Pride and Prejudice

"If gays vote Tory they will rue the day very soon,” cautioned Chris Bryant darkly. His comments followed Ben Bradshaw's attack on the Conservatives, warning that a deep strain of homophobia persists in their ranks. The Culture Secretary bares the scars of a nasty and prejudiced general campaign in Exeter 12 years ago, when his oddball Tory opponent Dr Adrian Rogers accused gay people of leading “deviant [...]

Philip Blond explains how to recapitalise the poor and free them from welfare dependence in the Guardian.

In the Independent, Steve Richards argues that Gordon Brown's U-turns on 42 days detention, the abolition of the 10p tax and the part-privatisation of Royal Mail reveal a man trying too hard to create a big tent.

In the Times, Roy Hattersley demolishes John Denham's [...]

Last week, sitting in a downtown hotel bar with a representative of Americans for Peace Now and Hagit Ofran, head of the Settlement Watch project in Israel, I found myself buoyed by a strange sense of optimism.

Gatherings of US peace activists in recent years have been marked by an underlying despair about the Israeli-Arab conflict. Even at the peak of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign of hope and change, few [...]

Xan Rice, a contributing writer of the New Statesman, has been named journalist of the year at the annual Africa Business Reporting Awards.

Rice was nominated for his report The Choclate King of São Tomé, which detailed the work of Claudio Corallo, an Italian chocolate producer acclaimed around the world.

"Xan has written several outstanding pieces, covering a lot of ground, with deep insights and [...]

Scotland Yard have launched an investigation into a Tory frontbench peer who claimed £100,000 in overnight allowances despite living less than 50 miles from Westminster, it was reported last night.

The Daily Telegraph said that Lord Hanningfield was being investigated over reports that he returned to his home in Essex while simultaneously claiming expenses for staying in London.

Lord Hanningfield, who is the leader of Essex County Council, [...]

The shadow chancellor George Osborne has denied any wrongdoing after an inquiry into his expenses claims was launched by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.

The investigation was launched after a complaint from by his constituency's Labour Party chairman. Osborne is alleged to have claimed for a mortgage worth £5,000 more than the price of his house. He also stands accused of “flipping” his second home to avoid paying capital gains [...]

The Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has warned that “a deep strain of homophobia still exists on the Conservative benches”.

Speaking after a poll showed rising gay support for the Tories, Bradshaw, one of the first openly gay MPs, said that the party’s record on the issue meant they could not be trusted.

The gay Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant, echoed his words. “If gays vote Tory they will rue [...]

Alistair Darling has warned that even after the financial crisis, too many bankers remain “complacent” about excessive bonuses and risk-tasking.

The Chancellor indicated that next week’s banking reform White Paper will outline plans for tighter regulation of the financial system, as he promised that bankers who indulged in short-term speculation will “be brought back to earth”.

The document will argue the “tripartite” system of regulation, which divides responsibility between [...]

Sunday’s overthrow of the Honduran president, José Manuel Zelaya, has raised the spectre of a dark Latin American history of coups d’état and brutal military dictatorships. In a break with the past, however, the region is speaking in unison, condemning the new dictatorship and calling for Zelaya to be reinstated. Significantly, the US government has also joined its southern neighbours in rejecting the new dictatorship and recognising Zelaya as the [...]

When and how did you begin reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

I'm writing a book about the West Bank city of Hebron, and I started going out to the region in 2007. I've been reporting on it since then.

Clearly any peace deal must be brokered by the US. Are you confident that Obama can have a positive effect?

Not particularly. Of course, his approach is an improvement on [...]

The Commons Speaker John Bercow has called for MPs to be able to elect his three deputy Speakers this autumn.

In a statement to MPs, he said that in a modern democracy it was unreasonable for the deputies to simply be selected by the party whips.

The proposal is one of a series of reforms promised by Bercow to make the Commons more democratic and accountable. He said [...]

The Ascent of Money is an essay in financial history. Do you think the current crisis is due in part to the lack of a historical sense?It’s a central theme of the book that ignorance of financial history can be a cause of financial crisis. I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in [...]

My friend Graham Ovenden and I were commissioned to illustrate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass some time around 1969. I took on Looking-Glass. The cost of making the books eventually became prohibitive, so my watercolours were made into silk-screen prints, and existed only as prints until about five years ago, when D3 Editions published Alice: Through the Looking-Glass.

I didn’t read Lewis Carroll’s books until I was [...]

Nine months ago, Gordon Brown won plaudits for intervening boldly to prevent the financial crisis spiralling out of control with a plan to recapitalise the banks. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman declared in the New York Times, under the headline “Gordon does good”, that Mr Brown had “saved the world financial system”.

Today, the Prime Minister stands accused of wrecking the public finances and bankrupting Britain. Critics left and [...]

It was Alan Greenspan who first let slip. In 2007, to the great glee of the anti-war movement, the elder statesman of American finance recognised that the real motive for the Iraq War had little to do with weapons of mass destruction.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq War is largely about oil,” wrote the former Federal Reserve chairman in his [...]

I left the north, I travelled south (ardent Smiths fans can fill in the rest), at a time when Thatcherite Conservatism was something of a swearword in most of England’s northern territories. So as David Cameron’s ascent has switched a Tory victory from possibility to likelihood, I’ve been itching to find out how Brand Dave is faring – and have been making a Radio 4 documentary to find out. Teasing [...]

