It is National Recycling Week. There is a website, revealing all sorts of national and local initiatives. The government body Wrap, (standing for the Waste and Resources Action Programme) has come up with a slogan: "Let's Waste Less". Celebrities have...
Read moreFor a few happy weeks, it was possible to forget how broke and scared most of us were feeling. The endlessly cheering spectacle of politicians having to discuss bath-plug expenditure, of them actually trying for the first time to avoid...
Read moreIn yet another instance of disastrous news management from the government, the launch of National Men's Health Week has coincided with a story that Tessa Jowell is now Cabinet minister with special responsibility for getting the Prime Minister to take...
Read moreThat great and virtuous institution, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has for the past two years been studying why British society is in such a terrible mess. It has consulted with commentators and thinkers, and has conducted a survey of 3,500...
Read moreIn the week of the first ever Green Britain Day, I was fortunate enough to hear an exchange which captured, in an admittedly microcosmic way, the realities behind the energy debate. At a planning committee in Norfolk, one of two...
Read moreIn his song "Gave It a Name", Bruce Springsteen circles around the question of guilt. A man who has done bad things "couldn't stand the guilt or the blame/So he gave it a name." It is a weird, offbeat psychological...
Read moreHere is an unusual angle on a grimly familiar story. The constituents of an MP who has been caught up in the expenses row are, in the phrase of the month, very, very angry. Their faith in politics and politicians...
Read moreThere has presumably been much back-slapping and high- fiving at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport after a rare item of good news for the government this week. The great New Labour dream of making Britain a land fit...
Read moreThe week's least surprising news is that the woman variously known as the Hairy Angel and SuBo has begun to behave oddly. In the few short weeks since Susan Boyle appeared on a TV talent show, she has been propelled...
Read moreIn a startling new survey, it has been discovered that not only are girls made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but that they can often induce niceness in others. Boys, on the other hand, have a slugs-and-snails...
Read more
