Moral Maze

Twelve years to save the world. While we're squabbling about Brexit, climate scientists are reminding us that the existential threat of our day is global warming. This week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issues the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising temperatures. According to its authors, keeping to the preferred target of 1.5C above pre-industria...

The Prime Minister Theresa May has announced a 70th birthday 'present' for the NHS: an extra £20bn a year by 2023, paid for in part by tax rises. It has been received with cries of 'about time' and 'not enough.' Other voices mutter that we are simply pouring good money after bad into a system that is broken. To go with the funding boost, the government has promised a 10-year plan that "tackles was...

These are difficult days for diplomats; President Trump has torn up the rule-book. In just a few hours he went from firing off a salvo of angry tweets criticising America's G7 allies to embracing Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea - seen for decades as a rogue state - in an historic summit. Mr Trump's supporters see a man who gets things done in the interests of the people who elected him. As...

With 25 Islamist plots foiled in the last five years and four extreme right plots stopped since March 2017, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid this week described a "step change" in the terrorist threat to the UK. As a result, MI5 is to declassify and share information on UK citizens suspected of having terrorist sympathies. "Key" biographical data on - potentially - hundreds of people will be given t...

Following the landslide vote to overturn strict abortion laws in the Irish Republic, attention has shifted to Northern Ireland - the last corner of the British Isles to resist both legal abortion and gay marriage. The Prime Minister Theresa May is facing growing calls to bring the laws in line with the rest of the UK. It's a complicated political picture, but it raises a number of important moral...

Worried Facebook-users who have deleted their accounts because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal have been discovering that the social network held even more data about them than they had feared: complete records of their phone calls and text messages, contacts from their address books, appointments from their calendars, reminders of their friends' birthdays... It is naïve to suggest that we can...

The icy winds from the East have been an apt meteorological metaphor for UK-Russia relations. Since the Salisbury spy incident, and the immediate pointing of blame at the Kremlin, diplomats have been kicked out of both countries. But that's unlikely to be the end of the matter. All eyes are on what happens next. What would be the most moral course of action to take? Should the UK pursue the strong...

Tatty bye, Doddy. The most famous resident of Knotty Ash, wielder of the tickling stick and creator of the Diddymen, has died. Sir Ken Dodd's widow said: "He just wanted to make people happy". He was both of his time - described as "one of the last music hall greats" - and timeless. From his debut at the Nottingham Empire in 1954 as "Professor Yaffle Chucklebutty: Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotte...

Cycling is again in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. A damning report by MPs argues that Sir Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky "crossed an ethical line." They claim that the Tour de France champion used an asthma drug - which is allowed under the anti-doping rules for medical need - to enhance his performance. The accusation is strenuously denied, but where exactly is the "ethical line"? Isn't it e...

Since we learned that aid workers, sent to help the victims of the Haiti earthquake, chose instead to have sex with some of them, there's been something of a moral earthquake within the international aid sector. Charities had seemed to be beyond criticism; paragons of virtue. Now their moral high ground is crumbling away. It's not just Oxfam, though that was where the revelations began and where l...

Orthodox faith schools have long been crucibles in which enlightenment values and religious freedoms have simmered uncomfortably. The bubbling grew fiercer this week with the prospect of more faith schools and the scrapping of the rule that they have to take in non-believers. The concern among many about what religious conservatives are teaching children has hardly been assuaged by a group of ultr...

As restaurant prices double for the day and the world turns pink and fluffy, it's easy to be cynical about February 14th. Romance is a marketable commodity, partly because most of us grow up convinced that our most important aim in life should be to find true love, believing that the perfect partner is out there waiting, if only we can identify him or her, and then it will be hearts and flowers al...

That rich men attract beautiful women - and vice versa - has for centuries been obvious and unquestioned. Suddenly a few noisy scandals have started a social avalanche that some call the new puritanism. In the past week Formula 1 racing has abolished the 'grid girls' whose role had been to look glamorous in the company of racing drivers; the Professional Darts Corporation, in consultation with BBC...

2017 has been a year of sex scandals and toppled reputations; trigger-happy tweeting and polarising rhetoric; 'remoaners' and 'Brexiteers behaving badly'; 'no-platforming', 'safe spaces' and 'snowflakes'. This year some cherished values - among them free speech, accountability, democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law - have been called into question as never before. For this final Moral Maze of...

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's engagement was announced this week after a frenzy of speculation. We are used to media excitement about the personal lives of young royals, but perhaps this also says something about the value we still place in the institution of marriage. At the same time, the fact that nobody seems to mind that Ms Markle is divorced suggests an acceptance that relationships are m...

Driverless cars could be on UK roads within four years under government plans to invest in the sector. The Chancellor Philip Hammond said "We have to embrace these technologies if we want the UK to lead the next industrial revolution". At the thick end of the wedge, Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk believes artificial intelligence is "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation"....

The Church of England has issued its schools with advice on transphobic bullying, suggesting that boys should be free to dress up in tutus and tiaras, and girls allowed to wear tool-belts and superhero capes, in the spirit of exploring "who they might be", without fear of stigma. The traditional view of gender is in rapid retreat. Both the Westminster and Scottish governments are considering makin...

The Westminster sex scandal has shone a light on yet more public figures behaving badly. The behaviour may not be new, but people appear to be far less tolerant of it. This raises questions about where our morality comes from and whether human beings can become collectively more ethical. Is this apparent shift in social mores an example of how our collective moral standards have improved? Or has a...

Before the Cava corks had finished popping to celebrate Catalonia's declaration of independence, direct rule was imposed from Madrid, the region's autonomy stripped away; its president sacked. It was a tumultuous few minutes by any country's standards. To some, the Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont is a traitor to Spain who should face criminal charges. To others, he is a Catalan patriot fighting f...

Newly-released data obtained by the Labour MP David Lammy shows the dominance of the top two social classes at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Four-fifths of the students accepted between 2010 and 2015 were the offspring of barristers, doctors and chief executives - and the numbers are edging upwards. More offers were made to pupils in the London commuter-belt than in the whole of northern Engl...

Following claims of rape or sexual harassment made by dozens of women against the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a picture emerges of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood exerting pressure on young actresses at the start of their careers, often in hotel rooms and offices. While the allegations of non-consensual sex are denied, the story has prompted a collective soul-searching in Tinseltown an...

The Moral Maze returns with a special programme marking 50 years of the Abortion Act, recorded in front of an audience of students at UCL Faculty of Laws. Under the 1967 law, terminations were made legal for the first time in limited circumstances, with the agreement of two doctors. By far the most common reason for abortion (accounting for more than 181,000 of the 185,596 abortions in 2016) has b...

For the crowds of holidaymakers flocking to Spain, it must have come as a shock to see "tourists go home" daubed on buildings in Barcelona and Majorca. You'd think the locals would be more grateful for the millions of euros they bring with them to spend. The resentment is not just about belligerent and under-dressed Brits drinking all day and yelling all night. The anti-tourist graffiti, tyre-slas...

One of the less predictable arguments to result from Brexit concerns the rights and wrongs of chlorine-washed chickens. Perhaps chlorinated-chicken-gate made many people feel temporarily smug about UK standards of animal welfare, compared with those in other parts of the world. Yet, at the same time, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a 'Go Vegan World' advert with the headline "Humane mil...

Despite the introduction of the Equal Pay Act nearly half a century ago, the BBC salary revelations of last week suggest that the most dramatic example of inequality for women - the gender pay gap - shows no immediate sign of narrowing. In a letter urging the corporation to act now to deal with the disparity, many of its highest-profile female personalities emphasise "what many of us have suspecte...