Leading Articles

Recent Leading Articles

Leading article: Prize tiger

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Acknowledging, naturally, their terrible mistake in passing over our columnist Philip Hensher's Sheffield-based magnum opus The Northern Clemency, we are gratified to see that this year's Booker judges have not been afraid to take a punt on an interesting new voice. In awarding the prize to first-time novelist Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger, the judges are continuing a tradition of promoting fresh, first-rate fiction from the Indian subcontinent.

Leading article: A black day for the banks, and the dawn of a new era

Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Remember the date. Monday 13 October will go down in history as one of the blackest days in the annals of British banking. it was the day that some of our largest and proudest private financial institutions were forced to sell large chunks of themselves to the state in order to avert total collapse.

Leading article: Rainy days

Tuesday, 14 October 2008

It takes the Tate Modern, and a French artist, to remind us, just as the markets crash and the recession takes hold, that it's all going to get much worse over the next 50 years. The gallery's latest installation in the much-applauded Turbine Hall of the former power station is a work of the French-born artist, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Not for her the giant slides, the glorious colours or the intriguing contraptions that have previously graced the hall. instead we have a collection of bunk beds scattered and accompanied by the sound of the steady drip of rainwater.

Leading article: A bounce that won't deliver Mr Brown an election

Monday, 13 October 2008

Gordon Brown travelled to Paris for a meeting of eurozone countries in an imposing mood. Continental leaders were anxious to hear the British Prime Minister's advice on the financial crisis with a view to applying similar solutions to those adopted by the British Government.

Leading article: A bad Bill heading for oblivion

Monday, 13 October 2008

It is widely predicted that tonight the House of Lords will throw out the Bill extending the time limit for the detention of terror suspects without trial to 42 days. Unelected and unaccountable, the House of Lords seems an aberration in a modern democratic society. But again we are reliant on these ermine-clad throwbacks to achieve what their elected contemporaries in the lower chamber have failed to do: kill a bad Bill.

Leading article: The spirit of cricket

Monday, 13 October 2008

A report by Loughborough University researchers that teaching cricket in state schools improves children's behaviour, spreading chivalrous and "gentlemanly" behaviour over one and all, raises possibilities. Deprived state schools, after all, are not the only arenas in which problematic behaviour – the type the researchers link to football – rears its ugly head. Many of us encounter barging, loud, testosterone-loaded, winner-takes-all behaviour – what we will refer to as "football" values – on buses, at Tube and railway stations and checkouts. Can we realistically import some cricketing spirit into these virtual war zones?

Leading article: The green lining to this chaos

Sunday, 12 October 2008

There are two responses to the financial crisis that are wrong. One is to say that we can forget all that goody-goody guff about the environment now that people are worrying about how to pay next week's bills. The other is to say that our culture of consumption has been exposed as unsustainable and that we must abandon capitalism for a life that is closer to nature. Today we outline a middle way.

Leading article: Mere words will not restore confidence in the markets

Saturday, 11 October 2008

The financial crisis is now colliding with a gathering recession

Leading article: Before the gold rush

Saturday, 11 October 2008

In the midst of the banking crash there may yet be a gold rush, if not one which will improve the health of our beleaguered stock exchange. Piercing sunlight, eggshell blue skies, and stillness – after a forbidding summer, October has already ushered in what Albert Camus famously described as "a second spring when every leaf is a flower".

Leading article: Local authorities cannot duck their responsibilities

Friday, 10 October 2008

Icelandic insolvencies pose serious questions about council priorities

Leading article: Mud-slinging to little effect

Friday, 10 October 2008

In this most unconventional of US elections, now overshadowed by a financial crisis for the ages, an ancient truism of presidential politics is being overturned. John McCain is finding out that negative campaigning, a guaranteed winner for Republicans in elections past, is simply not working as it should in 2008.

Leading article: A clarification

Friday, 10 October 2008

Readers will forgive us, in these days of bank rescues and Nobel prizes, for only now recognising a genuine achievement: Gordon Brown made a joke. Now, as the sound of spluttering cereal echoes across the land, be ever more amazed as we record that the gag was off-the-cuff and, although those re-telling it are surely obliged to preface their remarks with the words "you had to be there", it was not bad.

