The wrong target: Don’t reduce the number of MPs – take the axe to the Lords
There are many things that could be done to improve the way Parliament works, but the pointless reform that will be presented to MPs next week is not one of them.
There are many things that could be done to improve the way Parliament works, but the pointless reform that will be presented to MPs next week is not one of them.
It is quite something to open an inquiry by announcing that it might roll on for five years. That was the prediction of Justice Lowell Goddard on 9 July, as she outlined the possibility that one in every 20 children in the UK has been abused.
The Home Office’s Prevent is one of the four elements that make up the UK’s post 9/11 counter-terrorism strategy known as Contest. They are Prepare for attacks, Protect the public, Pursue the attackers and Prevent their radicalisation in the first place.
Is peer-to-peer lending set to crash into the mainstream with a bang next year?
Are many of Britain's leading shares too fat? As the campaign against human obesity becomes even more intense, there remains a remarkable army of bloated heavyweights inhabiting the stock market.
In a week when the Chancellor unveiled his latest austerity measures, the banks showed no signs of pulling in their horns as a raft of low-cost deals hit the market.
Old Mutual is home to one of the most successful UK equity teams. For more than a decade, it has been a key contender in the small and medium-sized companies arena. With the appointment of Simon Murphy in 2008, and more recently Richard Buxton, it now also has considerable strength in larger companies.
Building a wall along a border won’t change a mindset. Thousands of holidaymakers are being flown home from Tunisia, and the effect on the country’s economy will be devastating. Innocent people will lose their jobs in the tourism industry and it will take years to persuade visitors to return and spend their cash in one of North Africa’s most welcoming and lovely spots.
This week's Thought for the Day will no doubt see me being accused of something akin to schadenfreude, but all I really want to do is echo Gore Vidal's elegant misanthropy, to wit: "Every time a friend of mine succeeds, I die a little."
“We need a counter-narrative.” How often have we heard that since 7/7? We need to tell a better story to those young British Muslims for whom bombs and beheadings hold a greater allure than anything we have to offer. Someone’s seducing them away with a narrative of lies, so we must seduce them back again with a narrative of truth.
We, the undersigned, take issue with the government’s Prevent strategy and its statutory implementation through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 for the following reasons:
In 1995, Harper Lee wrote the foreword to a 35th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. “I am still alive”, she wrote. “Although very quiet.”
On Apostle Paul Street in Thessaloniki, a little bit of Turkey shelters behind a tall metal fence. It does so both literally, since the Turkish consulate does business from this plot in Greece’s second city, and spiritually.
If George Osborne now wrote his career plan on the back of an envelope as Michael Heseltine allegedly once did, looking at how it has gone so far and how he’d like to be received from here on, it would probably say: 2012 – hated (booed at the Paralympics after his “Omnishambles Budget”); 2015 – respected (trusted to finish the job on the deficit); 2019 – loved (by his party, when it chooses David Cameron’s successor); 2020 – loved (by the voters at the next general election).
The classical crossover singer Katherine Jenkins could soon be arriving at a station near you. You’d have to live on the route of the Snowdon mountain railway, mind, but you get the idea. Katherine’s name was this week proudly emblazoned on the side of a carriage. I could live without it telling us that she is an OBE. What is it with people in the arts now so keen to flaunt their honours — there was a time when the only honours that mattered to them were awards in their chosen art form.
After new cases of Ebola were identified last week in Liberia, my experience of visiting countries worst hit by last year’s epidemic tells me one thing: women’s engagement is essential in preventing a second Ebola crisis.
There was an important vote in Europe this week but it wasn’t about Greece so you probably won’t have heard about it. Its implications, however, could be more sinister and more damaging for democracy than a Grexit.
Picking a university subject is already difficult enough for young people. But here’s an extra piece of data to weigh on your decision: you may be picking a life partner as well.
You would think twice about calling this new British chamber musical a “cracking” show. An intense, hermetic piece, with music and lyrics by Eamonn O'Dwyer and a book by him and Rob Gilbert, it has the imagery of breakage (of glass, promises, secrets) on the brain.
Wendy Whelan and Edward Watson have plenty in common: long-limbed, sinewy dancers with nervous intensity and serious cheekbones. In Other Stories, former New York City Ballet star Whelan and The Royal Ballet’s Watson commission a range of new works. In some, they coyly pretend to be themselves. It’s when they start playing Brechtian sado-masochistic criminals that the evening takes off.
Billy Connolly famously defined an intellectual as “someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger”. It’s a joke reincarnated for a new generation with the Flower Duet from Delibes’s Lakmé, now so insistently and indelibly associated with British Airways.
By the time the average young person finally leaves home they are 26. Most have had a stable upbringing with family support, both emotionally and financially, but are nevertheless unable to support themselves until they are almost entering their third decade.
It's festival season in the Serbian capital, with events celebrating just about everything – from beer to boats, writes Mary Novakovich
Who has a fancy dress party at the age of 50? Well, Piers Morgan, for one. At the foot of the characteristically understated, engraved and mirrored Perspex invitation to his birthday party came this horrifying instruction – Dress Code: Great Gatsby.
1. How long were party leaders MPs before they got the top job? Fabulous chart from Matthew Smith. Liz Kendall has already been in the House of Commons for longer than David Cameron was before he became leader.