It has already been suggested in certain quarters that Michael Jackson’s death belongs in the category of “you-will-remember-where-you-were-when-you-found-out” events. I, like a lot of people, found out in the way I find out everything of importance: by sitting at my computer and being bombarded with the news from 80 directions at once. I’m pretty sure I’ll remember that.

The newsgathering media are an unstoppable machine now, and their increasing sophistication [...]

Labour strategists have attempted to turn the tables on the opposition parties with the launch of the government’s “Building Britain’s Future” plan for the economy, public services and the constitution.

What the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg called a “hotchpotch of unrelated Whitehall schemes” has in fact been carefully thought out inside cabinet. The success or failure of the fresh approach will determine whether Labour stays in power after the [...]

Early in the week Jacqui Smith gave me her first print interview since she resigned. In close on two hours we covered a lot of ground, but I like to end up with quick-fire questions. “What’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done?” I asked. Quick as a flash, she replied: “Not make my husband sleep on the sofa for the last six months.”

***

I was up in [...]

Could the Middle East prove to be the United States’ Dien Bien Phu? The latter, you may remember, was where the flower of France’s colonial troops was vanquished by the Viet Minh in 1954. That military defeat in Vietnam came to symbolise the end of France as an imperial power. I exaggerate, of course: apart from Iraq, American troops are not embroiled in the Middle East and there is no [...]

After reading the latest sunbed scare story in the papers, I did something out of character: I went out and bought a copy of Grazia, its glossy cover resplendent with the pneumatic – and suntanned – Victoria Beckham. I believe a society gets the magazines it deserves, and I wanted to understand what has changed in our perennially complex attitude to appearance.

The obsession with beauty is at least as [...]

The script for the next general election is written and the words are being tested in Norwich North, scene of the latest by-election campaign. When David Cameron travelled up to visit the constituency this past week, a member of his staff showed him a leaflet published by Labour. It listed the cuts that would be imposed under a Conservative government, implying that there would be virtually nothing left in Norwich [...]

In rural Colombia, your dead body can earn somebody a significant cash bonus – paid for indirectly by the US taxpayer.

For years, Colombia has been a recipient of large amounts of US military aid and is one of Washington’s last close allies in South America. Its government has received billions of dollars to fight drug production and the civil war with the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces [...]

Forget igloos and bobsleds. Not-so-squeaky-clean Canada has a new label to answer to: the United Nations World Drug Report 2009 shows how the country is now a major global trafficking hub for synthetic drugs such as Ecstasy and methamphetamine.

While it may come as a surprise to international observers, for local law enforcers, who have uncovered more clandestine drug labs than the country’s market can hold, the label seems to [...]

Two policemen approach a group of picnickers in the shade of the National Gallery on a summer’s day in London. “Aww. This is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” says one officer. “I’m sorry, though, you can’t drink here.” A picnicker clutching a can of lager asks why. “Because it’s a controlled-drinking zone,” says the policeman, and continues, “so put it away so I can’t see it.” There is a [...]

What is it about a man in a loincloth? It’s not just the abs, or the fallen-from-grace appeal of an aristocratic orphan brought up by apes. It’s not even the maiden Jane, who morphs from a sexually retiring, hairy mass in 1918 to a leopard-print-bikini-donning temptress in the 1940s. As his catalogue of assailants has found: it’s hard to pin Tarzan down. He’s been claimed as action hero, ecologist, polyglot, [...]

It was while we were sitting in a Starbucks in Norwich that the loneliness of David Cameron’s position dawned upon him. It was our second visit to Norfolk within the month for a by-election campaign that had not even officially begun and, despite it being breakfast, his patience with the day had thinned.

“There must be some other f***** who can help out with

the dogsbody work?”

“Not really, [...]

Whoever designed this summer’s cricket programme must have had a sly sense of humour. Immediately after the newest, brashest form of the game, the World Twenty20, comes the oldest, most traditional contest of all: an Ashes series between England and Australia comprising five five-day Test matches, starting in Cardiff on Wednesday. White clothes, red balls and ancient rituals of lunch and tea replace the coloured costumes, white balls and dancing [...]

Good news for the sexually challenged – Viagra is now available without prescription at Boots. All you need do is walk in to your friendly pharmacist, be tested for glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and walk out with the magic blue pills.

By all accounts, we are in desperate need of the most successful drug ever manufactured. One in ten British men, I am reliably told, suffers from “erectile [...]

On 28 June, the UN mission investigating alleged war crimes committed during Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in January began public hearings in the coastal territory. The testimony of witnesses who had seen relatives killed and property destroyed in the war, which Israel codenamed Operation Cast Lead, was screened in a local hall and broadcast live on some TV channels in the Middle East. A plan to webcast the [...]

While air-conditioning units are switched on across a hot and bothered UK, those enduring India’s heatwave have been driven to more extreme measures. These residents of Sanjay Colony, New Delhi, scrambled to collect water from a state-supplied tanker amid temperatures that have rarely dropped below 40°C in the past three weeks. Water shortages and power cuts have led to angry demonstrations around the country. This year’s monsoon, already late, is [...]

It is said of King Solomon that he had a servant whisper to him repeatedly – when things went well and when things went badly – “this, too, will pass”. Crises do pass, even the most intense ones. But after the current global economic crisis, there will be no return to the status quo ante. For the world has looked into an abyss. The experience of the 1930s led to [...]

