The Week

Diary

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 2 May 2009

Monday Farewell then GWB. Whoever thought that was a good idea? Nobody here, I can assure you. Measuring output in terms of General Wellbeing is just plain silly when the really important stuff is all to do with hard figures. As such, we will be using a brand new measure of the nation’s progress from

More from The Week

The panic pandemic

‘In 1918, half a million Americans died. The projections are that this time, the virus will kill one million Americans.’ These were the words of the President’s chief health adviser, as he warned about the dangers of swine flu. But he wasn’t speaking this week. The year was 1976, the President was Ford, and the

A 30-year blip?

Thirty years ago this Sunday, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister with a Commons majority of 43. In the 11 years that followed, she took an economic basket case, the sick man of Europe, an offshore banana republic, and transformed it: inflation was curbed, penal tax ended, the unions tamed, and Britain’s confidence on the

Letters

Letters | 2 May 2009

Broken pledges Sir: Labour has lost all credibility, having broken a clear manifesto pledge not to raise taxes but then doing so. It is the second pledge that it has failed to honour, the first being its failure to hold a referendum on the EU constitution. If directors of a company break clear pledges made