Deborah Orr

Deborah Orr: A freewheelin' Bob Dylan is let loose on the radio - what a brilliant idea

Published: 23 December 2006

'It's night time in the big city. A woman in a red gown throws out her cellphone. A man sleeps with a gun under his pillow. It's Theme Time Radio Hour ... with your host Bob Dylan." Bob Dylan's radio show always starts with the voice of a deadpan woman describing some variation on a film noir theme, and intoning solemnly that the great man is coming on the air.

Deborah Orr: The difference between migrants and Britons is a difference in expectation

Published: 20 December 2006

A lot of people find it hard that their sense of identity is tied to the night shift at Little Chef

Deborah Orr: Christmas will have to be cancelled this year. I'm just too disorganised

Published: 16 December 2006

How could this catastrophe have befallen me? I am not merely unprepared for the coming festivities. I am more unprepared than I have ever been in my life before. I simply cannot understand what has happened. One minute it was summer, the next there was only one window in the entire street that didn't have any fairy lights. It was my window, I observed with some amazement. In Christmases past, my tree has been going all brown by this stage in the game. Right now, I'm beginning to think the unthinkable, and wonder if it's even worth getting one.

Paying the price of a zero tolerance approach to street prostitution

Published: 13 December 2006

Deborah Orr on understanding the causes of a most shocking crime: The way these women get money is just one more nasty and unpleasant detail in a nasty, unpleasant life

Deborah Orr: There are times when the reader knows too much about the writer

Published: 09 December 2006

I've been in thrall for years to Liz Jones, whose column about her single, then married life until recently was the sine qua non of toe-curling personal-revelation journalism. But I've found a new car crash to gawp at of late, in the form of Lorna Martin's Grazia dispatches about her thrice-weekly therapy.

Deborah Orr: What's gone wrong with the NHS?

Published: 07 December 2006

Patricia Hewitt and her chums are thought to make bean-counting look like a form of hedonism

Deborah Orr: Islamic terrorism is a contradiction in terms, so it doesn't exist. Discuss

Published: 02 December 2006

Next week I'm going to the cinema. Definitely. But this Thursday evening saw me sitting on a panel of five women in Whitechapel, and taking part in a "Dialogue With Islam" about whether the veil is "a mark of separation" or "a statement of identity". Quite how these two categories are mutually exclusive, I'm afraid, was not resolved during the debate. Neither was anything else.

Deborah Orr: When criminality is a lifestyle choice

Published: 29 November 2006

Well-adjusted schoolchildren are petrified of being seen as ambitious or clever, because it's not cool

Deborah Orr: The crime equation: spend more money on welfare, and less will be needed for prisons

Published: 22 November 2006

In neo-liberal societies, economic failures are left to sort out their difficulties anyway they can

Deborah Orr: Police checks won't stop men from targeting desperate, foolish women

Published: 18 November 2006

Call me a hopeless romantic. But if I felt I had grounds for suspicion that my boyfriend was a paedophile, it might set me wondering whether he was Mr Right after all. It might at least alert me to the idea that there could be a few "trust issues" in the relationship. Indeed, I'd tend towards the idea that such worries were a hint that it was time to "move on". I'd still go the police, of course, but it wouldn't be to get their say-so on whether it was OK to carry on playing happy families. It would be more to hand over my "grounds for suspicion" and offer my devout hope that I might be allowed to express them in court.

Deborah Orr: It is undeniably cruel to force 'cold turkey' on prisoners, but this legal action is wrong

Published: 15 November 2006

It won't puncture the arrogance and self-pity that assist addicts in justifying their behaviour

Deborah Orr: Stop lumping all Muslims together as either our destroyers or our saviours

Published: 11 November 2006

MI5's Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller tells us not to panic, but mentions that 200 British-based networks are currently hatching at least 30 major terrorist plots in Britain. The BNP clearly does want us to panic, so it wades in and says that July 2005 would never have happened if only the police had listened to it.

Deborah Orr: The probation service needs help - but is John Reid the man to provide it?

Published: 08 November 2006

His government has been reforming the service every three years since it came to power

Deborah Orr: We should start talking to Hamas, but will we ever understand them?

Published: 04 November 2006

More distressing scenes from Gaza, with yesterday's Israeli tank incursion seemingly planned with the intention of bulldozing a mosque. Such a provocative act is hardly a springy step on the road to peace and reconciliation, so the sight of massed women taking non-violent defensive action to stop the tanks in their tracks and being killed for it is appalling.

Deborah Orr: Why are they peddling the same set of reforms for 'family justice' all over again?

Published: 01 November 2006

All this graft, over many years, involving three departments, has never amounted to anything at all

Deborah Orr: It all makes sensational reading, but does anyone think about the children?

Published: 21 October 2006

It's been a vintage week for armchair gossips, with personal revelations that one would normally have to twitch the curtains feverishly to happen upon simply falling into the laps of a nation agog. Merry pontification about Madonna, who adopted a Malawian non-orphan, centred on whether David was being rescued from poverty for selfless enough reasons and, as usual, everyone agreed that since the world's thirst for details about the child would be insatiable, he'd never get a minute's peace. Tut, tut.

Deborah Orr: These ham-fisted appeals sound more like a reproach than a rallying cry

Published: 18 October 2006

If you're a Muslim and call yourself a decent citizen, goes the message, then you ought to be trying harder

Deborah Orr: This government jails people because it finds helping them too difficult

Published: 14 October 2006

You'd imagine that the facts might speak for themselves. Here are a few of them. Britain has more people serving life sentences in its prisons than the whole of the rest of western Europe put together. Indeterminate sentences, brought in under the 2003 Criminal Justice Act and regretfully referred to by David Blunkett as "underused", are currently being handed down at the rate of 40 per week. The number of prisoners jailed for life has doubled under the current government. One in every 10 men in prison in Britain is serving either a life sentence or an indeterminate sentence, while 55 per cent are serving four years or more.

Deborah Orr: Hope doesn't always make economic sense

Published: 11 October 2006

The public fondly imagines there should be no ceiling on what the NHS invests to save its bacon

Deborah Orr: So many good intentions squandered

Published: 10 October 2006

If everyone knows so clearly what needs to be done, then why is the problem so intractable?

Deborah Orr: Capricious or not, celebrity adopters are a symptom of a crisis at home

Published: 07 October 2006

Madonna's people may be furiously denying that the star was doing anything more controversial than kissing babies in Malawi this week. But the story of her alleged adoption still illustrates perfectly how celebrities are gradually becoming the culture's useful idiots.

Deborah Orr: A gold-rush tale of greed and despoliation

Published: 05 October 2006

Rosia Montana is merely a microcosm of a situation that plays out worldwide every day

Deborah Orr: It is not the dogs people keep that are so dangerous - it's the lives they lead

Published: 30 September 2006

One struggles to work out whether it's mere reticence and sensitivity, or just brutal, head-in-the-sand hypocrisy. But something has governed the elephant-in-the-sitting-room partiality of the reporting around the horrific death of Cadey-Lee Deacon.

Deborah Orr: How can we intervene anywhere after Iraq?

Published: 27 September 2006

It's hard to be grateful when young men die for a bunch of lies and a surfeit of macho posturing

Deborah Orr: When 'truancy' is about nothing more than a cheap family holiday

Published: 23 September 2006

I like the way that the bumper increase in school truancy during the past decade has been reported as having occurred "despite" repeated government drives to improve attendance. Actually, even cursory analysis of the figures suggests that at least some of the rise - if not all of it - has happened precisely because of the government's policies.

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