Paul’s Week in Politics Articles

If you grew up in the 1970s like me, you were treated to a ceaseless diet of jokes and sketches about the crumminess of certain institutions. I’m casting my mind back to endless Two Ronnies jokes about British Rail sandwiches, Fawlty Towers-style hotels, and the inefficiency of British Leyland.

For those that believe parliament is an extension of a university debating club, they needed to look no further than the debate on Tuesday on the Big Society.

Reading the list of delegates, their names, addresses and organisations at Labour’s founding conference brings home the nature of the nascent Labour party. It is obvious that Labour in 1900 was overwhelmingly working class, male and anchored in a bewildering array of trade unions.

The Special Air Service has returned to its birthplace, the Libyan desert, to secure the return of stranded British oil workers. Cameron’s first attempt at a rescue – chartering planes from a private airline which arrived late and left half-full – was a disaster. It’s a good job he wasn’t in charge of the Falklands taskforce; they’d probably have landed in the Shetlands.