In late summer 1979, my friend Davitt Sigerson – then a writer on black music, later the chairman of Island Records in America – handed me an advance copy of Off the Wall and said it was going to make Michael Jackson a superstar.

The cover wasn’t promising: in his tux and afro, the winsome kid who had fronted the Jackson Five looked about as off-the-wall as a student on [...]

It is easy to spot media sexism towards women in government. There are the comments about Jacqui Smith’s cleavage and Caroline Flint’s “flouncing”, the damning scrutiny of what women MPs wear – from bitchy remarks that whatever Harriet Harman spends her income on, it’s not clothes to Anne McElvoy’s dismissal of Flint’s appearance in Observer Woman as “upholstered in orange silk”. (When David Miliband did a shoot for GQ last [...]

You don’t imagine curators as the type to rub their hands together in gleeful satisfaction, or pat themselves on the back for their shrewd judgement – we leave that to the bankers. Their timing at the British Museum, however, is spectacular. An exhibition about medals that confer disgrace rather than honour upon the recipients, memorialising triumphs of negative achievement, will surely pull in the outraged in droves. The Daily Telegraph [...]

Both rap and neoliberalism are 30 years old: 1979, the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected, was also the year when the Sugarhill Gang had the first bona fide hip-hop hit with “Rapper’s Delight”. At the time, few anticipated either the impact that neoliberalism and hip-hop would have, or the way in which they would come to echo one another. “Rapper’s Delight”, with its steal from Chic’s “Good Times” providing [...]

When John Updike died in January – of lung cancer, aged 76 – it was received as dreadful news by most of his readers. Updike was still producing novels and stories at a dazzling rate; he was still granting interviews and grinning for photographers. Of living American writers, he was, without question or competition, the most personally adored. But he was also a figure of great suspicion among critics, and, [...]

After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.”

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom are [...]

Every season brings its load of new books about France and the French, freshly baked by British or American expatriates who have taken a decade or two to understand what makes this country and its people so different from Britain and the British, the US and the Americans. Most such accounts get lost in the stack of brash, stereotypical covers emblazoned with berets, naked breasts or the Eiffel Tower wrapped [...]

YaloElias KhouryQuercus, 320pp, £17.99

Politics and passion in a Beirut shaken by the legacy of the civil war are at the heart of this harrowing novel by the Lebanese-born author of the acclaimed Gate of the Sun.Yalo is sensitively translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies, who notes how “complex” is the terminology of the Assyrian people and their language. The novel is morally and philosophically, as well [...]

In his essay “Carving and Modelling”, the now rather unfashionable, psychoanalytically inclined art critic Adrian Stokes wrote: “Carving creates a face for the stone, as agriculture for the earth, as man for woman. Modelling is more purely plastic creation: it makes things, it does not disclose, as a face, the significance of what already exists.” Stone, he suggests, “is the symbol of the outwardness, of the hoarded store of meaning [...]

A worry for the maker of any period film is that audiences may struggle to relate to the tribulations of a past era. In Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, set in 1930s Chicago, that concern is actually inverted: the film has so many modern echoes that it risks resembling too strongly the here-and-now, only with vintage Buicks instead of SUVs, Tommy guns rather than AK-47s.

The story is set in the [...]

Revelations: How to Find GodChannel 4

There wasn’t anything particularly amazing about the script, or the direction, of Jon Ronson’s film about the evangelical Christian Alpha course (28 June, 7pm), but for his access alone he must receive ten house points from the school of television critics.

The Church of England arm of the franchise is surprisingly defensive about its most successful conversion tool, as Ronson found out when [...]

An excellent documentary about self-improvement manuals (The Grandfather of Self Help, 2 July, 11.30am, Radio 4) told the story of the journalist Samuel Smiles, whose book Self Help was published on the same day as The Origin of Species in 1859, and went on to sell more copies than the Bible that century.

Still a huge seller in Japan, Smiles’s book promotes “energetic action” and “unremitting study”, insisting we can [...]

The lure of politicsNo 4082Set by Dipak GhoshWe asked you to complete the following sentence (and add a few more for good measure): “I came into politics because . . .”

Report by Ms de MeanerWell done. The five politicians are, in the order below: William Hague, John Prescott, Sir Peter Viggers, Iain Duncan Smith and Dennis Skinner. Basil Ransome-Davies and Adrian Fry get £25 each, [...]

The Place Royale is full of men in bowler hats. A huge boulder floats above them, defying gravity and good taste. From a distance it looks unfathomable, but when you come closer you realise the boulder is a hot-air balloon and the bowler hats are plastic.

This cobbled square is full of surreal knick-knacks (white pianos, wrapped-up statues) but most people don’t take much notice. They are too busy queuing [...]

Often, at the end of a summer’s day, I turn to the Quran, not to hide, like the Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, in its shadow, but to ponder its dazzling certainties and to wonder what on earth could have produced them – to which the good Muslim will reply, “Nothing on earth”.

And then the question arises: What am I to drink with this book, which tells me that I [...]

In news that will have pretty much the same devastating effect on the female readership of this magazine as Paul McCartney’s marriage to Linda Eastman had on millions of Beatles fans, I have to say that the search for the next (in effect) Mrs Lezard has come to a shuddering but very welcome halt. No further applications for the post will be accepted, but I would like to thank all [...]

