patient: How much to have this tooth pulled?

dentist: £180.

patient: £180 for just a few minutes' work?

dentist: I can extract it very slowly if you like.

Jokes about going to the dentist used to be about the pain of tooth extraction, but in 21st-century Britain they're more likely to be about the pain to our wallets. An estimated one in five people in Britain is deterred [...]

Now that we have a high-speed rail link to Brussels, maybe Britain's transport chiefs could take a look at the rest of the Belgian rail network. For, when it comes to public transport, it's the much-derided Belgians who have the last laugh on us Brits.

Like Britain, Belgium is small and densely populated. But, unlike Britain, it has a co-ordinated, fit-for-purpose, publicly owned public transport system. Belgian Railways is the [...]

"We are going back to the dark ages of dentistry," says Richard Daniels, chief executive of the Dental Laboratories Association. Eighteen months on from the introduction of new NHS contracts, discontent within the dental profession is growing. The DLA says the current contract "forces dentists to make prescription decisions based on financial resources rather than clinical need" and claims there has been a 57 per cent reduction in "Band 3 [...]

It's a country where people say "hullo", when they mean "goodbye". Where first names come last and last names come first. Where the most unsocialist political party one could imagine calls itself "Socialist" and where the case for public ownership and a national health service is argued by the conservative opposition. Welcome to Hungary - and to a topsy-turvy political landscape straight out of a Savoy opera.

In the three [...]

For most of us, a general election campaign is the only time we ever meet that strange creature, the British politician, and those who aspire to become one. But forewarned is forearmed. Here is a list of questions to wipe the grin off the faces of even the most smug candidates: the questions that the party's candidates would least like asked. They are not trick questions, merely those which highlight [...]

This year on St Valentine's Day, it is estimated, we will spend in excess of £40m on flowers, and send 15 million cards and more than 100 million text messages. Worldwide, more than $13bn will be spent. Global capitalism has done for St Valentine's Day, a relatively low-key event in the Christian calendar, what it had already achieved for Christmas, transforming it into a multimillion-dollar spendfest. Yet the very same [...]

I do not join those who decry Charles Clarke's ambition to hold citizenship ceremonies for everyone who reaches the age of 18, and not just for new immigrants. Indeed, I believe that the citizenship ceremony - denounced as "another new Labour gimmick" - was one of the best legacies of Clarke's predecessor at the Home Office, David Blunkett. Like Mr Toad, the man was capable of doing good. When the [...]

There are two pictures of life today in the former socialist countries of eastern Europe. The first, the standard western line peddled by Timothy Garton Ash and other zealots of European integration, is of increasingly prosperous people rejoicing in new-found political freedoms and in their countries' status as members of the EU and Nato.

Then there is the reality. Hungary is by no means the worst off, but its problems [...]

It's given us a chainsaw massacre and J R Ewing, and has launched the careers of two George Bushes. It boasts the highest obesity rates in the world and its biggest city has 253 branches of McDonald's. For many, the case for a pre-emptive strike on Texas will already have been made. But there is another side. Although the Lone Star State's overall contribution to the happiness of the planet [...]

We lost in eastern Europe and we lost in the west, too. The past 20 years have been years of retreat for socialists the continent over. But in one corner of Europe, social solidarity and egalitarianism remain strong. Is Norway Europe's last surviving socialist country?

Almost half of Norway's GDP is produced by the public sector, the highest proportion in western Europe. The state owns majority shareholdings in the two [...]