Convenience Big Store: The scandal our Twitter-obsessed media has ignored

4 May, 2023

In the headlines

Voters are heading to the polls for local elections in much of England today. More than 8,000 council seats are up for grabs, and, for the first time, people must bring photo ID to cast their ballot. Labour needs at least a 10% lead over the Tories to be on track for a general election victory, according to polling expert John Curtice. The price of fish and chips has shot up by 19% over the past year, to an average of £9. The Office for National Statistics has launched a tool showing how inflation has affected the cost of hundreds of everyday items – try it out here. The Prince Charles Cinema, just off London's Leicester Square, has made its post-Coronation plans abundantly clear (see below). As one Twitter user comments, they've clearly been "asked one too many times".

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Vennells: awarded a CBE in 2019. Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty

The scandal our Twitter-obsessed media ignored

The name Paula Vennells probably doesn't mean much to you, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. Which is strange, given she presided over "the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history". During her seven-year tenure as CEO of the Post Office, 736 branch managers were wrongly prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting because of a faulty new computer system forced upon them by bosses. "The individual stories are horrific." At least four people committed suicide; dozens were imprisoned, including a teenager. One operator spent her son's 10th birthday locked up, while pregnant, in a "horrendous" cell, and gave birth to her second child wearing an electronic tag.

Despite these "mindboggling and frequently tragic" stories, not a single person has been held accountable – including the top brass, who allegedly knew the system was flawed. Vennells herself was awarded a CBE in 2019. And the scandal has received almost no coverage compared to recent furores over comments made by Jeremy Clarkson and Gary Lineker. The subject just isn't "sexy enough" for a "chatterati" who prefer cancelling their opponents on Twitter to the boring, grinding work of holding "iniquitous and dysfunctional systems" to account. And of course, obsessing on social media about celebrities saying something controversial is exactly the sort of "looking-the-wrong-way" that allowed this scandal to happen. As long as we remain hyper-focused on individual misdemeanours, the likes of Vennells "will keep on getting away with it".

On the money

Ben Whishaw in This Is Going to Hurt

There are currently 18,000 UK-trained doctors plying their trade abroad, says John Burn-Murdoch in the FT, a 50% increase since 2008. Put another way, "one in seven practising doctors who trained in Britain is now working elsewhere" – almost triple the rate in similar countries. Clearly one factor is pay: whereas inflation has left the average worker's wages at 2.5% below their 2009 level, it's 13% for nurses and 24% for junior doctors. But when medics who moved overseas are asked what pushed them, they are twice as likely to mention "workplace culture, burnout and stress" than money. Whatever the government does on pay, "broader and deeper changes are needed if an NHS career is to regain its allure".

Noted

King Charles's coronation will be a truly multi-faith affair, says Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. The ceremony will be overseen by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. But it will also be attended by Britain's Chief Rabbi, who has been given a room at a royal residence near the Abbey so he doesn't have to use a car on the Sabbath; the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster; and London mayor Sadiq Khan, a Muslim. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is Hindu, will read from the New Testament. "Not everyone likes these attempts to bring the coronation into the 21st century." The European Conservative, a right-wing journal, has accused Charles of having a "Koranation" because of his sympathy for Islam.

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Fashion

One Direction rocking the skinny jean look in 2014. Jason Merritt/Getty

"For men, at least, reports of the demise of skinny jeans have been greatly exaggerated," says Jacob Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. Though trendy Gen Zs now prefer baggier trousers, slimmer cuts are still selling well in the US – they make up 70% of men's jeans sales at the luxury department store chain Bloomingdale's. Women are adopting billowy styles, but men, "more stubborn and less swayed by trends", are sticking with their "pencil-leg", indie-rock-inspired jeans.

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Valeria Ferraro/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

Don't be fooled, Meloni's no moderate

British columnists have recently given Giorgia Meloni something of a rebrand, says David Broder in The New Statesman. Sure, the Italian PM has previously spoken about "ethnic substitution", they argue, but since taking office her policies have been "pretty mainstream". This assessment is dangerously wrong. In recent weeks, Meloni's domestic agenda has lurched rightwards, focusing on policies to avoid the supposed "extinction of Italian people". She subscribes to the same "Great Replacement" theory as the American far right, warning of a "plan for ethnic replacement" supposedly organised by "speculators", "communists" and George Soros, who she calls a "usurer". It has more than a whiff of "the old spectre of 'Judeo-Bolshevism'".

Then there are Meloni's radical plans to combat, as she sees it, "the wrong people populating Italy". The PM is pushing through legislation to stop gay men and women from becoming parents via surrogacy – which one member of Meloni's party labelled a "crime worse than paedophilia" – and to stop the children of same-sex couples being registered under both parents' names. She has also launched a crackdown on migrant rescue NGOs and supported policies that deny free school meals and transport to the children of immigrants, even if they've lived in Italy all their lives. Yes, Meloni has fallen in line with the liberal West on global issues like the Ukraine war. But recasting her as "pretty mainstream" betrays a dangerous ignorance of the far-right turn currently underway in Italy.

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Gone viral

A sniffer dog at the Met Gala has gone viral after being caught on camera gawping at Jared Leto's hyper-realistic giant cat costume. "Poor dog," says one Twitter user. "None of his friends are gonna believe him."

Quirk of language

The etymologies of everyday words can be gripping, says Mental Floss. Shampoo comes from the Hindi verb champna, meaning "to press or knead muscles" – being "shampooed" in 18th-century India involved a "vigorous full-body massage" as well as hair washing. Chortle first appeared in Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky, combining "chuckle" and "snort". Whisky is from the Gaelic uisge beatha, or "water of life". Companion is a combination of the Latin com, or "together with", and panis, or "bread" – so it roughly means "one who you break bread with". See more here.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's Japanese Emperor Naruhito in his student days, seeking out the Loch Ness monster. The ruler studied at Oxford in the 1980s, producing a fascinating-sounding thesis: A Study of Navigation and Traffic on the Upper Thames in the 18th Century. But it has emerged that in his (presumably considerable) downtime, the 23-year-old heir took the opportunity to climb Ben Nevis, have tea with Queen Elizabeth and go on a secret trip to find Nessie. "He asked very sensible questions," Loch Ness Centre founder Tony Harmsworth tells The Times, "and seemed to be genuinely interested."

Quoted

"All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light."

Australian writer Clive James

That's it. You're done.

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