The government is preparing to take new measures to prevent forced marriages after a study suggested that nearly 8,000 cases were reported in England last year.

The study published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families suggested that the majority of victims were from Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Forced marriages are aimed at preventing girls from marrying boys from other religions or cultures, or enabling others to move [...]

Credit card firms will face new restrictions aimed at protecting consumer rights under government proposals published today.

Lenders will be banned from sending unsolicited credit card cheques and from raising credit limits without permission from the customer.

Recent research found that one in five people had had their credit card limit automatically increased over the last year.

The plans will be unveiled in the government’s Consumer White Paper, [...]

Student grants and loans will be frozen this year despite a rise in tuition fees, the government announced yesterday.

The moves were criticised by universities, student leaders and opposition parties who warned that they would deter poor pupils from applying and would burden graduates with more debt.

Fees will rise by 2.04 per cent to £3,290 a year, an increase of nearly £300 since the fees were introduced [...]

The government yesterday abandoned its divisive plan to part-privatise Royal Mail after the recession left it struggling to attract bidders.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, said that the depressed market had made it impossible to agree the sale of a 30 per cent stake in the company. The government had received only one bid, below the asking price of £2bn.

But in a statement to the House of [...]

George Osborne has rejected a claim by Lord Mandelson that he lied about being denied access to government spending figures.

A spokesman for the shadow chancellor said that he stood by his claim that the Tories were refused access to a database containing details of spending in 12,000 areas.

This morning, Mandelson, the Business Secretary, ordered Osborne to withdraw the "deliberate untruth".

Last night, Osborne said the Conservatives [...]

Gordon Brown made a second half comeback today during yet another tit-for-tat Prime Minister's Questions exchange on public spending.

Brown caused laughter on the Tory benches after outlining rises in "current spending" which included "0 per cent" in 2013-14. Cameron replied: "that answer gets 0 per cent".

But the initial set-back was redressed when Brown accused George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, of seeking to "cut schools now, cut Sure Start [...]

MPs will be forced to declare all income and time related to their second jobs from today under new rules introduced by the government in an attempt to increase transparency.

Previously MPs had to name their outside employers and directorships in the Register of Members' Interests but were only required to disclose income related to their work in parliament.

The new rules on outside interests were agreed in April before [...]

The government has announced that it plans to nationalise the East Coast rail service, after refusing to bail out the struggling rail operator National Express.

The troubled company was forced to abandon the franchise after it failed to renegotiate its £1.4bn contract with the government.

The news came as National Express announced that its chief executive Richard Bowker, who oversaw the purchase of the service, has resigned.

Tesco is considering a bid for Northern Rock as the government tries to sell off the nationalised bank before a general election.

Britain’s biggest supermarket chain is reported to have shown “provisional” interest in buying the bank which was nationalised in February 2008 as the credit crisis intensified.

The Times reports that Gordon Brown is desperate to avoid a Conservative government taking the credit for returning the lender [...]

Michael Martin, the former Speaker of the Commons, is set to receive a peerage despite a warning from the vetting panel for the House of Lords that his presence could damage the reputation of the upper chamber.

In an extraordinary intervention, the House of Lords Appointments Commission wrote to Gordon Brown to warn him that the elevation of Martin could “diminish” the workings of the Lords.

It is [...]

Gerald Mars, a social anthropologist, has written several books on occupational crime and deviance including Cheats at Work and Workplace Crime. He is currently honorary professor at the Department of Anthropology at UCL and also works as an independent consultant. Here he talks to fellow academic Sean Carey about fiddling and fraud in the UK and elsewhere.

Why do people fiddle?

Most jobs as they are formally defined are relatively [...]

In the Financial Times Niall Ferguson and Glen O'Hara explain why the odds are against a Conservative majority at the next election.

David Aaronovitch argues in the Times that the end of central control over schools could harm less able children.

On the eve of Sweden's EU presidency, Ruben Andersson writes in the Guardian that the country's "failing" social state no longer [...]

The UK economy contracted at its fastest rate since 1958 in the first quarter of this year, according to new official figures. The economy contracted 2.4 per cent from January to March, higher than the original estimate of 1.9 per cent.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the fall was due to weaker manufacturing outpout. The ONS also said that the recession began earlier than first thought, during [...]

Labour is preparing for an early byelection in Norwich North, with the poll likely to be held before the summer recess. Officials suggested that the writ for the byelection will be moved today with the poll held on July 23.

The byelection was triggered by the resignation of Ian Gibson who decided to step down after he was banned from re-election by the Labour Party’s ‘star chamber’.

Gibson [...]

The UK cannot sustain current defence spending and should consider abandoning plans to renew the Trident nuclear missile system, a think-tank report has warned.

The report by the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said that at least £24bn of weapons programmes should be reviewed “with a view to making cuts”.

“Fundamental choices are necessary. The attempt to maintain the full spectrum of conventional combat capabilities at the [...]

The Children’s Secretary Ed Balls will set out the government’s new education reforms today, offering parents greater rights over their children’s education and scaling back central control over schools.

The Education White Paper published today includes new legal entitlements to one-to-one tuition and sports provision in schools. Children will also have a guaranteed personal tutor for pastoral support during secondary school.

The document will also confirm that the government [...]

Iraq was on alert for renewed insurgent violence today as US troops began to withdraw from the country's towns and cities after handing over security duties to the new Iraqi army.

