Politics

Poor old Ed Balls. He’s been making predictions of doom that now appear to have gone too far and too fast. The latest blow to the Shadow Chancellor is that the IMF, which he went through a period of definitely liking a lot when its lieutenants started suggesting that austerity was ‘playing with fire’, has upgraded its growth forecasts for the UK by more than any other major economy. This map from the organisation’s latest World Economic Outlook illustrates rather neatly how well the IMF expects the UK to do in comparison to other European economies. Obviously this doesn’t mean that everything is fine and dandy and that everyone in the UK can

The OECD released a report this week on education standards. It makes for grim reading: we’re bottom of the class. Those aged 16-24 in England came 22nd of 24 for literacy, and 21st for numeracy. We’re behind almost every other advanced nation in the world. What’s gone wrong? There’s a clue in the different scores by age. Young people who had pretty much their entire education under the last Labour government do worse than most older generations. The clear problem – is a decade of dumbing down led by Labour and supported wholeheartedly by the teaching unions. They made qualifications in cake decorating ‘equivalent’ to physics GCSE. They allowed calculators in

The very fact that a Cabinet member has stood up in the House of Commons to make a statement on the future of newspapers suggests there’s something going rather wrong in our democracy. For three centuries, newspapers have not been toys in the political train set. Britain has operated on an unspoken principle of liberty, so firmly embedded in the national DNA that the separation between government and the press did not need spelt out in a constitution. Today, a medieval group known as the Privy Council (in fact, an octet of politicians) has decided to reject the newspaper industry’s plans for self-regulation in favour of politicians’ plans for press regulation.