New Statesman

Ed Miliband Needs to Share His Vision with the Country

Never is this more true than when the individual in question is leader of the Labour Party. Because of the default hostility of much of the press, any leader struggles to win a fair hearing.

The Archbishop, the Conspiring Catholics and Mr Cameron's Letter

The archbishop's political intervention was especially courageous because he must have known how his disparagers would mobilise against him; how they would wilfully misread and misinterpret his highly nuanced contri - bution, which challenged both left and right to define a new kind of communitarian politics at a time when government is attempting to cut both the demand for and supply of the state. Showers of arrows There is a view inside Lambeth Palace that much of the indignation against t...

Major Lesbian Sock Puppets? Whatever Next?

Are there any lesbian bloggers out there who aren't straight, middle-aged, American men? (Short answer: yes, and they're understandably furious.) If, for some strange reason, you have not been following the serpentine twists of the international blogosphere in recent days, let me bring you up to speed. How do hoaxes crash? But there are more serious questions to ask, such as: "Why did two fully grown men think it was a good idea to assume the identities of lesbians and publicise their musing...

Boring for Bilderberg

The continued presence of a woman clunkingly but correctly described as "the greatest and best of the great and good" provides Bilderberg with a much-needed shot of glamour. Nor was this the most of the Chancellor's problems, the poor boy suffering continuous humiliation as Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, persistently referred to him as "my good friend, Oborne".

The 'Timidity Gestapo' Standing in the Way of Labour's Progress

Labour ran out of money because public spending is all it knows; it takes a Conservative chancellor to pick up the pieces; only major pruning of the state will restore economic confidence and drive recovery. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has a sturdy de-fence against these charges: the deficit soared when government revenue collapsed after the global financial crisis.

Southern Cross, a Haunting Example of How Privatisation Can Go Wrong

The drop-off in revenues as government spending cuts hit was exacerbated by Southern Cross running significantly lower occupancy rates than its competitors, due at least in part to its worsening reputation for poor standards of care. Rather than just demanding whether private equity firms should be allowed to run businesses such as Southern Cross, we should also be questioning the role played by profit-driven enterprise in the running of businesses where "rationalisation" and "streamlining" ...

The Jobless Deserve Compassion, Not Useless 'Work Programmes'

[...] they promise that the programme will give 2.4 million unemployed people help to find jobs over the next five years, which seems unlikely, given that there are so few jobs available. [...] the evidence is that the unemployed are not just a bunch of lazy bastards.

Brothers Grim

If just one piece of evidence were needed to illustrate how bad relations between David and Ed Miliband became during Labour's first leadership contest in 16 years, it came on 13 July 2010 when the two brothers arrived with their aides at the TUC's summer reception at Church House in Westminster. The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, has not yet completed his detoxification strategy - and the recent leaked memos in the Daily Telegraph about his role in the so-called Brownite plots against Tony Bl...

Oh No, Minister

What a pity??? Or that the statement was a shame, or worthy of shame? Or is it an instruction: ?You should feel shame??? If an order, it?s likely to fall on deaf ears. Since we started to write Yes Minister , shame went out of style.

Eat, Drink, and Empty Your Pockets

The experience of going to modern rock festivals - a weekend?s release after months of office drudgery, for which you pay a princely sum to sleep in a rain-sodden tent surrounded by other exiles from the Guardian -reading enclaves of north London - could hardly be less like the unaffected localism of their medieval equivalents. In times past, people often complained about the excessive drinking, fighting and fornicating, as they do today, yet these things posed no grave threat to the establi...

A Tale of Two Heritages

Awarded an MBE in 1997 and praised as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy in 2003, she will be speaking this month at the start of the Southbank Centre's National Treasures series ('Well, that's the end of my career, isn't it she jokes). While the soaps and running serials are a fantastic banner for how Britain really is, the Midsomer Murders argument [the creator of this series said an all-white cast represented "the last bastion of Englishness"?] was the tip of an iceberg.

Carry On Camping

Woooo! Where you can be nervous in a silent theatre and someone opening a can of beer can throw you, the music festival shines a whole new light on the word distracting. Fuelled by the rabid, punked-out lunacy of Guardian -reading, Radio 4-listening coriander pluckers, the comedians here were the rock stars; 3,000-plus punters, glued to the stage and big screens, were as captive an audience as any in a club.

Can Pay, Won't Pay

Through philanthropic "global brand" initiatives such as Product Red ("This should feel like hard commerce,?" the multimillionaire announced at a press conference in 2006), the be-sunglassed smugonaut has long been in the vanguard of capitalism's ideological shock troops, ramming down our throats the idea that the way to alleviate the effects of rampant and destructive profit-making lies in further rampant and destructive profit-making. The group's founder and co-organiser Philip Goff explai...

Retro Mania

At a time of wage stagnation, festivals represent value for money (compare the price of a ticket to see a band and a support act at, say, the O2 with the price of a ticket to see hundreds of acts at a festival - no contest). Working with researchers from Wolver-hampton University, we assembled archives and the experts who would enable an authentic celebration of music, fashion, art, design, film and food from the 1920s to the 1980s and help us focus on how these decades continue to influence...

The Tone of Beauty

After the death of his father, a musician who played the erhu, his mother, an English teacher - and the first female in her family not to have bound feet - became so poor, she said it wasn?t possible to scrape together the penny it would cost to buy Guo a longed-for bamboo flute, and so he lay down in the snow in the courtyard and refused to get up for days until the funds for the instrument were found. Another dazzling half-hour with origins in the communist far east - Wandering Souls (Worl...

Even the Estranged Wife Can See That My Predicament Is Dire

Forty-seven months of spectacularly up-and-down emotional rides may seem a tall order to endure in the pursuit of such knowledge, but you can't make any meaningful empirical deductions on the ennobling qualities of suffering by seeing if you become a better person simply by dropping a car battery on your foot. [...] I am learning that poverty and distress do not necessarily make one a finer person.

To Eat Food Off a Conveyor Belt Is Some Kind of Crazy Bliss

[...] when Scotland secedes, it may take its Yo! Golden Boy, being something of a rightist, took the view that the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden was wholly acceptable; I demurred, pointing out that Bin Laden didn't pilot any of the 11 September attack planes and that, far from being a hierarchical command structure - like the US army - al-Qaeda was more in the manner of a franchise: you approach them with your death-dealing idea, and they provide funding, expertise and branding.