Six years on from the 2003 US-led invasion, the partial withdrawal will see 130,000 American troops retreat to military bases in the country, ready to assist if asked by their Iraqi counterparts. US combat operations will not end [...]

The Guardian's Jackie Ashley urges Labour to focus on the right-wing nature of many of the 'New Tories' rather than on the false division between "Labour investment" and "Tory cuts". Donald Macintyre explores whether Iranian hostility to Britain, the "little Satan", is designed to keep open the possibility of US negotiations.

The Times's Libby Purves calls for a scientific, research-based approach to [...]

The oil refinery strikes which took place across the country have come to an end after workers voted to end the unofficial strike.

Contract workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in north Lincolnshire voted to return to work after union officials recommended that they accept the offer made by the management.

The strike began after 51 workers were laid off at Lindsey, owned by the energy company Total, [...]

Police used inappropriate force at the G20 protests after too many inexperienced officers were put on the frontline, according to a critical report by MPs.

The Commons Home Affair Select Committee said: "Never again must untrained officers be placed in the front line of public protests".

MPs were told by Commander Ben Broadhurst, who led the G20 policing operation, that 2,500 officers had only two days of public [...]

Gordon Brown will outline new entitlements for NHS patients and will pledge to give priority on housing waiting-lists to local residents, as part of a series of policy announcements this afternoon.

The plans come as Brown seeks to regain the political initiative, launching a new government document Building Britain’s Future today.

Under Brown’s proposal, councils will be required to take account of applicants’ links to the area [...]

Lord Mandelson has admitted that the proposed part-privatisation of Royal Mail will be delayed after the government received only one bid.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the Business Secretary said the plan was being “jostled” by other bills for the remaining legislative days in the current parliamentary session.

The government has been looking to sell a 30 per cent stake to the private sector but has [...]

Five of the nine British embassy staff detained in Iran have reportedly been released.

Iranian media said on Sunday that the staff were being held for their alleged involvement in protests over the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A spokesman from the Iranian foreign ministry, Hassan Ghashghavi, confirmed that five of the detainees, all Iranian nationals, had been freed.

“Out of nine people, five of them [...]

Gordon Brown is increasingly relying on the advice of a former Conservative MP as he forms strategies to take on the opposition between now and the next general election, Newstatesman.com has learned.

Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary, who defected to Labour from the Conservatives in 1999, now has a base in Downing Street from which he offers the Prime Minister strategic advice on how to tackle David Cameron.

Although [...]

Cleaning up with Pledge

Our old friend Tacitus said that “the more corrupt the state, the more laws”. As the flood of astonishing claims finally began to dry up, this was the week when party leaders sought to stamp their authority on the expenses scandal by hammering their tribes into line with rules and diktats. Usefully, this will eliminate the need for any of them waste time searching for a [...]

Johann Hari explains why Conservative policy on marriage would unwittingly harm children.

In the Guardian, Misha Glenny warns that the rise of the internet will be mirrored by the rise of cyber warfare among states. Can we avoid "cybergeddon"?

The FT's Philip Stephens argues that economic unilateralism is preventing essential global regulation.

BBC director general Mark Thompson [...]

The BBC has come under pressure to curb pay after the salaries and expenses of senior executives were published for the first time yesterday.

The corporation’s top 50 executives earned up to £13.6 million last year, with expenses claims totalling £363,000 over five years.

The broadcaster agreed to publish the details after a series of Freedom of Information requests were made by journalists. Mark Thompson, the director general, [...]

Gordon Brown is to pledge that the UK will play a leading role in securing global agreement on a new treaty to tackle climate change.

The Prime Minister will launch a document tomorrow outlining what proposals Britain will take to the Copenhagen conference in December, where world leaders hope to agree on a replacement for the Kyoto protocol.

In a speech at London Zoo, Brown will call [...]

Gordon Brown will next week unveil plans to offer people more power over their public services, including the police, as he seeks to regain the initiative on policy after a tumultuous few months.

Brown has felt unable to set out the government’s policy agenda in recent times as he has dealt with the fallout from the expenses scandal, a series of ministerial resignations and Labour’s poor performance in the [...]

The government is set to end centralised control of schools by scrapping the national strategies introduced by Tony Blair in 1997.

The move, to be outlined in next week’s education white paper, will end oversight of the literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools and will offer schools more freedom over teaching methods. It will also allow the government to end its contract with the private company Capita, which [...]

Conservative MPs are set to pay back £250,000 in expenses following a review of claims made by the party’s scrutiny panel.

The panel, set up by David Cameron after the details of all MPs’ expenses were leaked to the Daily Telegraph, has now investigated the claims made by all Tory MPs. A comprehensive list of those required to repay expenses will be published this afternoon. MPs already found to [...]

David Cameron will today pledge to campaign for a new “right to data”, offering voters more information on a range of key areas.

In a speech later today, the Conservative leader will accuse Labour of creating a “control state” and of limiting political accountability.

The 20 areas covered under Cameron’s plan include the performance of schools and hospitals, crime statistics and the salaries of quango heads. The “right [...]

The financial crisis is, as everyone knows, far from over. Banks are still not lending; unemployment continues to rise. The threat of a protracted recession remains urgent. Why then are Britain’s bankers carrying on as if it were business as usual?

