Column: Pat’s Politics Articles

The exam question is simple: how do we deal with the problem of banks deemed too big to fail and then taking risks underwritten by an effective taxpayer guarantee? This is the problem the Banking Commission sought to resolve in its report issued last week. Bankers are...

The political debate over the past year has been dominated by argument over the deficit. How far and how fast to cut. Yet the economic signals in this country and others in recent weeks show that this debate is missing a more urgent point: how countries can secure the...

In the face of the disorder in English cities in recent days, the debate has revolved around questions of individual responsibility or wider issues of opportunity and parenting.  But there is a broader and more fundamental lesson in all this about freedom.  The past...

For most Labour people, their starting point with Rupert Murdoch is the front page of The Sun with Neil Kinnock’s head in a lightbulb in the 1992 election.  The lightbulb wasn’t the beginning.  It was the culmination of years of hostility that Kinnock had had to face...