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...
I always thought that Nemtsov would make it, that he would be shielded from the vengeance of the system in part because he was Nemtsov.
My first encounter with the dark net was in Rio de Janeiro in 2006. I was interviewing a public prosecutor about the changing nature of organised crime in Brazil. His office was in Barra, an...
What can be said about a country whose electoral options run from bad to worse, from xenophobia to all-out racism?
In 1969, three years into the Cultural Revolution, China was not only poorer than most African countries but suffering from a massive famine. Mao Zedong and his colleagues decided to import...
We have a situation in which a lecturer cannot speak her mind, universities bring in the police to deal with campus protests, and graduate students cannot write publicly about what is happening.
Laws governing how much money individuals and organisations could give to politicians were prophylactics, designed – however imperfectly – to prevent corruption by limiting how much money could change...