A new report, launched in Brussels on Monday by the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, shows that a European financial transaction tax (FTT) would boost growth in Europe by at least 0.25%. It would also raise revenue to combat poverty and climate change at home and abroad, and help re-balance the economy by making long-term investment more worthwhile than short-term, high frequen...

RBS boss Stephen Hester breaks his silence on the controversy surrounding his bonus, saying the attention had been "discomforting, to say the least".

Liberal Democrat peers have traditionally been seen as a quiet bunch, but more than 60 have voted against the government at least once in this Parliament.

Tory bosses at Southampton City Council want to take services away from the city's least well off while protecting discounts for the better off, say the city's Labour councillors. They're proposing an amendment to make the budget fairer, to be debated at the Budget setting meeting on Wednesday, 15th February. The council's own reports warn that many of the Tories' proposed...

I know I harp on about income disparity and how it has widened since the mid-seventies. There others who do see this as the major problem in society today, and not least of these are those attending Davos this year. Listen to Gillian Tett of the Financial Times talking about this on BBC’s This Week.

One of my hobbies is to browse the pages of the (London) Times from a hundred years ago. As I intend (though I promise nothing) to write the odd post around articles from the time I thought it might be a good idea to describe (as best I can) the world in 1912. Or, at least, the world as seen through the pages of the Times which is a potentially dangerous thing to do. Imagine,...

Unless ministers produce a drastically different document in the next few weeks, this experience is going to become commonplace throughout the country, not least because – as a report by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) will reveal on Monday – the reforms will withdraw a 25-year-old safeguard from more than half of the

When David Cameron wielded his veto at the European Council in December many Tories thought this was the beginning of a process of repatriation of powers from the EU. Myself, I thought it would be the high water mark of the government’s Euro-scepticism — and so it has proven. But things are about to get even worse for the Bill Cashes of this Parliament. In the short-term, at least.
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Four years on, I’m still a Daily Mail reader (even if they think I’m a foreigner). Here’s an updated explanation. I once rang the Daily Mail to mildly complain about a story I had a connection with. The journalist I spoke to put me on hold while he conferred with a colleague. At least, he thought he

At least 20,000 people have been wrongly labelled as criminals or accused of more serious offences because of blunders by the police and the Criminal Records Bureau.