Paul’s Week in Politics Articles

If you were to choose when and where to fall ill between January 2005 and March 2009, you’d have been wise to avoid Stafford General Hospital. For over a thousand people, without the choice, their illness led to avoidable death. The NHS in Stafford killed more people...

The world may not have ended this week, but the 'big society' did. It was born in David Cameron’s Hugo Young memorial lecture of November 2009, and died in the prime minister’s questions last Wednesday. It started in a whirlwind of rhetorical hyperbole: ‘we need a...

Last Sunday I attended the Bangladesh Caterers’ Association awards. The UK ‘Indian’ restaurant and take-away trade (the quote marks are there to remind you that most ‘Indian’ restaurants are owned and run by Bangladeshis) is worth up to £3.6 billion. It employs 80,000...

Is there anything in the world uglier than the government frontbench when it’s attempting to take down an opponent? That’s a question I shall return to later. The Guardian rightly highlighted, on its Thursday front page, the trio of Cameron, Osborne and Alexander...