Multidisciplinary Topics

In 2017, the first nursing homes in England and Wales welcomed young orphaned children for a few hours each day. Since 1976, when a nursery school and care home were merged in Tokyo, this practice of intergenerational care has been introduced in several countries, and promoted in 2017 with the UK with the Channel 4 series “Old People’s Home for 4-Year-Olds”. The same year it was released, the intergenerational care home Nightingale House in Wandsworth set up a nursery on the same site as its nursing home.

Multiple countries are increasingly joining the international trend towards promoting personal autonomy through legalising assisted dying, one in which the UK is an outlier. Unfortunately, the law surrounding this area has remained stagnant for more than 50 years, even as the society around it, such as the British Medical Association, religions, and the political landscape’s moves to accept it. 

A fair and just court process demands that clients on both sides have competent representation. Why then are some notable ministers trying to villainise lawyers for trying to do what they should to uphold the rule of law? 

Though released in 2016, the issues raised by Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake about the changes enacted by the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 have remained just as pressing in 2020. In the midst of loud calls for (what was said to be necessary) austerity, the act saw the introduction of Universal Credit and a simplification of the welfare system to ‘improve incentives to work’. Loach’s film uses emotional drama to highlight the plethora of problems faced by the individuals forced into the benefits system.

The media commenting on an individual or organisation’s actions and character is an unexceptional occurrence. However, it becomes problematic when they assert their opinions, and project their bias, to the detriment of the relevant party’s reputation.

Recently, leading Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell suggested in an interview with Sky News that the mood in Parliament was changing and that assisted dying could be legalised in the UK within the next four years. Under the current law in England and Wales assisted suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment. There have been attempts to legalise it in the past, most famously Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill in 2014, however, they have never won enough support in Parliament. 

A monopoly on a colour seems an odd thing but yet it has been fought hard for. An analysis surrounding the $1’000’000 case regarding Louboutin’s signature red-soled shoe.

“…the chambers I applied to said, ‘Look, we like you, we think you’d fit in here. But we hired a black guy last year and we’re not going to do it two years in a row’ .. and there I was denied a very basic opportunity to secure a job simply because of my race, because I was black”.

Is this proposal an implicit acknowledgement of the futility of our overpopulated prisons? Are there better ways of dealing with low-risk offenders? The pandemic has clearly underlined a surplus of prisoners in UK prisons, many of whom pose no tangible threat to society - so is it just to hold them in prison, costing taxpayers thousands and limiting their freedom?