Politics

It is one of the oddities of politics that a Labour government can sometimes get away with announcing policies which, had they come from the mouth of a Conservative minister, would have provoked howls of anger. So it is with welfare reform. Whenever Mrs Thatcher’s government proposed to make benefit claimants actually do something for their handouts rather than languish in bedsits in Hastings and Margate, as was the common practice in the 1980s, the resulting rage and charges of heartlessness smothered serious reform — with dreadful consequences. In pockets of the country unemployment has become hereditary, and the idea of working for a living an entirely alien concept. The

Clinton brought Arkansas to Washington, and Texas followed Bush. Now, says Alexandra Starr, Obama is bringing the take-no-prisoners politics of Al Capone’s city to the Beltway Washington may not have had an architectural makeover in more than two centuries, but the city’s political culture has shown a chameleon-like ability to change with each incoming administration. When Bill Clinton arrived from Little Rock, Arkansas 16 years ago, for example, he brought a penchant for late-night rambling discussions and a Southern disregard for keeping to schedules. Most of his underlings emulated those attributes, imbuing the town with a swing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ethos. President George W. Bush’s Lone Star state heritage came through in his

It’s the debate of our day, the meta-debate if you like. It unites the issues of Muslim extremism, creationism, irritable atheism, faith schools, Britishness, the future of the monarchy, Sarah Palin, Ruth Kelly: all the juiciest talking points. The radio show The Moral Maze seems to return to it with increasing frequency: Michael Buerk has developed a special sort of quizzical-weary tone with which to pick at its entrails. I’m talking, of course, about the Place-of-Religion-in-Public-Life debate. This is a debate that’s gradually turning into a culture war: over the past few years we’ve seen both sides digging deeper in, and the middle ground becoming less habitable. How can this

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever. Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present. One of the grim everyday realities of life