The City's Financial Services Authority has given Barclays Bank a massive fine for lying about its cost of capital in the obscure process that sets a key price in the financial markets. It shows again that finance is too important to be left to the so-called market.
A finance insider reads Soros' intervention at Trento and wonders whether this is just a trading superstar talking up his own portfolio?
The basis of taxation - especially of the super-rich, but also of the increasing numbers who feel no great traditional or ethnic attachment to the nation - must be solidarity, whose only sustainable basis is a common view of the good we're building. The State needs to recognise its duty in supplyi
An attentive reading of the UK Chancellor's (finance minster's) latest speech to the City reveals the strain of ignoring what really limits Britain's ability to formulate a good response to its own double dip recession or to play a constructive role in the Eurozone crisis. In both cases, the root
The Labour leader's attempt to open a conversation on Englishness should be welcomed. But it stops short of real engagement, while its cack-handed clumsiness tell us much about the party and Miliband as a leader.
As Jubilee celebrations die down in the short period of calm before the Olympics, questions arise about what all this means, what Britain and Britishness is, and what the future might be for both.
The Labour leader has set out his defence of the Union in a speech that appealed to his party to recognise England and show pride in the English. But is this enough, with Scotland considering independence and the English question waiting to explode?
This piece is part of our debate 'The Great British Summer?'.
Anthony Barnett:
I was in Scotland during the Jubilee for a family celebration of Tom Nairn'
The festivities around the London Olympics and Diamond Jubilee will paint a picture of a stable, timeless (simultaneously modern) Great Britain. But the Anglo-Britishness it appeals to is far from the present-day reality of contested identity and authority, in which England is preparing to speak.
Government ministers are planning to adopt Singaporean educational practices in English schools. We need to keep in mind that children in Singapore may currently be better at doing sums, but they do not live in an open democracy
John Davey argues that it's time for the English to take the initiative and put the democratically sclerotic British state to sleep.
