Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Note: The following article was written by Shane Nagpal L6B (20NagpalS@students.watfordboys.org) Global trade is not a small side issue. UNCTAD estimated that global trade in goods and services surpassed $35 trillion in 2025, reaching a new record. This makes the question of free trade feel urgent rather than theoretical. A cheap T-shirt, a smartphone assembled across five countries, fruit in winter, coffee before school. The cotton from the T-shirts may be grown in one country, stitched in another, shipped through a third and sold on a British high street by the weekend. Free trade is everywhere. It sits quietly behind the lower prices consumers enjoy and the larger markets firms depend on. But the same T-shirt can also tell a darker story: a closed factory in Talbot, a steelworker in Ohio, or a farming community hit by retaliatory tariffs. Free trade creates winners and losers. The question is not whether the winners exist. The real question is whether the winners gain enough, a...