Next week’s Budget marks George Osborne’s last chance to make a game-changing reform before the next election. The Chancellor will have his boasts ready: he’ll say that Britain has the fastest growth of any developed country. What he won’t say is that no developed country has needed to pile so much debt onto its citizens
Home Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, promised that, if elected, his administration would hold a referendum on membership of the European Union only if there was a new transfer of power to Brussels, which he called ‘unlikely’. If Scotland votes for independence, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds might have to
The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from BBC Radio Hebrides to reviewing the Sunday papers on TV, as long as they’ll give your latest book a plug. Mind you, most of them want to talk about anything except the new book. The
Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in line with its foreign policy objective of a multi-polar world and the prevailing of international law over the rule of brute force. How very Roman of him. Cicero pointed out that if one wanted violence
Years of war Imaginative souls have tried to compared the situation in Ukraine with that which preceded the first world war 100 years ago. Are years ending in 14 especially violent? — 1414 saw the Polish-Teutonic war, one of a dozen skirmishes between Poland and Teutonic knights between the 14th and 16th centuries. The war
Slavery isn’t over Sir: I was alarmed to read Taki’s piece in this week’s High Life (8 March) which claimed that ‘slavery… has been over since 1865, except in Africa’. The Centre for Social Justice, whose board I chair, last year published its groundbreaking report It Happens Here, exposing the desperate plight of those in