Leading article: A bold financial package – but not yet a market solution

Thursday, 9 October 2008

The £500bn rescue deal is huge and historic but still limited in effect

Leading article: Libraries should be about books

Thursday, 9 October 2008

Perhaps the peculiarly hybrid name of his department – Culture, Media and Sport – has clouded his judgement. But the Secretary of State, Andy Burnham, will today add his voice to calls by chief librarians for a revolution to modernise public libraries and "bring them into the 21st century". In Mr Burnham's words, this means banishing the image of libraries as "solemn and sombre places patrolled by fearsome and formidable staff" and making them "come alive for generations to come".

Leading article: Darling's package needs to be as big as promised

Wednesday, 8 October 2008

Piecemeal solutions are not going to solve this crisis

Leading article: Defeat is not yet inevitable

Wednesday, 8 October 2008

Seven years ago today, the West began a war in Afghanistan which is proving intractable. Military victory against the Taliban regime, which was sheltering Osama bin Laden, was swift; the US and Britain then switched their focus to Iraq.

Leading article: A common goal

Wednesday, 8 October 2008

Young people can feel justifiably harassed these days. "Too violent," they are told, "too fat, too ill-educated." What they really need, and respond to, are positive role models. So Arsenal Football Club's scheme to send its first-team players into schools to teach langauges and coach the beautiful game is to be applauded. The Double Club programme is being made available to help 1,800 pupils in the South-East of England learn languages, science and citizenship. Participating players will also be reminded of their duty to set the best example to the young.

Leading article: The day Britain and Europe shared each other's pain

Tuesday, 7 October 2008

As the world's major stock markets fell through the floor yesterday afternoon, the Chancellor delivered a statement to MPs about the measures he was taking to ensure stability in the banking system. It was meant as a message of reassurance. But this was not the sort of statement you expected to hear from a British Chancellor, any British Chancellor.

Leading article: Smacking should be banned

Tuesday, 7 October 2008

Britain's children enjoy less physical protection under the law than prisoners. No one has the right to subject a jail inmate to assault. Yet parents are allowed to assault their offspring with impunity – by smacking them. This is a disgraceful anomaly, and tomorrow the House of Commons has an opportunity to rectify it.

Leading article: A tale of two viruses

Tuesday, 7 October 2008

In recent years, the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to eminent scientists recognised for important but, to the layman, arcane discoveries related to cell functioning and mouse genetics. Not this year. Everyone knows the devastation wreaked by Aids and the deadly potential of cervical cancer. The two French researchers who discovered the HIV virus, and the German scientist who identified the human papilloma virus (HPV) as the cause of cervical cancer, are certain to be popular recipients of the award.

Leading article: A US election that has turned the world on to politics

Monday, 6 October 2008

One of the longest and most enthralling US election campaigns in memory will reach its climax four weeks tomorrow, when Americans finally cast their vote. But it is salutary to consider how completely the political landscape has changed from 18 months ago when the bare outlines of the contest were being established and Hillary Clinton's nomination seemed a foregone conclusion for the Democrats.

Leading article: Unequal before the law

Monday, 6 October 2008

On the surface, at least, the argument put by the teachers' representative, Chris Keates, looks controversial to the point of being outrageous. She has said, in a television programme to be aired tonight, that a law making it a criminal offence for a teacher to have a sexual relationship with a pupil over the age of 16 is anomalous. Rather than face prosecution, she contends, and almost automatic inclusion on the sex offenders' register, the teacher should face only professional sanction. Child protection agencies are up in arms.

Leading article: Hail to the people's race

Monday, 6 October 2008

it might yield something in the exotica department to skydiving over the Himalayas, and it might be only half the length of the marathons held so successfully in London and other world cities. But the Great North Run, now in its 28th year, has become an institution in its own splendid right. As with the London Marathon, a single enthusiast led the way – the middle-distance runner Brendan Foster, who put his beloved north-east on the international map, without forgetting local people.

Leading article: Brown wins the conference trick

Sunday, 5 October 2008

Three weeks on, where do we stand? Three weeks ago, the Liberal Democrats were assembling in Bournemouth, while the administrator was working over the weekend to pull the plug out of the big socket at Lehman Brothers in Canary Wharf. Three weeks ago, the Prime Minister's hold on office seemed precarious as a minister, a whip and several Labour MPs had resigned from Government posts to demand a leadership election.