Features

Down the primrose path: 30 years of the National Lottery

“30 years of changing lives”, boasts the National Lottery, three decades on from the day Noel Edmonds hosted the first ever draw. With “seven millionaires every week” and “£49BN for good causes”, it could almost be mistaken for a philanthropic organisation.

Are the ‘gender wars’ largely over?

In 2002, I got a phone call from a church in south Wales. A man who was presenting as a woman had been attending the church for a year. The fact he’d been attending for a year tells you the church had been good at welcoming him. But he wanted the church to let him use the women’s toilets and attend the women’s Bible study. They said no. So he sued them.

Challenges to free speech

A lot has been said over the past few years about freedom of expression – who has the right to say what, is this kind of language acceptable, is that OK to say in public but not online, and what, if any, consequences should there be for offensive speech?