The Government is “woefully underprepared” for a demographic time bomb that will see the number of people aged over 65 living in Britain leap by nearly five million in two decades, a report warned today.

Study reveals newly qualified women still earn thousands of pounds less than men

Sir Mervyn King today called for the Royal Bank of Scotland to be split up and sold off within a year to end the “nonsense” of state ownership.

The Chancellor George Osborne has been accused of having suffered a “humiliating blow” after Britain was stripped of its AAA credit rating.

Lunch on Wednesday with Michael Snyder, chair of the Professional and Businesses Services Group, one of the network of advisory committees for government. He, in his day job, is long-time head of Kingston Smith, a mid-sized accounting firm.

Government ministers are riding roughshod over the civil service, and that leads to government by cock-up and a loss of morale in Whitehall

Anders Lustgarten's play begins, promisingly enough, as a dystopian satire which takes us on a darkly absurd extrapolation of the “market knows best” approach to austerity.

Minister Damian Green was accused of hypocrisy tonight after he insisted that transparency was key to reforming the justice system at a time when the Government is pushing through proposals for secret courts.

The Government wants the private sector to finance the huge costs of nuclear power stations and hopes French company EDF will shortly kick off its new build.

British workers have experienced a lost decade of earnings growth thanks to the global financial crisis, with average real wages no higher in 2012 than they were in 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Gold-plated final-salary pension schemes have been in terminal decline for more than a decade. The Coalition's policy of trying to shore up the economy by pumping more and more money into it has simply hastened the crisis and persuaded more pension trustees to panic and shut attractive schemes.

Greek riot police stormed a train depot in Athens on Friday to disperse subway staff defying government orders to end their strike, intensifying a confrontation that has paralysed public transport in the city.

Spain's woes have reached a new peak as the beleaguered nation's austerity programme drove unemployment to a record 26 per cent, official figures showed.

In December, I met an exceptionally talented young Labour MP for coffee. She has merits that most employers would salivate at: a fierce intelligence, excellent communication skills, judgement and motivation. Best of all, she has an inspirational concern for social justice and solidarity with the poor and needy.