Both Labour and the Conservatives are to blame for this perversion of the original purpose of the welfare state. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher encouraged hundreds of thousands of unemployed people to register for incapacity benefits so she could cl...

The case for a tax on land I believe Harriet Walker's column ("What about some land for the poor", 11 November) makes a wrong assumption. The kind of "landowners" she mentions may be from families which have occupied the land for centuries, but i...

Our once-envied system is at risk The impression that the NHS has survived the cuts and its budget "ring-fenced" by the Coalition Government needs to be examined. Although the NHS budget has been relatively protected, the health service has to fi...

They're still in charge, by all accounts. The biggest survey of landowners in 140 years reveals that a third of the country belongs to the aristocracy – from Ralph Percy, Duke of Northumberland, whose forebears make an appearance in Shakespeare's Hen...

The enterprising scientist then emailed pictures of the lizard to experts in the United States who jumped on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City from where they phoned the restaurant to place an order. Unfortunately, the restaurateur, so excited by his sudde...

It happened almost by accident at first, then decidedly on purpose. The device is now popular among America's youth, and the same is happening in Britain, and the key is free messaging. BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion saw the evaporation of corpo...

What brought everyone out on to the streets? The general consensus was anger. The rights afforded by education are not simply the reserve of the elite, a claim implied by some commentators. As an excellent film by the UCU showed, colleges such as Gol...