Society

There was an almighty hoo-ha when George Osborne introduced pension freedoms. In the biggest change to pensions in a generation, anyone aged 55 and over is now allowed to take their entire pension pot as a lump sum, paying no tax on the first 25 per cent and the rest taxed as if it were a salary at their income tax rate. I was among the naysayers and one of those who thought the then Chancellor was absolutely bananas for implementing the new rules. The temptation to blow the lot on a round-the-world cruise or a fancy car must be overwhelming, and falling back on the State in later years

We all remember it from school, whether as perpetrator, or assistant of perpetrator, or victim: the moment when everyone turns against another pupil and it becomes legitimate to be vile to her. When she is ‘down’, it becomes more and more enjoyable to torture her and to find endless new aspects of her to be woundingly vicious about, every hour of every day. It has been like this for Theresa May in the last week. She’s the outcast in the playground, knowing that if she so much as opens her mouth to say something, she’ll receive a torrent of withering sarcasm. Please can it stop? It leaves a nasty taste

This week you were invited to fill a gap by providing lyrics for the European anthem. The powers that be behind the anthem, which has as its melody the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, chose to dispense with Friedrich von Schiller’s words. ‘There are no words to the anthem; it consists of music only,’ says the EU website, in bold type. My request for suitable words elicited an absorbing, inventive postbag. I wondered if anyone might revisit Schiller’s 1785 ‘Ode to Joy’ and repurpose the following lines: ‘Yea, if any hold in keeping/ Only one heart all his own/ Let him join us, or else weeping/ Steal from

The lessons to be learned from the Conservatives’ poor showing in the election could fill more pages than the national curriculum. Don’t unleash on the public a manifesto which has not even been tested among senior ministers. Don’t think you can get through a seven-week election campaign by endlessly repeating the same mantra, especially when you are being ridiculed for it. Don’t underestimate how quickly public opinion can change. Sell yourself, your party and its ideas, rather than just attacking your opponent. Yet there is a serious danger that Theresa May and the rest of the Tory party could pick up the wrong message. There is a growing narrative that

Had the Grenfell Tower tragedy befallen one of the millionaire high-rises built along the Thames recently, it would still be a catastrophe that shocked the country and the world. But what makes this disaster so numbing and sickening is to see, in the faces of the dead, some of the most vulnerable people in our society. People who were, in effect, in the care of the state – that is to say, in our collective care. If we pay taxes and vote, we’re part of a system that’s supposed to devote the greatest attention to those in greatest need of government help. And on Tuesday night, dozens of them were

The powerful tournament in Stavanger, Norway, draws to a close at the end of this week. World champion Magnus Carlsen dominated the blitz event which preceded the main competition. Sadly for the home crowd, Carlsen got off to a very bad start in the classical time limits competition that followed, with the energetic American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura seizing the leading role. Here are some key extracts from play.   Aronian–Carlsen: Norway Chess, Stavanger 2017 (see diagram 1)   In this tense situation, where White has a mass of pawns in exchange for a bishop, Carlsen conceives of a plausible defensive plan to resurrect his dormant bishop and ferry it round