Leading Articles

Leading article: An unhealthy mindset that must be eliminated

Shameful neglect of disabled patients reflects wider attitudes

Recent Leading Articles

Leading article: The trade talks are over. What now?

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

The breakdown of the world trade talks in Geneva yesterday is profoundly disappointing to those – including our own Prime Minister – who claimed them as the most important economic negotiations of the new century. Indeed the talks, started in 2001, have lasted most of this century. Little wonder that some of their particpants still hope that they can be revived after a summer pause.

Leading article: French lesson

Wednesday, 30 July 2008

We knew how much we still had to learn from the Continentals the moment the new chatelaine of the Elys�e took her first tentative steps on British soil. Over the next two days she kept British eyes – not just male eyes – riveted with her unerring sense of chic and decorum. And now we discover that Mme Bruni-Sarkozy can also teach us a thing or two on handling a tricky past when you are in the public eye.

Leading article: The PM and the curse of his disloyal courtiers

Tuesday, 29 July 2008

Labour MPs fanning the flames of regicide should be ashamed

Leading article: Collision course in Turkey

Tuesday, 29 July 2008

It is hard to think of a nation more familiar than Turkey with the tensions between East and West, between religion and nationalism, between autocracy and democracy. But those opposing forces seem to be reaching a new intensity of late. The ruling Islamic party is at risk of being outlawed by the Constitutional Court. Another court is hearing a case against a collection of ex-army officers accused of plotting to overthrow the government by force.

Leading article: An important victory. But there are more battles ahead

Monday, 28 July 2008

For a decade, ever since the Government introduced the minimum wage, the restaurant business in this country has made a mockery of its provisions through the shameless abuse of the tipping system. What restaurants up and down the country have been doing is using the cash that customers leave behind as extras for deserving staff in order make up those same workers' minimum wages. Tips, in other words, have become an excuse not to pay staff a decent wage – a means of a subsiding the £5.52-per-hour (up from £3.60) required under the 1998 Act.

Leading article: India must reject the forces of extremism

Monday, 28 July 2008

The bombs that went off this weekend in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, killing dozens of people who happened to be passing by the bicycles and tiffin boxes in which these devices were planted, are a worrying reminder of the ethnic and religious tensions tearing at the fabric of Asia's largest democracy. The choice of the targets appears ironic, for Ahmedabad was the birthplace of Gandhi, while Bangalore has become the shiny symbol of a new, high-tech India.

Leading article: The brain needs quality time

Monday, 28 July 2008

So much information; so little time to absorb it. It's the lament of the age and was the gist of Barack Obama's overheard advice to David Cameron at the weekend, inadvertently picked up by an ABC News microphone.

Leading article: Finished? Maybe. Should he be? No

Sunday, 27 July 2008

It is a rule of newspaper campaigns that they should demand only things that are likely to happen anyway. The Independent on Sunday has wilfully disregarded that rule in its support for the Prime Minister. It is neither inevitable or right that Gordon Brown should lose the next election, but it is idle to deny that the simplistic Westminster story has a certain self-fulfilling quality.

Leading article: Labour's Glasgow East defeat is a portent of worse to come

Saturday, 26 July 2008

The catastrophe that was last night's by-election result for Labour had loomed ever since David Marshall MP announced his decision to step down. Glasgow East was the party's third-safest seat in Scotland and one of the safest in the country. Yet everything, from the political climate to the timing, conspired to make even a 13,000 majority seem marginal. In the end, Labour lost the seat to the Scottish National Party by 365 votes. They are votes that could decide the fate not only of a Prime Minister, but of his party.

Leading article: Europe today. Tomorrow, America

Saturday, 26 July 2008

Hardly ever – probably never if one is to be accurate – has an American presidential candidate been treated with quite such enthusiasm in Europe as Barack Obama this week. A US president, yes. Both John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan came and wowed them in Berlin. But Barack Obama is different. He is new. He is untried. And he is – hard though it may be remember in the cascade of hope that has accompanied his visit – still just a nominee, not the elected chief.