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My sister’s keeper
My sister died last night. She was 46 years old. For the last of those years she lived in a care home near the sea front in Great Yarmouth, a Victorian guest house converted by an enterprising local doctor. On good days she took her medication, but regardless she spent her weekly state allowance on…
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Half a century of British economic progress in one street
I was born in the front bedroom of the two bedroom house my grandparents rented from the council. It was February 1965, The Kinks were at number one for homes with record players and without teenage mothers. A year later, my brother was born in the same room. If the front bedroom was for being…
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Does Journalism versus Surveillance equal Terrorism?
The detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner does not raise any issues over the use of current anti-terrorism legislation to target journalism. The law says: A person commits an offence if— (a) he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of…
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Punishment by politics
The elections in Italy reveal a crisis in leadership. Wolfgang Münchau blames Mario Monti’s defeat on a lack of political realism – code for cynicism. Paul Krugman blames it not just on Monti but on a European elite – or ‘Very Serious People’. in Europe even more than in the US the Very Serious People…