BBC Radio Five Live were crusading again last week, their plan of campaign once more heavily reliant upon taking a lazy sound-bite and stimulating a heated debate around it. This time, the sound-bite was a distinctly unprofessorial not to say yobbish statement by Professor Craig Currie of Cardiff University, who...

So, the day has arrived at last. An icon is to depart the game. England's "Goldenballs", the man with the most famous metatarsal the world has ever seen, he of the sculpted facial furniture with chiseled jaw and cheekbones to die for, David Robert Joseph Beckham OBE is finally to...

Stephanie Bottrill was a 53 year-old grandmother who had lived in her terraced house in Solihull for 18 years, bringing up her children as a struggling single parent, nurturing the cherished back garden which was her pride and joy. Here she'd buried the pet cats she had loved;...

28 years ago, on May 11 1985, I went to watch Leeds United play at St Andrews, Birmingham City's ground, in order to support the United lads, who still had a faint mathematical chance of promotion. These were the bad old days, when football violence was still highly fashionable, and...

The football-related media is in a frenzy of mourning today after the announcement that Sir Alex Taggart has decided to step down as Supreme Dictator of the FA Premier League. Who will follow him, they ask, tearing their hair and wringing their hands in distress. Chelsea fans may be surprised...

Okay, so I'm a Leeds United fan - so what has this got to do with me? Well, I'd have to start by declaring an interest - as a die-hard supporter of the One True United from the right (Yorkshire) side of the Pennines, I'm not exactly enamoured of Man...

Iain Duncan-Smith, having pandered for so long to the Daily Mail-reading citizens of leafy suburbia, gladdening their hearts with his continual broadsides aimed at "shirkers" or those allegedly living the high life on munificent benefits may just have made a tactical error, thereby rousing the ire of the comfortably-off grey...

They were tenaciously frolicking away in ersatz triumph on Monday night at The Theatre of Hollow Myths, as Man United, cracking on that they weren't bothered about another barren European season, dutifully celebrated another processional title triumph, having brushed aside the expected feeble resistance of Aston Villa.

Since Rupert Murdoch...

In the wake of recent atrocities abroad, and our own tragedies lately here in the UK, we can sadly reflect that the gap in between these appalling stories seems to grow ever shorter, as we look ahead gloomily and wonder: whatever next? It's cold comfort at best that the proliferation...

At last, a Premier League football manager has gone public and given voice to a dark suspicion that thousands of us fans have harboured for a long time now. Roberto Mancini, may his name be blessed, says that teams facing the Mighty Manchester United are infected with a

Ex-Cabinet minister Peter Lilley has unwittingly put his finger on a possible answer to the 'spare bedrooms' issue, which has been used to justify the iniquitous Bedroom Tax.

Interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live, the former social security secretary attempted to defend savage cuts to housing benefit...

A paraphrased adaptation - with apologies to T S Eliot.

This variation was written to coincide with the first day of the UK Coalition Government's so-called 'Welfare Reforms' which will savagely cut into the income of the very poorest, at a time when millionaires will benefit from massive tax cuts....

If you should happen to be a football fan - as I am, and have been these many years, since days of yore with short shorts, middling ability and long sideburns - then you may well be in the habit of switching on the TV occasionally to watch the glitzy...

Imagine you're a talented young TV screenwriter, looking for a smart new idea for a satirical comedy lampooning incompetent and uncaring politicians. You're looking for a main character, ideally in high office and making decisions on a daily basis that shape policy. You're probably going to make him a Tory...

Q: When is a Fox not a fox?
A: When it's a sacrificial lamb.

The Fox in question - Liam of that ilk - is due to make a speech containing radical proposals exceeding in scope and intent anything the coalition government has so far contemplated. His true motives...

"Execution-style Killing". It's one of those chilling news-story phrases that are fairly frequently-used, lazily, thoughtlessly and as a knee-jerk response it would seem, by habit-driven journos or unmotivated sub-editors. But this one is deeply, deeply inappropriate, offensive and misleading.

The fact is that the killings thus referred to are almost...

Former Manchester City maverick Mario Balotelli will be remembered in the English game for many things, but prominent among those various goals, skills and misdemeanours will be his famous celebration after scoring against Manchester United at Old Trafford last season in City's 6-1 eclipsing of their local rivals. Balotelli slotted...

My wife Tracy's great-Uncle George died last week. He was 91. A few days beforehand, he'd been up a two storey ladder, clearing out the gutters at his bowls club. He walked home a mile or so, spruced himself up, and then back to the club for a dinner dance...

As a former Welfare Rights Worker with Citizens Advice Bureaux in Pontefract and Wakefield in West Yorkshire, I've retained an interest in social policy developments in general, and Welfare Benefits legislation in particular. You may take the man out of advice work, but you can never quite take advice work...

The concept of The Big Lie as a propaganda technique has a long and well-documented, though tragically chequered history. It was a charge leveled at Jews by Adolf Hitler, with chilling irony as it turned out, accusing them en masse of laying the blame for Germany's...