Deborah Orr

Deborah Orr: If exceptions can be made for the very rich, do the same for the very poor

Published: 03 February 2007

Blair himself has done much to encourage the demonisation of those who are excluded

Deborah Orr: How can juries understand rape unless the full horror is explained to them?

Published: 31 January 2007

I was raped as a young woman. But I never went to the police. I was simply mute with the misery of it all

Deborah Orr: This is not a new strain of immorality, just a nation recklessly keen to get in on any act

Published: 24 January 2007

In 'Whisky Galore!' looting booze and hiding it was lovingly portrayed as a fabulous caper

Deborah Orr: Sadness, swans and swimming lessons... portrait of an artist not on Saatchi's list

Published: 20 January 2007

On the lamppost outside the So Sad Show, a starving artist has taped up some shrivelled flowers in cellophane, in tribute to an imaginary roadside death. Or I think it's part of the show. Outside or inside the Guy Hilton Gallery, on Fournier Street, Shoreditch, London, it's hard to tell where art ends and entropy begins. Which is only fitting.

Deborah Orr: Give Scotland its economic independence and it will start to flourish like Ireland

Published: 17 January 2007

Scotland shouldn't be doing as badly as it is, given its natural resources and its educated population

Deborah Orr: Don't bother trying to exert yourself when everything has to be 'average'

Published: 13 January 2007

Can government education policy become any more confused? The headlines this week may have been dominated by the decision of the minister for communities to ship her child out of her community to be schooled. But the really gobsmacking thing is that the clumsy, weird legislation Ruth Kelly steered through Parliament as education minister precisely to wrong-foot all those ghastly middle-class state school users doing their best for their child, "like any parent", also came home to roost this week.

Deborah Orr: She should not be sacked for these political beliefs

Published: 12 January 2007

I love it that the people who bandy around the word "fascist" as an insult to others, also want to see people fired from their jobs for believing things that they find unpalatable. The BNP has a right to exist, though to me this is an ugly and dangerous part of British culture. If Clarke wants to align herself, that's her look-out. And if ballet lovers don't want to see a BNP member dance, they can stay away if they wish to.

Deborah Orr: Face the facts: if we don't want a privacy law, we need to change our behaviour

Published: 10 January 2007

The press guards jealously its interest in publishing any old tosh about 'people in the public eye'

Deborah Orr: It's not just the upper classes that are getting away with deadly blood sports

Published: 06 January 2007

When a pair of Rottweilers belonging to her mother's boyfriend mauled five-month-old Cadey-Lee Deacon to death, the nation remained largely decorous about the glimpse into social chaos afforded by the tragedy. There was acceptance, in the public sphere, at least, that it was reasonable that the pub the family lived in might need guard dogs, that a rule about the dogs remaining outside could have been understandably overlooked, and that no one was to blame for the baby's death.

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.

Jan	FEB	Apr
	05
2006	2007	2008