This has been the week of the whistleblowers. Nevres Kemal is the social worker in the north London borough of Haringey who raised the alarm about failings in the council's child protection system in early 2007, several months before the death of Baby P. For her bravery and compassion she was dismissed from her job and served with an injunction preventing her from speaking publicly of her concerns.

Christopher Galley [...]

"The heat of a campaign": this was the phrase Barack Obama used to swat away a reporter's question about how he could pick Hillary Clinton to serve as US secretary of state after all that he had said about her. "During campaigns or during the course of election season," Mr Obama said, as his one-time rival stood smiling awkwardly beside him, "differences get magnified."

Magnified is an understatement. For 16 [...]

What is remarkable about the debate over how the government should respond to the economic crisis is that so many commentators write and talk as though nothing has changed. It is, we are told, government debt, not bank debt, that should make us tremble. The government, we hear, is to blame for failing to anticipate the crisis, not the bankers and City traders who are largely responsible for the mess [...]

It seems only yesterday that wise commentators were talking of a political consensus, of co-operation between the parties, and even of including leading opposition party figures on the National Economic Council, established to steer the UK through the economic storm. Now, suddenly, the consensus is over. First comes George Osborne, accusing Gordon Brown of creating a run on sterling with his talk of "fiscal stimulus". Then the Conservative party leader [...]

Few of us who lived through the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s can forget the misery caused by high unemployment as the Thatcher counter-revolution destroyed traditional working-class communities, especially in Britain's industrial northern cities. In retrospect, it feels as if an entire generation of working families were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market experiment as the Tories broke violently from the quasi-socialist consensus politics of the [...]

Let us hope that, like a pantomime drunk, we are pushing at a wide-open door in calling for swift action by government on the damning report from MPs on drink-related civil disturbance. Alcohol abuse now ranks with knife and gun violence as top of the crime and crime-prevention problems facing today's police, absorbing enormous numbers of officers at peak trouble times and costing the country's police forces around £7bn a [...]

This is a time of reckoning. For too long we have been encouraged to live carelessly and we are now living with the consequences: a world economic system on life support and a planet that is warming rapidly because of the increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases arising from human activity. If the earth continues to heat up at its present rate, we know what our fate will [...]

In considering how best to bring Britain out of recession with maximum speed and minimum pain, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling should start by ignoring the 16 free-market economists who wrote to the Sunday Telegraph arguing that higher public spending risks "seriously misallocating resources". It is not the government, but the privately owned financial services industry, that has been misallocating resources on a grand scale. The surprise is that these [...]

It was not the best of times to be reminded that politicians of all parties seem so easily to find themselves enjoying the hospitality of billionaires and plutocrats. Nor to be told that the meetings off the coast of Corfu on the yacht of the richest man in Russia were quite unconnected to party funding (which would be illegal), just "social events". In fact, in a week when the governor [...]

In his celebrated speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, the speech through which he rose to national prominence when still just a senatorial candidate for Illinois, Barack Obama thrilled his audience not only with his signature oratorical high style but by calling for a new "politics of hope". He went on to define what those new politics would be and urged the party and the nation to [...]