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0 shares 238 View comments A few weeks ago, I found myself standing outside a handsome office building on London’s Embankment, staring at a blue plaque. According to the plaque, this was Savoy Hill — one of the first homes of the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) after it began broadcasting in November 1922, exactly 90 years ago. Today, seven days after the shambolic resignation of BBC director-general George Entwistle, that first BBC looks almost completely unrecognisable. Worlds apart: The BBC is unrecognisable from the cheery amateur company it was 90 years ago Back then, its handful of employees were largely drawn from engineering firms such as the Marconi Company. Its ethos was one of cheerful amateurism, and inside its tiny studio, the amiable spirit of the British boffin prevailed. Above all, it was an institution with a profound sense of moral mission, epitomised by its first director-general, the stern Scottish Presbyterian John Reith. Und

0 shares 698 View comments The year is 2022, and in the gilded splendour of his Brussels headquarters, the EU President is facing a tricky dilemma. Pressure is building on him to finalise his latest budget — yet the problems seem intractable. With so many small new nations scrabbling for funds, agreement seems impossible. Catalonia, for example, is demanding deep cuts in EU administrative expenses, while the Scots are calling for higher welfare subsidies. The new states of Lombardy and Tuscany are at loggerheads, the Corsicans are still in the doghouse after their government’s latest corruption  scandal, and the Walloons haven’t paid a penny into common euro funds for years. A shattering continent: Almost every major European nation is being threatened by breakaway movements The new map of the Continent, a crazy patchwork of competing states governed by an interventionist European Union, tells the wider story. The age of the strong nations has gone, and Britain h

0 shares 95 View comments Victorious: Barack Obama won an unexpectedly comfortable re-election against a backdrop of bitter ideological wrangling and fiscal brinkmanship Where will 2012 stand in history? It was not one of the outstanding, iconic years like 1945, the year World War II ended, or 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. It saw no earth-shattering events to stand beside the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks on New York or the invasion of Iraq. In many ways, indeed, the story of 2012 was simply more of the same. In Britain, the Coalition limped miserably along, while the economy stubbornly refused to improve. On the Continent, the euro staggered blindly from crisis to crisis. In the Middle East, the festering sore of the Israel-Palestine conflict claimed the lives of hundreds more victims, while the Arab Spring slid further into bloodshed. And across the Atlantic, Barack Obama won an unexpectedly comfortable re-election against a backdrop of b

0 shares 99 View comments The horsemeat scandal is one of those appalling stories from which nobody emerges well. Certainly not the suppliers, some of whom will surely face criminal charges. Not the Food Standards Agency, which has proved embarrassingly passive. Not the supermarkets, whose obsession with profit margins has seen them drive prices and standards into the gutter. And not, I am sorry to say, the Great British public, whose love affair with cheap meat means we have effectively colluded in our own deception. Oddly, though, the first person I thought of when I heard the news about Findus’s horsemeat lasagne and Tesco’s equine bolognese was a man who died more than 60 years ago: George Orwell. A champion of British home cooking: George Orwell would not have been surprised by the horsemeat scandal, for he was an unsparing critic of ordinary British families' unhealthy indifference to what they ate for dinner Orwell was not merely one of the most acute

0 shares 83 View comments For connoisseurs of the Liberal Democrats’ innate susceptibility to scandal, the past few weeks have offered rich pickings. First there was the resignation of one of their few heavy hitters inside the Coalition, Chris Huhne, who had lied about allegations that he had given his speeding points to his then wife, whom he subsequently abandoned. Then came the news that as many as ten women, some of them Lib Dem councillors and activists, had complained about inappropriate advances from the party’s chief executive, Lord Rennard — allegations which, it turns out, were known to Nick Clegg as early as 2008. Resigned: Chris Huhne lied about allegations that he had given his speeding points to his then wife, whom he subsequently abandoned And finally, hanging over the party like a sour smell is the shadow of the man-mountain Cyril Smith.  The late MP for Rochdale was one of the Liberals’ most recognisable figures in the Seventies and Eighties. Now

0 shares 995 View comments The world is at  a crossroads in history. Vast, untameable economic forces are remaking the landscape of international affairs. In Britain, a dithering Prime Minister is buffeted by crisis after crisis. Abroad, from the heart of Europe to the fringes of Asia, economic powers are rising. And there is talk of a new German empire, bigger and more powerful than ever. Ever more citizens in the Mediterranean countries of the eurozone in particular argue that for the third time in less than 100 years Germany is trying to take control of Europe It sounds like something ripped from today’s newspapers. But this was the state of the planet in 1913, 100 years ago. At first glance, the Britain of 1913 appears impossibly different from the Britain of today. Our imperial dominion stretched across the globe, while our bankers and manufacturers were widely regarded as the best in the world. And in a society rigidly divided by class, the Tories were in t

UK pension funds are dipping a toe into the specialist market for high yielding but risky bank loans in an effort to offset poor returns in their traditional investment portfolios. After years of slow economic growth and record low interest rates, UK pension funds have this year for the first time turned to leveraged loans: they now average 2 percent of their total portfolios since the start of 2013, pension consultants say.   Buying up these kind of loans is commonplace in the U.S., where pension funds and insurers have been investing in them since the early 1990s. They currently allocate up to 5 percent of their entire portfolio to leveraged bank loans. But some experts caution that UK pension funds are venturing into a market historically dominated by specialist investors without fully considering the high levels of management required to look after the assets they are buying, which often involve struggling companies or homeowners. Leveraged loans are given by banks to compani

0 shares 153 View comments Today our MPs will vote on one of the most vital issues to have come before this Parliament — the future of our free Press. By now there can be few people in Britain who do not know the background to the phone-hacking scandal, and few who do not share the widespread revulsion at the shameful wrongdoing of a handful of newspapers. But what is at stake today transcends the entirely justifiable outrage of the victims of phone-hacking. Scroll down for video If Ed Miliband (left) and Nick Clegg (right) should prevail, the Press will be regulated by statute for the first time since the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 Tragically, the victims’ cause has been hijacked by a group of activists who do not have our democracy’s best interests at heart. The Hacked Off campaigners, who demand statutory regulation of the Press, deny that they are would-be censors. But these self-appointed crusaders miss the crucial point that onc