Salaries across the City are soaring in spite of the economic downturn and the ensuing bankruptcies, redundancies and repossessions. This past week it emerged that Goldman Sachs is planning [...]

As Iran’s mullahs continue to crack down on protesters, not to mention their wild-eyed rhetoric about “evil” Britain, they should pause to take note of how their riven country has reached the top of yet another unenviable international league table. “The Islamic Republic of Iran now ranks alongside China as the world’s biggest prison for journalists,” Reporters Without Borders declared this past week.

According to figures compiled by the Paris-based [...]

So by the time you read this, the gates of Glastonbury Festival 2009 will be open. There couldn’t be more activity here on the farm at the moment – in every corner, day and night, people are creating amazing things. To be honest, I thought it would be hard to beat last year’s energy levels. But this year everyone has really pulled out the stops.

It occurred to me recently [...]

Daniel Finkelstein, a Times columnist and a former director of the Conservative Research Department, writes: “I am a neocon . . . It declares my belief in two things – that in every country . . . whatever its traditions, the people yearn for liberty, for free expression and for democracy; and that the spread of liberty and democracy . . . is the only real way to bring peace [...]

Gordon Brown has been widely criticised on the left for coming late to the constitutional reform party. He is a self-professed believer in first-past-the-post, and his instincts, like Tony Blair’s, have been to push big constitutional change into the long grass of inquiries and commissions. Even in the wake of the great expenses scandal, and after a brief debate in cabinet, there appeared to be little momentum for the introduction [...]

avid Cameron’s black mood over the dissing of his fellow Old Etonian Sir George Young by Grange Hill’s John Bercow is unlikely to be lifted by the identity of the Speaker’s first two visitors. Ignoring the protests of flunkeys, Comprehensive Boy Bercow’s Labour enforcer Martin Salter and the Campaign Group lefty Diane Abbott barged uninvited into the palatial apartment by the Thames to congratulate Comrade Conservative. Matchbox-sized Bercow looked unnerved, [...]

Just before Morgan Tsvangirai walks into the room, the woman sitting next to me says she thinks he is the bravest man in the world. We are sitting in a grand, pillared hall in a building off the Strand in central London. When Tsvangirai is introduced as the prime minister of Zimbabwe, there is long, resounding applause.

The reception for the prime minister is different from the one he received [...]

T S Eliot wrote that the point of any journey was to find out where you came from. As I bore my bulging canvas bag to the wharf at Circular Quay, not far from where my Irish great-great-grandparents had landed in leg irons, I hoped the point of my journey would become clearer once my ship had sailed. The Bretagne was my ship; it was white with blue stripes along [...]

Following yet more disastrous headlines, Boris Johnson’s administration now resembles a ship with no clear course and with a crew losing members at an alarming rate, each one forced to walk the plank while the captain himself tries to persuade everyone else that nothing is wrong. So far, three deputy mayors of London, including the most senior of Boris Johnson’s aides, have been forced to resign in one year.

The [...]

This September in Somalia, hundreds of thousands of people are due to take part in an election. At polling stations guarded by civilian police, they will stand in orderly lines beneath a scorching sun waiting to vote for a new leader.

Much of this country continues its relentless descent into mayhem and murder. But Somaliland, a small north-western chunk, has been trying for the past 18 years to free itself [...]

In one man’s apartment block in east Tehran, people gather on the roof every night to chant “Allahu Akhbar!” – the rallying cry of the 1979 revolution that has been taken up by supporters of the defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. One night, the man says, during a pause in the chanting, a lone voice cried out from the roof opposite: “Ya Hussain!” – the lament of Shia pilgrims [...]

Last year, beating drums and impromptu song and dance sequences gave India’s first Pride parades a distinctive desi flavour. This year, the stage is set for two new Indian cities – Chennai and Bhubaneshwar – to join Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore and Mumbai in the ranks of the global queer community.

However, the masked faces that dot India’s Pride marches signify a grave underlying problem. In the world’s largest democracy, homosexuality [...]

John Bercow will by now be getting used to the idea of snuggling down each night in the State Bed, an elaborate Pugin four-poster in the Speaker’s House. But in the past, the accommodation that came with his political duties in Westminster consisted of the floor of my bedroom. During the mid-1980s, my home in Pimlico served as a dosshouse for Thatcherite ideologues, much to the consternation of my long-suffering [...]

In theory, secret ballots are the cornerstone of democracy. But when the electorate is made up of conniving, duplicitous, self-deceiving politicians given a rare chance to vote in private, then all bets are off. The election of the Speaker was one such occasion. And that this farce was conducted while the world chided President Ahmadinejad for heavy vote manipulation was an irony, this being the Commons, lost on nearly all [...]

Diarrhoea. The runs. The squits. The “insert funny name here”. Diarrhoea is funny, right? Because diarrhoea is something that you get from a bad kebab or some dodgy prawns. Because it is curable; not fatal; benign. It can be all those things, but only if your surroundings are not continually contaminated with the faecal particles that probably gave you the diarrhoea in the first place. Four in ten people in [...]

Until the drama over MPs’ expenses, workers in the financial services had been reeling from a succession of blows: collapsing banks, nationalisations, frozen bonuses, job losses and contemptuous, withering condemnation by the public and by opinion-formers in the media, church pulpits and parliament. An optimistic scenario was one of slow rehabilitation under a less permissive regime involving tougher regulation, partial public ownership of banks and a diminished, chastened City.

