Society Matters
Stranger than fiction: it could only happen in Milton Keynes
A Milton Keynes teenager with a student bus pass was asked by the bus driver to pay for a ticket for the cardboard cut-out figure he was carrying. When he boarded the number seven Arriva bus service at the Point, Milton Keynes, Liam Sheridan, 17, was asked to pay an extra full adult fare for the cut-out figure of the main character from the Xbox game Gears of War 3. As the cut-out was life-size, and took up another seat on the half-empty...
Equality gap #5: A Tale of Two Britains
With chief executive pay booming and little sign of self-restraint or regulation, Dick Skellington highlights how the burden of austerity is falling on the weaker and more vulnerable. Bonuses and chief executive pay are once again in the headlines: these are the winners in Coalition Britain. The winners, like Sir Fred Goodwin, may lose their baubles but their wealth remains inviolate. Sir Fred will have to change his letter heads, a trifling inconvenience, that is all. But while the...
The ethics of St Valentine's Day
Dick Skellington looks at how to ensure your Valentine Day flowers are ethically sourced. It is will soon be St Valentine's Day and the UK retail cut-flower industry, worth over £2 billion a year, is rubbing its hands with glee as the British public purchases hundreds of thousands of bunches of traditional roses for its loved ones. In the developed world, do we think about where these flowers come from and how ethically they are produced? Do we care about...
Stranger than fiction: the new 50 pence coin fails the offside test
That butt of all sporting jokes – the offside law in football – has come in for a battering in recent seasons. As an ex-football referee I could never understand why the offside law created such a fuss in media and supporters alike. At its heart is a basic simple law, but it is a law whose interpretation has changed over the years, mystifying some and confusing many. So when I heard the Royal Mint had issued new fifty pence pieces designed to explain the offside law of football I...
Blogging against the stream
Meg Barker outlines how she learnt to love blogging, and reflects on the many benefits it brings. I'm not a believer in new year resolutions: I think they far too easily become another stick to beat ourselves with in a culture where we already excessively monitor ourselves and make unfavourable comparisons. I do, however, find new year to be a useful time to reflect on my priorities and think about how they shape up in the year ahead. This is probably because – for me...
A one-sided view of Britain’s debt
Concern about the UK’s trillion dollar national debt could stifle the action needed to make it sustainable, argues Alan Shipman. So the UK now has a £1 trillion debt to set against its £1.5 trillion economy. The Coalition will blame its size on the profligacy of the previous Labour government. Labour will blame its continued rise on the Coalition’s over-rapid spending cuts, choking off the growth that would otherwise expand the government...
What everybody knows about Scotland and independence (is wrong)
A creaking and ineffective British constitution could be the first casualty should Scotland achieve independence. Bram Gieben debunks some of the myths circulating in the independence debate. The first casualty of war is truth, and going by the opening salvoes of the independence debate, a mass of ill-informed and partisan nonsense is already obscuring even the basic facts of the matter. Let's leave aside for the moment the tedious arguments about the mechanism of...
New survey questions scientific integrity
Academic researchers will always deny it, but a recent survey by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) suggests that as many as one in 10 British based scientists and doctors have witnessed colleagues deliberately altering or fabricating data in a way which accelerates the prospect of publication. The increasing emphasis Governments have placed upon rewarding scientists with long and worthy records of published work may be generating a 'publish or perish' culture, with consequent dubious...
Enduring Love? project seeks reasons why couples stay together
Meg Barker introduces the Enduring Love? project and invites those in long-term relationships to fill in the questionnaire. There has been plenty of research on break-up, divorce and separation. The team behind Enduring Love? project decided that it was time that we knew more about what makes people stay together. The plan is to get as many people as possible to fill out the online questionnaire so that the researchers can get a good idea of the diversity of ways in...
Dr, No!
It seems that even chemistry professors can get carried away. It had never occurred to me that the reasons why nuclear power has such a bad reputation was because of the depiction of nuclear power in the James Bond movies. I thought that the Fukushima near melt-down after the Japan tsunami last March might have caused more damage to a reputation already tainted by Two Mile Island and Chernobyl. Still, I guess Professor David Phillips, President of the Royal Chemistry Society (RCS) knows more...
About Society Matters
Provocative, relevant, current: for the last decade Society Matters magazine has been informing, engaging and annoying social sciences students in equal measure. Now, its move online has given us the chance to bring its lively mix of analysis and opinion to a wider audience.
Society Matters online started in October 2010 and has, so far, covered a wide range of issues and topics ranging from inequality and the big society to arms sales and foreign policy. All can be seen by scrolling down from the top of the Society Matters front page.
We have also illustrated many of these posts with the work of our two illustrators (see below). Serious analyses have been interspersed with posts on a less weighty issues which show both human folly and innovation.
Society Matters continues to be edited by its original creator, Dick Skellington. Dick, pictured above, was previously a programme manager in the social sciences faculty, walks the talk through an active involvement in the affairs of his home town of Stony Stratford, Bucks, and finds light relief through writing poetry and the occasional stage appearance in local productions.
Since many years at the coalface of journalism have taught us all that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words Dick is aided and abetted by resident illustrators, Gary Edwards and Catherine Pain – both former OU students.
Catherine has drawn and painted all her life, and when she is not pillorying public figures for Society Matters paints animal portraits, works in stained glass and produces alphabet teaching posters for children. Her work is in several galleries in and around her current home in Cambridgeshire and her publications include an illustrated cookbook sold on behalf of the National Trust, a colouring book for small children, Alphabet for Colouring, and The Lost Children, a story for older children. Her website is at catherinepain.co.uk
Gary has written two best-selling books about his travels all over the world watching Leeds United FC, Paint it White and Leeds United - The Second Coat. His third title No Glossing Over will be published by Mainstream in September 2011. He has not missed a Leeds game anywhere in the world since February 1968 and married his wife Lesley at Elland Road.
Specialising in wall murals, Gary also holds diplomas from the London Art College, The Morris College of Journalism, has a Diploma in Freelance Cartooning and Illustration and is a contributing cartoonist for Speakeasy, an English-speaking magazine in Paris. During the 1970's and 1980's he collected hearses and is a long time member of the Official Flat Earth Society as well as the Clay Pigeon Preservation Society. His website is at gary-edwards.co.uk
