The exam question is simple: how do we deal with the problem of banks deemed too big to fail and then taking risks underwritten by an effective taxpayer guarantee? This is the problem the Banking Commission sought to resolve in its report issued last week. Bankers are in no position to resist reform. As a …

The political debate over the past year has been dominated by argument over the deficit. How far and how fast to cut. Yet the economic signals in this country and others in recent weeks show that this debate is missing a more urgent point: how countries can secure the economic growth needed to lift their …

In the face of the disorder in English cities in recent days, the debate has revolved around questions of individual responsibility or wider issues of opportunity and parenting.  But there is a broader and more fundamental lesson in all this about freedom.  The past week has shown the crucial importance of liberty for a decent …

For most Labour people, their starting point with Rupert Murdoch is the front page of The Sun with Neil Kinnock’s head in a lightbulb in the 1992 election.  The lightbulb wasn’t the beginning.  It was the culmination of years of hostility that Kinnock had had to face from most of the press, but the Murdoch …

Amid all the fuss about NHS structures, it would be easy to forget what was happening in one area that really impacts on patients and that is the length of time people wait for treatment. The other night I took part in one of those end-of-the-week discussions on Radio 4. The other panellist was Tory …

The events of the past two days have seemed like a rerun of the debate last summer, says Pat McFadden MP. In the blue corner is George Osborne saying the Government inherited a mess and there is no alternative to the path of deficit reduction he has set out. Any sniff of Plan B would …

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole said that the Queen’s visit to Ireland was not so much a change in itself but instead underlined a change that has already happened.  He was right.  The relationship between Britain and Ireland has been transformed in recent decades. 

The Financial Times education results survey should be our rallying cry for change. We should learn from the London Challenge and reject anything that leads to levelling down, rather than levelling up, of standards.

You know something’s up when a politician of the right says, ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration.’  This was of course plastered all over Tory billboards during the 2005 election campaign, during the leadership of Michael Howard and before Mr Cameron’s rebranding exercise. 

As Andrew Lansley swings in the wind, cast aside by his Prime Minister, his reforms hang in the balance.