Christopher Howse News Today

Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street. How it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher explores Newark in Nottinghamshire.

Conflict over noise in the West End goes back centuries

There’s a new type of footgear in town, but what do shoes that are barely shoes at all signify? And what is their point, exactly?

SIR – There appears to be a worrying pattern in the way demonstrations and civic disturbances are being policed, especially by the Met. In the first instance there seems to be a hands-off policy: remember the early environmental protests, where officers handed out water and stood chatting with demonstrators as roads were brought to a standstill. Only after public outrage and political pressure did police tactics change. This hands-off strategy is now being applied to Free Palestine and an...

Faversham residents up in arms at 320-acre housing scheme that Duchy of Cornwall says will deliver the ‘most sustainable’ homes possible

SIR – In response to a question about Lee Anderson’s defection from the Conservatives to Reform UK, James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, came out with the old cliché – that a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour. Do these people who are supposedly running the country not realise that it is because of their incompetence that Reform even exists? The Tories failed to keep their 2019 manifesto pledges. When Rishi Sunak became the unelected Prime Minister, these were followed...

Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street. How it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher explores Waterlooville in Hampshire.

SIR – I do not disagree with Lord Moylan (“Sunak ‘squanders Brexit gains’ by approving more EU rules” report, February 18), who thinks that there is a “three-dimensional void” in the upper echelons of British politics.

This week: Max Jeffery writes from Blackpool where he says you can see the welfare crisis at its worst (01:29); Lisa Haseldine reads her interview with the wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose husband is languishing in a Siberian jail (06:26); Christopher Howse tells us about the ancient synagogue under threat from developers (13:02); Philip Hensher

There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure...but it is never safe to make an assumption about how the different generations feel about anything, from vegans to scented candles.