Government  Jack Straw, the leader of the Commons, outlined details of the White Paper which proposes a house where some peers are elected and some still appointed, as they all are now. Mr Straw, who wants 50% of peers to be elected, said…

Government Home Secretary John Reid proposed strengthening the sex offenders register to better protect children using the internet. As part of his Child Sex Offender Review, John Reid is considering extending the notification requirements…

The Heritage Foundation has recently brought out the 2007 version of their annual Index of Economic Freedom. This assesses and scores countries according to their performance on a range of factors, and then combines them to provide an…

Almost no one now pretends that Labour has achieved its ambitions for education. Government ministers continue to trot out their stale statistics about how much they have spent and how much the average grades have improved, but very few are…

All sorts of environmental issues are now presented not just as practical but as moral issues - if you don't recycle, you aren't just a wasteful person, you are a bad person. In Radio 4's Start the Week today, Andrew Marr's guests included…

I missed the story two weeks ago on Cheryl Gillan's proposal to voucherise charity funding. If I'd been in the country (I was skiing), I'd have laid into it at the time, but for such an idiotic proposal, late is better than never. The…

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has admitted that two of the government's three targets for reducing billions of pounds of fraud and error in the benefits system have been missed. For example, the housing benefit's rate of…

There has been condemnation today of the stale news (perhaps pumped up to make the new IPCC report more interesting) that the ExxonMobil-funded American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have been offering to fund research questioning the…