.Just a taster of debates about British Muslims over the past week. At the heart of each of these controversies is the question of how Muslims should relate to western societies, and western societies relate to them. For some, the answer is easy. On the one side, many claim Islam to be incompatible with western values and that allowing...

Politics

3 w. ago The white working class is nothing like what politicians think – or claim – it is | Kenan Malik

A new book, Underdogs, demolishes the myth that it is homogeneous in its hostility to immigration‘Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants,” Labour MP David Winnick told the House of Commons in 1968, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white working class.”It was the first time anyone had referred to the “white working class” in parliament to describe a segment of the British population. Half a century on, that segment has become the focus of one of the most contentious and polarising of debates. For many on the right, the white working class constitutes a distinct group, both their distinctiveness and their problems, stemming largely from their whiteness. Many on the left have, Joel Budd notes, “fallen silent on the subject”, nervous of racialising issues of class. Continue reading...

Politics