The ‘viability test’ for determining when in a pregnancy abortion should be banned has been comprehensively discredited as fallacious and dangerous, but both Labour and Tory leaders, as well as the anti-abortion lobby for its own doctrinaire reasons, continue to support it [More >>>]
Tim Garton Ash urges us to demand that Russia observes standards of behaviour which we fail to observe ourselves, as my letter in today’s Guardian shows. Relations with post-Soviet Russia have been consistently bungled by the west [More >>>]
The obvious and expertly advocated solution to the prison overcrowding problem is radically to reduce the prison population, much of which ought not to be there anyway. So why do successive home and justice secretaries automatically adopt the wrong alternative of building more and bigger prisons? [More >>>]
The iniquitous control orders régime has been renewed for another year, one day before another control order is quashed as unjustified by the high court; and the government continues to demand the extension to 42 days of the maximum time allowed for suspects to be jailed for questioning without being charged. These are indefensible breaches of our human rights [More >>>]
Recommendation to listen to a few minutes of comment on the Rowan Williams Shari’a law affair by the Revd. Dr Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney and philosophy don [More >>>]
Sadly the gulf between the political climates of the US and western Europe is growing; little hope of reform of the many shortcomings on both sides. But the EU offers a ray of hope for us Europeans [more >>>]
At least six cheers for Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield, with his splendidly English reaction to reports that Roman Catholic bishops in England are trying to insist that state-funded Catholic schools should teach...
All the leading political parties are competing with each other for the title of the harshest advocate of deporting all foreigners who have committed any offence, however minor and regardless of personal and family circumstances. Time for the courts to rule whether in many cases this is in breach of the Human Rights Act [More >>>]
Gordon Brown’s misfortunes mostly don’t deserve current savage allegations of incompetence, but the government needs to show more humility by dropping some discredited policies and reacting more flexibly to its own and others’ mistakes [More >>>]
Brian’s contribution to the series “What England means to me”, at http://whatenglandmeanstome.co.uk/?p=94, reproduced here in full [More >>>]