Now [...]

1 In 2008, the Williams sisters declared their enthusiasm for Barack Obama but surprisingly declined to vote for him. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, they insisted, they were barred from voting in any election. Serena explained: “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness, so I don’t get involved in politics. We stay neutral. We don’t vote. So I’m not going to necessarily go out and vote for him. I would if it wasn’t for my [...]

Over the past two centuries, there have been two globally dominant powers: Britain between 1850 and 1914, and the United States from 1945 to the present. But even in the case of the United States, whose influence is far greater than that of any other ­nation in history, such overweening power has never been without constraint. The concept of hegemony elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci entails the complex [...]

“Grim news,” read the Reaper’s placard, “647 workers sacked”. Outside the Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire, trade unions held a mass rally in support of workers dismissed following a wildcat strike. The latest flare-up of the dispute began on 11 June: as one of the site’s subcontractors hired new staff, another was giving workers the sack. On Friday 19 June, the French oil giant Total announced that the Lindsey [...]

Sweden has become globally symbolic of the welfare state: high taxes, social policies for equality, sexual education and liberation. Part of that symbolic status was a peculiar national and collective narcissism: one way or another, most Swedes, and not only intellectuals or cultural critics, were preoccupied with trying to understand the social-democratic model and culture in which we lived. And no wonder. What happened between 1932 and 1976, the 44 [...]

‘‘Filippa, where are you?” The question is asked every Thursday at public meetings in Tensta, a poor suburb north-west of central Stockholm. Filippa Reinfeldt of the Moderate Party is responsible for health care in Stockholm County Council, where the centre-right majority has introduced Health Choice Stockholm (Vårdval Stockholm). The new system makes it easier for private companies to compete with the public sector in primary health care.

According to the [...]

I’m sitting in front of a large and naked woman named Lucy who is lying in a foetal position on the floor of a Victorian art gallery in north London. I have spent the past 40 minutes trying to capture both the exact curve of Lucy’s fleshy backside, in charcoal on the paper I’ve got propped on my knees, and, with a putty eraser, the way that the light is [...]

"Picasso is essentially an improviser. And if the word improvisation conjures up, amongst other things, associations of the clown and the mimic – they also apply. Living through a period of colossal confusion in which so many values both human and cultural have disintegrated, Picasso has seized upon the bits, the fragments, the smithereens, and with magnificent defiance and vitality made something of them to amuse us, shock us, but [...]

Does art make a difference?It doesn’t make all the difference, because food, shelter, health care, education and many more needs come before it. But art helps the internal needs, and sometimes makes a difference where nothing else could.

Should politics and art mix?Anything that calls attention to the human condition is amazing. Art can be so powerful in raising awareness, swaying causes and uniting like-minded people. Then again, [...]

As the door to the rehearsal room nudges open, the torrent of sound is overwhelming: an explosion of fiercely blown horns fills the air. Squeezed into a space scarcely bigger than the average living room are nine young African-American men – the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. The music they are playing is intoxicating, unified but far from uniform, trumpets spiralling off trombones and vice versa. It’s jazz but it also channels [...]

The 100th anniversary of Eric Ambler’s birth on 28 June has produced a number of tributes. The most pleasing has been Penguin’s reissue of five of his best spy thrillers as Modern Classics, with introductions by fans such as James Fenton and Norman Stone, and black-and-white pho­tographic covers gorgeously evocative of their era and milieu – dingy, war-shadowed industrial Europe in the late 1930s.

Almost as pleasing, and a little [...]

The overwhelming fact of Isaiah Berlin’s life is not that he was a gossipy, gregarious Oxford don, but that he was a world figure in political theory. Of all the many books questioning why exactly people should submit to any form of government at all, Two Concepts of Liberty is pro­bably the most startlingly straightforward and compelling. To declare Berlin’s letters unreadable, as some critics have done, suggests either an [...]

The 1980s were a time of smug triumphalism, when Tina Turner shrieked that she was simply the best and Simple Minds pursued the New Gold Dream and Duran Duran ponced about in Rio. I wanted no part of it. And, to my relief, there was a subculture of musicians, artists and thinkers who wanted no part of it, either.

The Industrial Culture Handbook, published in 1983, let a dozen [...]

In the 1997 edition of his pamphlet Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, the wonderful curmudgeon Alasdair Gray begins his “carnaptious history of Britain from the Roman times until now” with two clarifying points. He defines “Scots” as “everyone in Scotland who is able to vote”, and argues for independence not “on differences of race, language or religion but geology” – the natural divisions created by seas and mountain ranges. (Writing [...]

Reviewing an instalment of McSweeney’s is a potentially hazardous undertaking. When the San Francisco-based literary journal first went to press in 1998 it only ran work that had been rejected by other magazines. A decade on, the Quarterly Concern now takes its own contributions, but its success is still a joyous riposte to the whole institutional system of literary value assessment, proof positive that editors and critics are not always [...]

Delhi Sam Miller Jonathan Cape, 291pp, £14.99

Sam Miller describes himself as a “flâneur”, someone who likes to wander aimlessly through cities, but his new travelogue of Delhi is anything but directionless. His meander along the highways, markets and alleyways of one of the biggest cities in the world is a faithful chronicle of contemporary Indian society and the imprint that centuries of change have left on the [...]

