Deborah Orr
Deborah Ross: It's no wonder children are troubled if adults are not prepared to grow up
Published: 13 October 2007
I think it's all James Dean's fault. Or maybe Bill Haley's. When a distinct youth culture emerged in the middle of the last century, it was envisaged that street fashion, pop and targeted teenage flotsam more generally would form part of a lifetime's rite of passage, a thrilling stopping-off point on the tortuous path between childhood and adulthood. But it hasn't worked out that way.
Deborah Orr: There is only so much that schools can do
Published: 12 October 2007
The British today are, in so many ways, the most fortunate human beings to have walked the earth. But neither we, nor our children, appear to see things that way at all. Yet another report has confirmed what most people already know – that, on the whole our society is not overendowed with happy bunnies, be they adult or child. When one considers the plethora of good reasons that experts, professionals, parents and children are willing to offer as to why this should be, it is hardly surprising.
Deborah Orr: All the familiar buzzwords - and the gaping holes
Published: 10 October 2007
There are various reasons why Alistair Darling's first big set piece looked like the action of a government that is becalmed, and one of them is that we have become used to budget statements being made by a man who has always been keen to emphasise that he is the power behind the throne. It is good that this Chancellor is less inclined to view the second most important job in government as some sort of slight and injustice than his predecessor. But it is not such a good thing that Darling seems happy to press on with the delivery of Brown's obsessions quite so slavishly.
Deborah Orr: Only after 27 years can we understand what Ian Curtis's death was really about
Published: 06 October 2007
Growing older gets a bit of a bad press, but it's actually really interesting, in lots of ways. One of them is watching the gradual recession of some of the passions of your youth into anachronism, and another is watching others among them slowly advancing into grand significance. You'd imagine, I think, as a young person today, that Ian Curtis had been really famous at the time of his suicide in 1980, even though his group Joy Division were barely in the mainstream. Anton Corbijn's critically acclaimed film about his life doesn't even mention his name, billing Control as "the story of an icon".
Deborah Orr: The criminal justice system is in a mess. And Labour's panic over it isn't helping
Published: 03 October 2007
David Cameron is just scaring me now. Did he really do the impossible? Did he really manage, in just a couple of sentences, to make the national identity card scheme sound like a bargain? Cameron argues that if the £5.75bn scheme were to be binned, then his party could spend all the money on halting the recently introduced practice of letting non-violent prisoners end their sentences 18 days early. If he had set out graphically to illustrate just how incredibly expensive it is to keep people in jail, I can't think of a way in which he might have done better.
Deborah Orr: Dinner, diaries, and how I'm driven to despair by electronic bad manners
Published: 29 September 2007
One of the many dubious gifts that our mobile phones have awarded us is the advent of just-in-time socialising, the phenomenon whereby no one seems to care about being punctual any more, because they can just text you saying that they're about to leave the house and could you order them a vodka and tonic.
Deborah Orr: Only the ideologically driven would deny the disabled the right to a sheltered workplace
Published: 26 September 2007
Even as a small child I knew that the local Remploy factory was something of an anomalous place. It looked different to the other local manufacturing businesses, partly because it looked cleaner, and partly because it looked calmer. It looked preternaturally calm, actually. There never seemed to be anyone around and about it at all. When I asked my mother what went on there, she told me it employed disabled people. So I filed it away under: "No concern of mine", and paid it only patronisingly sentimental attention from that day on.
Deborah Orr: Shamelessly seduced by the frivolity of the fashion world – and loving it
Published: 22 September 2007
London's heady status as the most thrusting city in the world may have taken a financial knock just lately. But it hasn't fed through to the world of fashion. No less a champion of the velvet trouser than design god Tom Ford has declared London to be showing Paris a clean pair of clumpy wedges. The London critics, usually secure in the knowledge that a bit of bitching won't lose anyone too much in the way of advertising contracts, are falling over themselves to be upbeat. And Anna Wintour, she of the baby-eating rep at US Vogue, came and sat in a pleasing number of front rows at this season's Fashion Week. This is a bit like having Bill Clinton come along to your muddy country book festival, only much more significant.
Deborah Orr: A lazy and prejudiced approach to crime
Published: 19 September 2007
Should we be proud that in the field of DNA profiling, Britain leads the world, with 5 per cent of its population already DNA profiled on police records? Or should we be wondering why it is that once again Britain is the state on the planet that is most concerned with watching and recording and filing and cross-checking its citizens, whether or not they are guilty of any crime?
Deborah Orr: We yearn for the comfort of tradition, but won't pay the price of restraint
Published: 15 September 2007
There's a line of thought contending that sentimentality is the other side of the coin of cruelty. Gazing in wonder at a survey by the supermarket chain Somerfield, which finds that Britons are all yearning to return to 1950s values, you can only presume this theory holds water. Because there's no sign of any yearning for old-fashioned virtues that might be pertinent.
