The Week

Leading article

Leader: Growth or bust

David Cameron has said he is determined not to lead a cuts-only coalition. He has spoken about promoting entrepreneurship, rightly hailing small businesses as the engine of Britain’s economic recovery. At the last Tory party conference, he paid homage to ‘the doers and the grafters, the inventors and the entrepreneurs’. He was fully behind these

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 29 January 2011

Home The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom shrank by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter of 2010 compared with that quarter the previous year, according to initial figures from the Office for National Statistics. Home The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom shrank by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter

Barometer

Barometer | 29 January 2011

No such thing as society The government’s ‘Big Society’ project is partly inspired by a desire to undo the damage created by a remark made by Mrs Thatcher in an interview with Woman’s Own on 31 October 1987. Here are some extracts from the transcript: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too

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Ancient and modern: The art of dying

So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But

Letters

Letters | 29 January 2011

The scale of the loss Sir: You state that ‘the British army was defeated in Basra’ (leading article, 22 January) as though it were a re-run of Alamein or Waterloo. Would it not be more true to say that the undermanned and under-resourced segment of the army in Basra was insufficient to cope with the