William Norton
The Real EU Referendum Winner May Surprise You
Brexit is already causing the biggest shakeup of British politics for a generation. But the biggest loser may prove to have the last laugh
Piketty’s panacea will make inequality worse
Has the fashionable French economist thought through his radical proposals? Crunch the numbers and you see the damage they’d do
Almost Joined-Up Thinking
George Osborne has missed a trick
McBrideshead Revisited
In the spin doctor’s memoirs the similarities between Evelyn Waugh’s protagonist Charles Ryder and Gordon Brown’s antagonist Damian McBride are several and eerie
Poll Facts
‘Don’t believe the polls. Either side could win the Scottish referendum’
Mayageddon
We’re all still here, so the end of the world was a false alarm, but the Mayans might never have predicted it in the first place
ONLINE ONLY: Translating the Autumn Statement
What was George Osborne really telling us?
How to Exorcise the Ghost of Penury Yet To Come
No pot of money supports the promise of state pensions—the system is unsustainable. A new savings model is needed
The Bores Have It
A new book on election reform forgets the fact that voters did not want AV
Planet Mirth
Matthew Sinclair’s new book, Let Them Eat Carbon, rightly draws attention to the foibles of climate change policy, rather than the global warming debate itself
Tolerating the intolerant
“For those who thought that a global pandemic would sound the death knell for identity politics, think again”
How to prevent the next pandemic
‘I have been reporting as a science journalist for years that the world is at increasing risk of pandemics like this; that this was predicted; that we know what we need to do to prepare and we simply haven’t done it; and that more and worse pandemics are coming so we need to do that, now’
D’où parles-tu? The post-truth world
Power, illusion and the open society: how postmodernism undermines our foundational concepts