Britain's Current Affairs & Politics Magazine. Violence against women in Tahrir Square. Speak it aloud, let it ooze over your tongue: how bitter does it taste?
Right now, thousands of Egyptian women who gathered to commemorate the centenary of International Women's Day in the newly liberated Tahrir Square are being assaulted, harassed and brutalised. Not by Mubarak's thugs, but by the men who lately stood beside them as equals on the barricades. As I write, images and reports are coming through on Twitter from women fleeing male aggression in the symbolic heart of what is already being called the Arab Spring. Speak it aloud, let it ooze over your tongue: how bitter does it taste?
"During the revolution, women weren't women -- they were simply Egyptians," writes Egyptian journalist Ethar El-Katatney. In Cameron's Britain profit has become the new piety. At what point did the denial of compassion become a morally righteous act?
When homeless people are criminalised and single parents left destitute "for their own good", it's a question we need to start asking. In a speech to the Tory party's spring conference, David Cameron laid out the "moral" case for an ideology which prioritises the wishes of business over the needs of ordinary people. Eulogising "small business owners" as modern-day Samaritans, the Prime Minister extolled the virtues of enterprise with as much pious self-satistfaction as any po-faced priest ever preached chastity.