Leading Articles

Recent Leading Articles

Leading article: Better education can help to make our roads safer

Friday, 21 November 2008

The Government should not rely solely on modifications to the law

Leading article: An unadvisable choice

Friday, 21 November 2008

So far, Barack Obama has been admirably decisive in his appointments in the run-up to taking over as President on 20 January. Compared to Bill Clinton's desultory attempts to appoint a team in the same period in 1991, the President-elect this time around has acted with speed and purpose. Within a week of his election victory, Obama had chosen his chief of staff and main adviser. Since then, he has started to make his main cabinet appointments, filling – according to well-sourced reports – key roles in Homeland Security, Commerce and Health and Human Services with a mixture of old Clintonites and close colleagues from his Chicago days.

Leading article: Small band of bigots

Friday, 21 November 2008

Talk about underwhelming. Now that the dust has settled, the sensible conclusion to draw from the leaking of the British National Party's membership list this week is that the political threat from Britain's far right is actually pretty minor.

Leading article: There are better ways to protect trafficked women

Thursday, 20 November 2008

The Government's proposals threaten to do more harm than good

Leading article: Unfair competition from the BBC

Thursday, 20 November 2008

The BBC's "local video" initiative is an audacious plan to invest large amounts of funding generated by the licence fee into flooding 60 key cities throughout the country with online news, weather, travel, sport and community information. At face value this might seem a positive development, an attempt by the corporation to enhance the cohesion of British cities and strengthen the democratic process through the dissemination of news about local life. What's not to like?

Leading article: Stepping down

Thursday, 20 November 2008

Saturday nights will not be the same. John Sergeant has quit Strictly Come Dancing. Though his footwork was, to say the least, questionable, popular votes kept him in the competition while better dancers fell away. This led to anger from judges and competitors alike, for which Sergeant has paid a heavy price. The show is now left with a gap which must be filled immediately if the series is to keep momentum and maintain its competitive personality. A challenger must therefore be found to fill the former ITV political editor's left-footed shoes.

Leading article: The US car industry is stalled on a road to nowhere

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

But any rescue with public money should come with strict conditions

Leading article: This is our problem too

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

No supply chain is quite as lethal and destructive as that of cocaine. That was the message from the Colombian Vice-President, Francisco Santos Calderon, at a meeting of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Belfast yesterday.

Leading article: Ball control

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

You've got to hand it to him: Diego Maradona still hasn't lost his eye for goal. He might have retired as a player long ago and been dragged through a horror show of drug abuse and weight problems, but the compact Argentinian still has that old killer instinct.

Leading article: The Conservatives are still searching for coherence

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Labour's attacks on George Osborne for "talking down" sterling surely deserve a special place in the pantheon of political hypocrisy. For a government which is openly borrowing on a massive scale to complain when an opposition politician points to the inevitable effect on the value of the pound is surely the height of chutzpah.

Leading article: A poisonous legacy of denial

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Seventeen years after the end of the first Gulf War, when a coalition of 34 nations, led by Britain and America, successfully expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, many veterans still live in the shadow of the conflict. Nearly 6,000 British servicemen remain ill – as do thousands more in the US – with an array of symptoms ranging from depression and pain, to arthritis and memory loss. None of these conditions can be explained away by the ravages of battle.

Leading article: Jumping frogs

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

They say that if you want to boil a frog, you don't throw it into scalding water as the creature will simply leap out. Instead, you turn up the heat slowly.

Leading article: The summit which marks the changing of the old order

Monday, 17 November 2008

Nothing emerged from the G20 meeting in Washington at the weekend that gives the financial markets great cause for bullishness today. There were no promises of co-ordinated interest rate reductions, or global tax cuts. There was support from the leaders present for "fiscal measures to stimulate domestic demand", which is likely to give Gordon Brown the cover he needs to cut taxes in a week's time, but nothing more definite. There were also some warm words on reinvigorating global trade talks, but nothing earth-shattering.

Leading article: A clean withdrawal from Iraq

Monday, 17 November 2008

An agreement of a historic nature was struck in Baghdad yesterday. The Iraqi cabinet has approved a deal with Washington which stipulates that US troops will withdraw from the streets of Iraqi towns by the middle of next year and that American troops will leave the country entirely by the end of 2011.

Leading article: Blowing bubbles

Monday, 17 November 2008

Now, we understand that Damien Hirst welcoming lower art prices, as he does in The Independent today, will sound to many of our readers as bizarre as the Pope praying for an upsurge in atheism, or Simon Cowell calling for a moratorium on those awful television talent shows.

Leading Article: Leadership is the best protection

Sunday, 16 November 2008

When vulnerable and frightened people are abused, everyone believes they should be protected. Unless they are social workers. They are blamed when a child is left in the custody of abusive adults, when the primary blame lies with those that harm the child. And they are blamed when they ask the courts to take a child away from a family, when it might be thought that an excess of zeal was preferable to what happened in the Baby P case.

Leading Article: The G20 leaders need to get their priorities straight

Saturday, 15 November 2008

Structural reform takes second place to managing the immediate crisis

Leading Article: Where the buck stops

Saturday, 15 November 2008

The full facts surrounding the prolonged ill-treatment and death of Baby P, while under the – clearly inadequate – protection of Haringey social services, must await the results of the two inquiries now set up. But enough has emerged to prompt serious disquiet, not just about this appalling case, and not just about procedures at Haringey, but about the fractured relations between the individuals and institutions involved, and between local and national government. In a matter of days, the tragedy of a single child has come to represent the failures of a whole system.

Leading Article: Opportunity lost

Saturday, 15 November 2008

The recreation centre and flats planned for the seafront at Hove is not the first major project to fall victim to the financial crisis, and it will surely not be the last. But it is one that is probably more deserving of being mourned more than most. This was to have been Britain's first major building by Frank Gehry. A cluster of towers would have replaced a dilapidated Thirties leisure centre; it would have been a work that was adventurous, and distinctive.

Leading article: A case of neglect that reaches the highest levels

Friday, 14 November 2008

Social services are underfunded, understaffed and failing to do their job

Leading article: A victory for bank customers

Friday, 14 November 2008

It is nearly eleven months since The Independent first exposed the multibillion-pound profits made by Britain's lending institutions from the selling and mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance to borrowers.

Leading article: Clever bones

Friday, 14 November 2008

Never underestimate what a 1.2 million-year-old fossil can tell us: such as when we all started to get so big-headed, so to speak.

Leading article: There is no magic bullet for rising unemployment

Thursday, 13 November 2008

Ministers need to be realistic in their efforts to curtail the recession

Leading article: Where nightmares lurk

Thursday, 13 November 2008

The shocking case of Baby P, who died after months of cruelty at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and her lodger, has drawn attention once again to the failings of child protection services, and those of Haringey in north London in particular. The highly charged exchanges in the Commons yesterday, where the Prime Minister accused the Conservative leader of playing party politics, and the Secretary of State's announcement of a review only a few hours later, showed that both parties grasped the level of national concern about the case.