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Times Online - Peter Riddell (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
Win or lose in Glasgow, Mr Brown will remain Prime Minister and Alex Salmond will retain the initiative in Scottish politics. But what is being called Warwick 2, after the original deal with the unions there in 2004, will have a crucial bearing on Labour's future. This is less about immediate policies than what is said at the next election and, even more crucially, afterwards, especially if Labour...
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Times Online - Alan Coren (Free subscription) | 13 hours ago
Now that the Treasury has admitted that it will revise (for that, read “abandon”) Gordon Brown's golden rules for “fiscal prudence”, all three supposed pillars of the Government's economic policy have crumbled to dust.
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 13 hours ago
Your report ("Bound Palestinian protester shot by soldier", 22 July) shows yet another instance of the violence perpetrated by the Israeli Defence Force against unarmed people who resist the occupation. B'tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has recorded 25 cases of beatings and/or abuse of Palestinians by the IDF between 2005 and 2008. Many cases involve more than one victim.
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Times Online - Alan Coren (Free subscription) | yesterday
Hurray! The welcome was almost universal. The disabled would be helped into work, the benefits bill slashed, a James Purnell Jerusalem would spread throughout the crippled land. Business leaders welcomed it - if the prospective employees are employable. The Conservatives welcomed it; even the Liberal Democrats sort of did. With the predictable exception of the unions, everyone accepts the basic principle...
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Times Online - Daniel Finkelstein (Free subscription) | yesterday
A small personal incident allows me to date with a reasonable degree of precision the moment when the Right won the argument on crime in Britain.
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The Independent (Free subscription) | yesterday
A trial took place recently in Belfast that seems to explain how nothing makes any sense. It revolved around a factory owned by the arms company Raytheon, which was set up in Derry soon after the IRA ceasefire. John Hume, who'd just won the Nobel Peace Prize, was among those who announced the opening of the plant, welcoming it as a result of the "peace dividend".
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The Independent (Free subscription) | yesterday
We have a friend who, when she was a girl growing up in Birmingham 25 years ago, ran away to join the circus. Running away from home to join the circus is a bit like eloping to Gretna Green, romantic storybook stuff that nobody you know has ever done, except that our friend did. And when she recounted the tale to our youngest son, nine-year-old Jacob, I'm sure I saw a purposeful glint in his eye....
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The Independent (Free subscription) | yesterday
Chris Gaskell runs the Royal Agricultural College. You may remember that he invited me there for lunch a while back, and gave me the run of their extensive collection of pig literature. Could he come over, he said, with a group of kids from urban environments who'd shown an interest in becoming farmers?
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The Independent (Free subscription) | yesterday
So Ethan Hawke has just married his children's ex-nanny. Nice. Classy one there, Ethan. You couldn't have left the building and gone to a bar to chat someone up? When you considered having an affair you didn't think of casting your net a little further? You know, wider than your kitchen?
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
Fickle Labour MPs might regret the day they allowed Gordon Brown to force Tony Blair from No.10, but I dare say many would have Brown's wife Sarah over her high-maintenance predecessor.
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
Last week, a glove-puppet turned into a grave-digger. For the past year, Alistair Darling had been Chancellor in name and salary only. Modern prime ministers also hold the title "First Lord of the Treasury". In Gordon Brown's case, it has not been a mere honorific. He has continued to run the Treasury as if he were still Chancellor.
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
The Quebecois have longer memories than most, and the inevitable intrusions of the Anglophone world are rarely welcome, even today.
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
The Middle East and its environs have been a busy place in recent days, as a Prime Minister who is (perhaps) in the sunset of his power, and a presidential candidate who is (perhaps) entering the dawn of his, negotiate highly political itineraries. Gordon Brown is in the middle of a two-day trip to Israel, where he will today address the Knesset. And Barack Obama has been in Afghanistan, where he...
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
There are times when you do not know whether to laugh or to cry, and this is one of them. The Imperial College Healthcare Trust has announced it will run a pilot programme to reward surgeons with bonuses for "excellence". Even for a professional group – medics – known for their gallows humour, this seems to be taking things a bit far. How, after all, do you judge "excellence" in surgery? Points for...
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 21/07/2008
Years ago, I worked for a company that published a famous "men's" magazine. Although the reader was officially in his early twenties, we knew it was bought by teenagers, seduced not by the gung-ho articles written by middle-class graduates roughing it on expenses, but by pages featuring photo-shopped, almost-naked women and other glossy desirables: mostly gadgets and games to parade as a show of alpha-male...
