Tag Archives: Comment

Friends arriving on the red eye from snow-bound New York couldn’t believe their luck at Heathrow. Instead of the winding immigration queues typical at US gateways, Britain’s temporarily fortified army border force proved miraculously efficient and even managed to welcome them to London with smiles. Former US president Ronald Reagan …

I was struck when I was posting my Christmas cards – ever the optimist, given the mail strike – that our stamps still have the late Queen’s head on them, even the ones specially printed for the festive season. Our coins still have her face embossed on them, and she …

How I miss that distinctive sound of Advent: the heavy thud of 11 envelopes landing on the doormat! Ever since the decline of handwritten letters, which began in the 1990s with the arrival of the internet, Advent has been the one time of year when we could re-live the daily …

Britain is flailing. It’s not all our fault; global shocks caused by the Ukraine war and European intransigence over Brexit have soured the economy, while the cultural madness sweeping the West continues to knock us off course. But when it comes to certain basics, we have no excuse. We face …

RUTH SUNDERLAND: Danger of a hair shirt Budget – taxing aspiration is a tax on human nature Two enormous challenges lie in wait for Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak in Budget The first is restoring credibility to the public finances  The second, and even more important challenge, is to ignite …

From a standing start roughly three years ago, Openreach’s full fibre network now reaches 9m homes and businesses across the UK, while the pace of engineering is expected to ramp up from 2.6m premises last year to more than 3m this year, and again in 2023. But here’s the bit …

In this dawn of the reign of King Charles III, while the country waits excitedly for new postage stamps with the King’s head on them, the Royal Mail appears to have other priorities. In its obsession with tracking and de-romanticising everything, it is imposing new stamps on us which manage …

At times, the impression is that the recent wave of damaging strikes, not just at the Royal Mail, but also BT, the railways, the country’s ports, and other vital parts of the economy has been driven more by a desire among hard-left union barons to score points against a Tory …

Whatever the other glories of the second Elizabethan age, it included a period in the 1960s and 1970s when British art entered a black hole and stayed there. There were exceptions: Lucian Freud, Henry Moore and David Gentleman, in the visual arts; the odd good feature film, mostly by Lindsay …

First, we need to rip up the rules that were put in place when it was privatised that protect the unions. The Royal Mail is ridiculously over-manned, and riddled with restrictive practices.  Of course, we all sympathise with the posties who want a pay rise that matches inflation, and the …