Politics

Marine Le Pen celebrated what she called ‘an ideological victory’ on Tuesday evening after Emmanuel Macron’s government finally had its controversial immigration Bill approved.  It was a day of jubilation also for the centre-right Republicans, who had formed the bulk of the negotiating team that forced the government to toughen parts of the Bill to make it more acceptable to them.   If Le Pen is the winner from the events of the last week, the media have no doubt who is the big loser: Emmanuel Macron The Bill was initially thrown out of parliament last week after the left and the right came together in an unprecedented show of

Much of the speculation in the build-up to the Scottish budget yesterday focused on the possibility of the introduction of yet another new income tax band for the well off. And So it came to pass. Speaking at Holyrood yesterday afternoon, Deputy First Minister and Finance Secretary Shona Robison announced a new ‘advanced rate’ of 45 per cent for those earning between £75,000 and £125,140, meaning they will pay more tax than they currently do. Meanwhile, Scotland’s top rate of tax, levied against those earning more than £125,000, will also rise next year, by 1 per cent, to 48 per cent. The ‘starter’ and ‘basic’ rate bands (note, not the

This week, the Ministry of Justice launched a consultation on its plan to digitise its vast archive of wills. The only problem is that it also wants to destroy its original paper copies – which date from 1858.  This destruction is supposed to save the taxpayer £4.5 million per year, although wills that ‘belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest’ will be retained. The proposal has been met with strong disapproval by historians and archivists – not because digitisation is inherently a bad idea, but because digitising an archive and then destroying the originals was never how it was meant to work.   Digitisation does have a role to play in

Traditionalists in the Church of England and the Catholic church don’t, of course, always see eye to eye. But on the issue of gay marriage and same-sex relations they may have found some common ground. In a landmark ceremony last week, the Church of England blessed a same-sex couple’s relationship for the first time. Prayers for two women – Catherine Bond and Jane Pearce – were held at St John the Baptist Church, in Felixstowe, Suffolk. As if by chance, this week we also heard about the same issue from the papal Dicastery, the Vatican body tasked with maintaining sound doctrine. Five conservative cardinals had submitted a dubium (i.e. awkward question) about whether

Claudine Gay is the self-declared ‘transformational’ president of Harvard university. She campaigned for the job by promising to retire the old Harvard of privilege and patrimony and to bring into being a new Harvard founded on principles of anti-racism and social justice. How is she doing?  At the moment, she is a bit distracted by allegations of plagiarism in her slim portfolio of publications. But she has a whole sea of troubles to take arms against. Let’s let her rest a moment on the shore and consider a small story from the not-always-illustrious past of America’s greatest university.   In 2007 Harvard admitted as a transfer student a young man, Adam