Society

Divorce is something I have yet to experience personally but Dave’s reshuffle has set me up nicely for any future threat to my own nuptial bliss. Out of the blue comes the call. It’s Dave’s office. ‘We need to talk — can you come over?’ And better I come round the back way to 10 Downing St, apparently, because there’s workmen all over the place at the front. And thus the bell tolls: on reshuffle day, winners are invited through the front door to smile for the cameras. The victims are roughed up around the back. Tentatively, I turn up at Dave’s office. His flunkies, who usually don’t give you

Conventional wisdom suggests that Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime will crumble from within if given enough time. That’s the reasoning which has, in part at least, prevented Western governments from intervening in the conflict so far. Tony Blair challenged proponents of that view yesterday. ‘People say inevitably he will go. I don’t think it is inevitable, actually, unless we are prepared to make clear our support and solidarity for those people who are struggling against what is a very, very brutal repression now,’ he told Radio 4’s Today programme. Although Blair isn’t necessarily advocating military intervention, he does think we should be exploring military options more thoroughly. This is the conundrum

The Work and Pensions Select Committee was much denuded this evening, chair Anne Begg told the guests: its membership had either been promoted in the reshuffle or had personal crises to attend to. In the end Begg was joined by Andrew Bingham, Stephen Lloyd, Teresa Pearce and Glenda Jackson to interrogate Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud about the implementation of universal credit. Their questions seemed rather denuded, too: not of detail, for these MPs do truly know their stuff when it comes to welfare reform, but of a sense of the bigger picture. During the hearing, which lasted nearly three hours, the Work and Pensions Secretary and his Welfare

The simplest way to react to the madder pronouncements of the trade union movement is to dismiss it as so much infantile ‘group think’. Solidarity can be very selective and Israeli trade unionists are apparently discounted simply for being Israeli. The latest decision of the TUC to send a delegation to Gaza under the auspices of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is not the daftest. But the idea that it would give delegates anything approaching balance is absurd. My Bright on Politics column for the Jewish Chronicle this week was addressed to the Jewish community but the Israel/Palestine conflict has a wider resonance: ‘Supporters of Israel are losing the battle of

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the autumn statement would be on 5 December, and commentators said he would confront the dwindling chance of meeting debt targets set for 2015. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said the government would set up a ‘business bank’ to lend to companies. The Commons Public Accounts Committee said a £1.4 billion Regional Growth Fund set up in April last year had created only 2,442 jobs. Delegates to the Trades Union Congress voted to support co-ordinated strikes against a public sector pay freeze. Tories from the right of the party started a group called Conservative Voice. The nation took a keen interest