Many people have expressed alarm at the steep rise in the numbers of people relying on foodbanks run by charities to get their next meal, but David Cameron loves them. Asked by Ed Miliband in a parliamentary debate last year whether he was concerned about the 'six-fold growth'...

When George W. Bush left office in 2009, he left a country in financial freefall, with a level of wealth inequality without parallel in US history, its crumbling infrastructure and institutional incompetence epitomized by Hurricane Katrina.

Abroad the reputation of the United States had been dragged through the dirt by...

Hello everyone. My name is George Osborne and I'm the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It's really a pleasure for me to show you round the new Britain that we have been building these last three years, in the hope that you will ignore the doomsayers and the naysayers, the negative...

Dear Boston Bomber,

It's now two days since you - or you and your associates - exploded your bombs at the Boston marathon and the death toll currently stands at three, one of whom was Martin Richard, an eight-year-old boy who was photographed last year holding up a...

Glenda Jackson's powerful assault on Margaret Thatcher was a welcome antidote to the generally adulatory and sycophantic tributes emanating from politicians and clueless celebrities alike.

It was a breath of fresh air to hear a politician remind parliament with such passionate clarity of Thatcher's 'brutal contempt' towards sections of...

Oh dear. For months the tabloid press has been working itself and the British public into a frenzy of horror at the prospect of an invasion of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, and what a shameful spectacle it has been.

Never mind the xenophobic and racist depictions of both countries as...

Proving once again that its natural habitat is the sewer, and determined to bring its readers down there with it, the Daily Mail has decided to use the Derby fire tragedy as an iconic 'what's wrong with Britain' story.

There is no doubt that Michael Philpott is a uniquely revolting...

The European commissioner for employment, social affairs and inclusion, László Andor, has strongly criticized David Cameron's latest attack on Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, declaring "there is a serious risk of pandering to knee-jerk xenophobia.Blaming poor people or migrants for hardships at the time of economic crisis is not...

The US Senate has killed Senator Diane Feinstein's Obama-backed proposal to ban assault weapons as part of a series of gun control measures put forward in the wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre last December. The bill proposed to ban 160 specific semiautomatic weapons and rifles, assorted...

You have to admire the courage and moral fibre of Britain's military chiefs. Here they are, ten years after the Iraq war, queuing up to describe the inept planning for the post-invasion scenario as 'wholly irresponsible'. So we hear former chief of defence Lord Guthrie, thundering that it...

When it comes to geopolitics, Hollywood often has a striking ability to produce films that reflect and reinforce the prevailing foreign policy assumptions of the American political and military establishment, or which at least do nothing to challenge them.

So it's not surprising that a film presenting Americans as innocent...

I never much liked Jimmy Savile when he was alive. On Top of the Pops he came over to me as a fake eccentric, hollow, faintly grotesque, and not nearly as loveable as he clearly appeared to regard himself.

I knew nothing about his private life and cared even...

I wish the Paralympics well, but I can't help noting a certain discrepancy between the celebration of the Games and the distinctly less celebratory attitudes towards the disabled that are prevalent in British society.

Yesterday David Cameron said that the Games will 'inspire a lot of people and...

On a rainy Bank Holiday evening yesterday, we drove through the last murky dregs of the-summer-that-never-was to Sheffield to see the Chilean director Patrizio Guzmán's wonderful Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz).

Guzmán is a documentary filmmaker and a leftist, who is most famous for the epic three-part...

A long time ago, when words like globalisation and deregulation were still rumours on the political horizon, the Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi founded the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in 1972. BCCI was originally intended to be a progressive international Third World bank that would...

There was a truly awful article in last week's New Statesman by Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy, accusing 'the left' of a curmudgeonly attitude towards the government's plans for military-staffed 'service schools.'

Lammy condemns critics of the scheme for propagating the idea that ' servicemen and women are...

I'm a big fan of Henning Menkel's Wallander novels and the Swedish television series that came out of them, and it's only because I still pine for the latter that I watched Kenneth Branagh's English version last night.

Like its predecessors, it's watchable and not without merits. Branagh portrays Henning...

Watching Ed Balls and George Osborne clawing each other in parliament yesterday was not an edifying spectacle - the parliamentary version of Alien versus Predator. I'm not one to agree with Osborne about anything if I can possibly help it, but when he condemns the 'Brownite cabal' for its economic...

I'm a little disappointed because I've just failed a sample paper from the Life in the UK citizenship test, even though I'm a British citizen. Despite the fact that I was born and educated in the UK and have lived most of my life in England, I now...

I've just seen Spanish director Iciar Bollain's remarkable También la Lluvia (Even the Rain). Some critics have compared it to Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, with its theme of monomaniacal obsession and vainglory in a Latin American context. But Even the Rain is far more textured and more political film.

The screenplay was...