Controversy has broken out over the government’s plans to allow shops to stay open for longer on Sunday during the Olympics, so that spectators can boost the economy while they are there. This move has reopened the question of Sunday shopping hours. I was moved to write this blog by seeing two letters in the…
Five years ago, Scotland’s unemployment was below the rest of the UK, and our Annual GDP growth rate had climbed above that of the United Kingdom. In the past year, however, those positions have been reversed with unemployment higher and growth lower than the rest of the UK. Uncertainty and disagreement over the timing of…
I am extremely grateful to Matthew Purvis, one of the extremely assiduous and analytically astute researchers in the House of Lords Library, who has confirmed with some statistics my suspicion that former MPs and councillors (nominees of their parties, all) are indeed disproportionately represented among the active membership (those who attend and vote) of the…
Yesterday morning I turned up at Westfield Community Technology College in Watford to teach Year 10 English. The school is a non-selective secondary school, in the partially selective environment of South Hertfordshire. First impression was that the school building investment programme that is now running six months late is still desperately needed in areas like…
In March 1962 I organised a bus-load of somewhat shambolic students from Oxford to visit the hitherto unknown ‘commuter belt’ town of Orpington. A few of us returned again on Polling Day for what turned out to be a historic Byelection result. The victor of that politically seismic event was a young engineer, only recently…
There are various well-known quotes about Parliament and about each House, though some of the quotations are not what they seem. Many people think the phrase ‘the mother of Parliaments’ refers to Parliament itself. Bright coined the phrase but he described England as the mother of Parliaments. This week, the quiz is on quotations. As…
Should the News of the World have been closed or should the managers and owners resigned or been sacked. Closing a 150 year old newspaper was wrong.
This remarkable book, by a doctor born in a refugee camp in Gaza, should be read by everyone concerned with that region. In January 2009 he lost three of his eight children when a tank shell struck his house in Gaza. Yet he refuses to demand revenge, and believes that medical workers on both sides…