Deborah Orr: You have to hand it to him: Gordon Brown's masterplan is working out just as he hoped
Published: 12 September 2007
I know we've been told for years now that Gordon Brown is "a master political strategist". But I think that I have only just woken up to the idea that maybe he really, really is. The moment of (possible) truth came not as I watched his fabulously relaxed performance before a wearily grumpy TUC conference the other day, but when I digested the sparse, uniform media analysis of the encounter that came afterwards. He knows he can finesse a lot of the trouble threatened ahead, and he knows the press and the public mood will help him to do so.
Deborah Orr: What's wrong with us? Any chance to moan and we'll grab it with both hands
Published: 08 September 2007
When did it all begin? At what point did the expression of absolute shock and outrage about things we knew perfectly well all along become de rigueur? And when did the chasm between the information that is freely available to people and the information that people actually act upon become so bafflingly unbridgeable?
Deborah Orr: Drive down the age of criminal responsibility and all you end up with is younger criminals
Published: 05 September 2007
Figures released by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act tell us that children too young to be prosecuted were suspected of being responsible for nearly 3,000 crimes last year. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is of the opinion that this is another piece of evidence suggesting that the age of criminality is becoming younger and younger. This revelation, it has been further reported, may reignite the debate on the age of criminal responsibility. Good. It's a debate worth having.
Deborah Orr: A dreary, joyless tribute to a woman who supposedly was full of laughter
Published: 01 September 2007
One of the weirdest things about yesterday's service for Princess Diana was that the BBC kept banging on about how it had been organised by "the boys". By "the boys", they meant a 25-year-old man and his brother, who at nearly 23 is an officer in the Army, and therefore in charge of a bunch of people, quite a few of them younger than he is.
Deborah Orr: Hang 'em? Hug 'em? The answer lies in the middle – and it can be reached by both sides
Published: 29 August 2007
Polls are fiendishly misleading at the best of times, so I blush as I cite the slender evidence of an internet poll run yesterday on the website of the local London newspaper, The South London Press. "Should parents take responsibility for gun crime kids?" readers were asked. A remarkable 23.3 per cent of correspondents answered: "No." Now there are various way to interpret this perplexing little nugget, and the most straightforward one would be to suggest that such limited ideas about parental responsibility in this not overly leafy corner of England might have an unambiguous relation to the bracing preponderance of gun-crime-kid activity in the area.
So breathtakingly beautiful, so heartbreakingly mean-spirited
Published: 18 August 2007
It's a sorry state of affairs when the nation is scratching its head over how to stop children from drinking, because when they are drunk they are more likely to kill people. But that's the extreme we appear to have accomplished. You can't help feeling that if more than lip-service had been paid for a long time now to the link between alcohol and violence in adults, this dreadful high-water mark might never have been reached. But there we are. These things are widely known, and little tackled, and the longer they go on unchecked, the worse they get.
Deborah Orr: These two canny Scots, as they celebrate 100 days in power, have much in common
Published: 15 August 2007
Deborah Orr: We will only get more role models when the state stops failing boys
Published: 11 August 2007
Some eminent group appears to submit some report to the Government every minute of every day. A lot of the time, the recommendations in these reports appear to stray far away from addressing any issue over which the Government actually has any direct control. Maybe the only report we really need at the moment is one which clearly outlines what the Government can and should do and what the Government can't and shouldn't.
Deborah Orr: Gutter gossip dressed up as sympathy
Published: 09 August 2007
Deborah Orr: We are crushing potential with a tyranny of testing - and a cult of the average
Published: 08 August 2007
Deborah Orr: When five-year-olds enter worlds from which they are usually forbidden
Published: 04 August 2007
Film censorship becomes more anomalous by the day, to the point where it has become virtually the only place where individual consumption of culture is still policed by the powers-that-be. It's accepted that this pertains nowadays only for the first stage of a film's life, when it is on general release, and that on the subsequent formats films are shown in, classification is merely a guide and not a requirement. It doesn't stop ghastly material from being seen by inappropriate audiences; it just puts off the moment when it's all up to the individual and the bounds of his private or family moral universe.
Deborah Orr: Equal rights for co-habiting couples will strengthen marriage, not undermine it
Published: 01 August 2007
Deborah Orr: Ah, the glamour of modern air travel
Published: 28 July 2007
For a variety of mainly unwelcome reasons too complicated to go into, I have lately found myself taking flights as regularly as most people take clean underwear out of their drawers. Suddenly, my dim awareness that there was something a little weird about the whole flying business has crystallised into weary insight.
Deborah Orr: Amid this latest apocalypse, the prophets of doom are all peddling their own agendas
Published: 25 July 2007
Deborah Orr: An unregulated, dangerous market - that's the main problem with drugs
Published: 21 July 2007
That didn't take long, did it? It's now a ritual of public life: a new influx of ministers means a new investigation into what illegal drugs, if any, they may have tried. The answer is that a lot of them have tried and hated cannabis, including Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary. Gordon Brown may have provided the ideal opportunity to place such a survey on the immediate agenda, what with his half-baked perorations about the re-reclassifying of cannabis. But it would all have happened anyway, for some reason, at some point, because it always does.
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