Opinion

Be honest. How many photos have you taken or posted online today? Did you upload a photo of you and your friends from last night on Facebook? Instagram a photo of your lunch? Post yet another photo of Founders on your Snapchat story? According to photographer Paul Strand, “your photography is a record of your living” and this idea summarises today’s social media age. We have the opportunity to broadcast every single aspect of our lives through photos and videos to the extent that we can ask the question ‘if you didn’t take a picture, did it really happen?’ I’m sure, like me, that whenever you do anything remotely exciting you take a picture and post it on Snapchat or another social media platform. But this action of actively posting a photo online can suggest that we are seeking vali...

Natasha Phillips explores how society exacerbates Mental Health stigma with language Awareness of mental illness has seen considerable progress over the past decade, and yet, language used to describe and classify mental disorders is still being misused. “Mentally-ill” may have the most synonyms of any word in the English dictionary, and so many of them have damaging and undesirable connotations. “Demented”, “insane”, “lunatic”, “maniac” and “unsound” are just a few examples – none of which are useful in describing any aspect of mental health and all of which contribute to the exclusion and ridicule of the people they are used to describe. And yet how many of us are guilty of using this language? Most of us wouldn’t bat an eyelid because constant use has led to normalisation of these wo...

The question over who lives in the White House for the next four years is dominating the news, and the decision is firmly placed in the hands of American citizens. So it can feel odd for us here in the UK: we changed our Prime Minister three months ago, without the public casting a single vote. But, like it or not, that is the nature of our political system. So it’s now up to Theresa May to convince us that she is worthy of her new title. At the Conservative Party Conference this week in Birmingham, May outlined her party’s plans for the next four years and just like every other conference, the underlying theme was ‘change’. In fact, she said the word exactly 29 times when talking about the economy, worker’s rights and housing affordability. However, the biggest reference to c...

A world of war is easily forgotten when you’re not living amongst it. A world of political squabble makes it easy to tune out. A world of environmental corruption provides a routine to abuse the natural world. We all make these excuses.   Leonardo DiCaprio, by giving up his only Oscar winning speech where he could have thanked his “supportive” family or made a joke about the iconic memes made of him, instead bored the world with a warning about the environment. But what he says is true, humans are knowingly destroying the Earth. As humanity grew careless towards the environment, with the mass emergence of industrialisation, there was a severe increase in the threats to humans.   We say that such things are normal because they aid our daily lives. This is essentially a...

Natasha Philips presents her argument against grammar schools. After being phased out 50 years ago, grammar schools are back on the agenda. Theresa May has declared her intention to lift the ban on selective education to help children from poorer families to do better, while Labour continue to oppose the change. However, could prioritising grammars over existing underperforming schools be further reducing social mobility? It is undeniable that grammar schools perform better – in 2015, only two of the 163 UK grammar schools had less than 95% of students achieving 5+ A*-C Grade GCSEs. However, the nature of selective schools is to segregate children in a way which will characterise the nature of their academic careers. Results of entry exams come to define the worth of these children; ...

            In the midst of this year’s relentless bid for becoming one of the most disheartening in living memory, it’s safe to say that there is a lot wrong with the world. I don’t need to digress on all the issues, I just need to vent over one particular group of petulant individuals who thrive on these problems facing society; the Social Justice Warrior. The term has been used to describe virtually anyone speaking out in the name of promoting progressive issues that we all have to face at some point in our lives, namely feminism, civil rights, and political correctness. The ideologies behind the movement itself aren’t exactly anything new, we’ve been seeing pressure groups form equally divisive barriers between themselves and the rest of society for decades now; but the whole Social Ju...