It is tempting to cheer the European Court of Human Rights’s ruling in the case of Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton. They have been awarded £30,000 in compensation on the grounds that the powers used by the police to detain them at a protest outside an arms fair in Docklands six years ago were illiberal.
Perhaps the least fashionable cause in Britain is the welfare of our elderly. At least 35,000 old men and women will die from the cold this winter: a staggering, scandalous figure. We are a rich country, there are many ingenious and inexpensive ways to heat a house, yet every August, when the number of ‘excess
A failed attempt by Mr Geoff Hoon and Miss Patricia Hewitt to provoke a ballot on the Labour leadership was not mentioned at the next meeting of the Cabinet meeting, Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister said. Instead he had urged ministers to apply a ‘laser focus’ on Britain’s problems, such as the weather. A
Monday V exciting! Now that we’ve decided to do married tax breaks for couples with children under five we’ll need an acronym. So we’re having a competition! I’ve come up with… the Married Couples With Children Under Five Allowance, or McWicufa. Pretty snappy huh! Everyone joining in the fun except for IDS who’s in a
A side effect of last week’s failed putsch is Peter Mandelson resuming his position at the front end of Gordon Brown’s election pantomime horse — pushing Harriet Harman into the rear. This is not good news for the Tories, as Harman would undoubtedly have alienated even more floating voters. I sat between her and Boris Johnson
The failed Hoon–Hewitt coup against the Prime Minister offers a clear Roman lesson — if you strike, you strike early and you strike hard. The failed Hoon–Hewitt coup against the Prime Minister offers a clear Roman lesson — if you strike, you strike early and you strike hard. When, for example, the despotic madman Caligula
The Greeks lied and cheated their way into the eurozone, says Matthew Lynn — and letting them get away with it through a bailout threatens the euro with collapse When Greece officially replaced the drachma with the euro on 1 January 2001, nobody was in the mood to mourn the world’s oldest currency. A public
Gangster paradise Sir: Owen Matthews’s article (‘Something rotten in the state of Russia’, 9 January) brilliantly encapsulates and explains the condition of Russia today. But he omits to mention that the subversion of the judicial system and pervasive corruption have been in evidence for a long time, which does raise the question of whether Hermitage