The programme for this powerful, no-tricks, high-end production of Racine’s version of Phèdre includes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, the one that begins: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action”. I can see why it is there, as thwarted lust accounts for a large part of the evening that lies ahead, but it is also misleading. The Greek myth of Phaedra, who falls in love with her [...]

Shirin (PG)dir: Abbas Kiarostami

Rudo y Cursi (15)dir: Carlos Cuarón

Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin is comprised entirely of close-ups of women as they sit in a cinema watching a film based on a 12th-century Persian poem about two ill-fated lovers. We can hear the other film throughout – the dialogue and music, the galloping hooves and clanging swords, and a dripping noise that may be a comment on inadequate [...]

This documentary-cum-reality show began life two years ago as an execrable BBC3 series called Filthy Rich and Homeless. At the time, I tried my best to stamp on it, hard. Rich people pretending to be homeless, then coming over all tearful at how demeaning begging is? Repulsive. I was disgusted.

Naturally, I thought – big head – that I’d seen the wretched thing off. But, no. Unbelievably, the BBC brought [...]

Two programmes about jazz have delighted your reviewer. The first was an appreciation of the great alto saxophonist Bud Shank (Jazz Library, 20 June, 4pm, Radio 3), who died in April. Through extracts from an interview given in 1995, Shank recalled his residency at the Lighthouse club on Hermosa Beach, California, in the 1950s, where he would sometimes play for 12 hours at a stretch to fans covered in sand.

The gateway stood in the woods outside Saratoga Springs. It was still before dawn, and lanterns burned on the stanchions that marked the end of the drive, flickering out over the snow. I turned in, trudging between the pines until the ploughed road passed a frozen, moat-like lake and switchbacked up a low bluff. As I reached the crest of the escarpment, a great house appeared through the trees, a [...]

The vanishing millionNo 4081Set by Hank T Romein

Whatever happened to urban myths, those funny or gruesome stories, such as “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” or “The Body on the Roof Rack”, which had happened to a “friend of a friend”? The Noughties should be throwing up stories about money, ingenious cons and fiddles, large sums made or lost in unusual circumstances by a friend of a friend. “The [...]

Leafing through a copy of one of my parents’ magazines, I notice and read a piece by Toby Young bemoaning the lot of the modern father, whom he describes as an unpaid slave to his children rather than anything approaching a meaningful authority figure. Yesterday, I read Tim Dowling’s column in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine in which, as is his wont, he describes his own tribulations as a father and [...]

Former home secretary Jacqui Smith has described the impact of the expenses scandal on her as “horrible” and said that the “intense pressure” on her family had been one of the key factors in her resignation from the government.

In an interview with the BBC World Service, she also said that she was angered by the leaking of her resignation before the recent reshuffle.

Smith, the MP for [...]

The Treasury was “caught flat-footed” by the collapse of Northern Rock and failed to carry out adequate checks on the bank’s lending levels after it was nationalised, a report by an influential committee of MPs has said.

The Public Accounts Committee also said that the bank’s failure could have been avoided if the Treasury had acted on warnings in 2004 of unsustainable lending. An exercise during that year “identified [...]

The Foreign Office is investigating claims that British citizens have been arrested following protests in Iran.

According to Iranian state television, several Britons were detained following the massive demonstrations triggered by the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “We are aware of the reports and we will be looking into them.”

Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said: “I don't know their [...]

Simon Jenkins argues that the Labour Party was "dismantled,ideologically and constitutionally" by the Blairites. The left is now unrepresented as never before. Steve Richards says that the Tories' loathing for John Bercow has exposed their reactionary side. Johann Hari on why the Amazon uprising matters to us all.

Agnès Poirier explains why secular France and multicultural Britain could never discuss [...]

Xan Rice, a contributing writer of the New Statesman, has been shortlisted in the journalist of the year category in the Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards.

Rice was nominated for his report The Choclate King of São Tomé, which detailed the work of Claudio Corallo, an Italian chocolate producer acclaimed around the world.

His nomination follows the recent success of fellow contributing writer [...]

Diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran remain severely strained after the government expelled several Iranian envoys in response to the expulsion of two British diplomats from Tehran.

The Iranian government accused the diplomats of “activities inconsistent with their diplomatic status”, a euphemism for spying. Gordon Brown dismissed the accusation as “entirely without foundation”.

The UK government has consistently been accused by Iran of covertly aiding protesters demonstrating against [...]

The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, will be urged to ban a liquid 'party drug' today by a mother whose daughter died after taking the substance.

Hester Stewart, a 21-year-old medical student from Brighton, died in April after a night out with friends. Sussex police said that toxicology tests confirmed that she died after she took the drug in combination with alcohol.

Her mother, Maryon Stewart, has called for an [...]

The government has been warned that it must do more to tackle long-term youth unemployment after a new study suggested it could treble by 2011.

The Centre for Cities predicted that the number of under-25s out of work for more than a year would rise from 130,000 in May 2009 to 350,000 by December 2011.

Young people aged between 16 and 24 currently account for 40 per cent [...]

Gordon Brown has come under renewed pressure to hold a public inquiry into the Iraq war after David Cameron said he would force the government to make a “proper U-turn” in today’s debate.

Brown faced fierce criticism last week after announcing that the inquiry would be held in private for national security reasons. In response, the Conservatives tabled a debate calling for a public inquiry.

Cameron, the Conservative [...]