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Why is there such guff in the online comments below my articles?

What’s to be done about the online comments sections in daily newspapers? These (for those estimable Spectator readers who have yet to succumb to tablets, iPhones and computer screens) are the spaces that the online versions of newspapers and magazines provide beneath the articles they publish, for readers to offer (or ‘post’) thoughts of their

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes | 16 May 2013

The BBC loves nothing better than a narrative in which Tory anti-European eccentrics split their party, and a bewildered public votes Labour. It is certainly the case that some of the Tory sceptics are half-crazed by dislike of David Cameron. But the reason the subject keeps coming up is because it matters, and it remains

Any other business

British banking would be poorer without a Co-operative challenge

When the Manchester-based Co-operative Bank was announced last July as the buyer of 632 Lloyds branches, tripling the size of its own network, I hailed the news as a step forward for  ‘banking biodiversity’. In February, George Osborne was still praising the deal, codenamed Project Verde, as one that would ‘shake up the established players’.