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
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?