The history is well established. When Iceland's banks collapsed in the credit meltdown of 2008, the Icelandic authorities lacked sufficient funds to compensate the UK and Dutch citizens who had invested their savings in the online lender Icesave. Bri...

But, whatever the moral complexion of the motives, this is still unsatisfactory. With an election looming, although not yet officially called, ministers ought to be pushing through no long-term commercial contracts, and certainly none that an incomin...

After all, Belle de Jour, the blogging London call girl, had maintained her anonymity up until that time, so why, I figured, would anyone be interested in who I was? The result? The rest of the gutter press arrived on the scene like vultures to a fre...

I think these facts tell an important story: the old duopoly of British politics is dying on its feet, but our institutions still operate as if nothing has changed since the height of the Cold War. An increasing number of people are voting with their...

That is why I support the Countryside Alliance's "Rural Manifesto", which calls for outdoor learning to feature on the school curriculum. The American writer Richard Louv, in his excellent book Last Child in the Woods, describes the growing "nature-d...

At a time when computer literacy was rare in the legal profession, my little knowledge led to me chairing the Bar Council's IT committee. In our age defined by technology, those cut off from this information revolution are at a huge disadvantage. Tod...

The official garlands bestowed upon The Hurt Locker at Avatar's expense have been hailed by thinking cinephiles as a victory for "proper" film-making; a rare vote for substance over style. That may be true, but in the frenzy of Avatar-bashing, I'd li...

Actually there should be no rickshaw pullers here. Following a campaign by activists who said such labour had no place in civilised society, the authorities last year amended legislation to ban them. The trouble is that they failed to provide alterna...