Would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live?
After a few months, my father finally agreed with Doris that I could go back to school. I apologised to her for my grasping, embarrassing father. Doris laughed and said he was easy to handle....
On 22 March 2012, David Cameron visited Kings Science Academy in Bradford, one of the first wave of 24 free schools that opened in September 2011. You can see footage of his visit online. The...
Istanbul lately has the feeling of a crime scene. The Gezi protests are over but life has got weirder: the black police helicopters always hovering; the intimidation of dissenters on Twitter...
When the Health and Social Care Bill was passed into law at the start of 2012, it elicited one of those usually impotent hashtag campaigns seen so often on Twitter, where thousands of people using the...
The trouble for the Greens is that they really would like to see the end of modern civilisation – as we know it.
One reason this election is so hard to call is that history offers a very unreliable guide. For each preferred or predicted outcome there is a historical pattern from which to draw comfort. If...
Bad things happen to schools if Ofsted turns up and doesn’t like what it sees. Up goes the report online and everybody reads it: parents, would-be staff, local media and business, all of whom want to...
A mile and a half from the small town in Fife where I live lies a loch called Lochmill. Half a mile long, it occupies a natural bowl in the Ochil hills, and is orientated almost exactly...
Everybody, especially if they’re afraid of flying, knows that the statistics say it’s the safest way to travel. Or one of them, anyway: as with everything else, it depends on how...
There are two standard views of the relationship between poverty and inequality. The first is that there isn’t one: how the poor fare has nothing to do with how much better off the rich...
Someone, or something, abdicated power in Grimsby, leaving swathes of it to rot. But who, or what?
Labour does not lack popular policy initiatives. What it lacks is a purpose.
Syriza is the most successful product so far of the left that stayed at home.
One of the services Twitter provides for misogynists and stalkers is anonymity.
Into the doldrums of Obama’s second term, freshman Senator Tom Cotton has trotted forward as the GOP’s new mascot of ostentatious warmongering. He’s the author of the letter...
In the first half of the 19th century radical reformers argued that Britain needed three things if it was ever going to become a real democracy: secret ballots, universal suffrage and annual...
The exposure of the Western world’s surveillance networks has heightened the feeling that democratic institutions aren’t functioning as they should, that, like it or not, we are living in the twilight...