Twenty-five years ago, when he had left the Communist party and taken over as chief executive at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Sir David Nicholson made a point of promising his staff a ‘job for life’. He has certainly stuck to his ideology. This week he admitted his part in the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal, in which
Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer failed to dissuade EU finance minsters in Brussels from endorsing a plan to cap bankers’ pay bonuses. City banks contemplated taking the EU to court over it. HSBC’s annual profits fell by 6 per cent to £14 billion, including a loss of £700 million made in Britain.
My friend and colleague Roy Brown has just sent me the draft of a statement he will submit to the UN Human Rights Council this spring, on behalf of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. This is a group to which we both belong, which campaigns on freedom of thought and expression, women’s and children’s
The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the rotation of an encyclical. Like much else in the Catholic tradition, it has its roots in the pagan world. Asceticism derives from the Greek askêsis,
Gove’s history lessons Sir: ‘The idea that there is a canonical body of knowledge that must be mastered,’ says Professor Jackie Eales, ‘but not questioned, is inconsistent with high standards of education in any age.’ This is not true. Primary education is, or should be, all about just such a body of knowledge. This gives
