France has been in a state of organised uprising this week, with 300,000 motorists taking to the streets and autoroutes to protest against rising fuel taxes. One protester has died, more than 400 have been injured and even more disruption is on the way. Watching Emmanuel Macron, you wouldn’t know it. He travelled to Berlin
Home Five pizza-eating cabinet ministers — Andrea Leadsom, Penny Mordaunt, Liam Fox, Michael Gove and Chris Grayling — put it about that Theresa May, the Prime Minister, could be persuaded to amend the draft withdrawal agreement with the EU before she signs it at a summit this Sunday. But Mrs May said that she had
‘Away with the cant of “measures not men”! — the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.’ George Canning said this in 1801 and recent events
The country’s champions of free speech — the police — were recently out in force to ensure that the alt-right Trump-supporting Steve Bannon could address the student union in Oxford. The students, inevitably, wanted him silenced. But what were they so afraid of? Plato knew: it was a matter of the difference between the spoken
Black Friday When and where did the term ‘Black Friday’ originate? — It was used to describe a collapse in financial markets on 24 September 1869, prompted by the revelation of a Wall Street conspiracy to drive up the gold price. But in modern usage it was coined by police in 1950s Philadelphia, who had
There is no ‘good’ Brexit Sir: David Harper claims to know ‘what the population of the UK voted for’ in the EU referendum (Letters, 17 November), yet no definitive Brexit plan was ever offered by the Leavers. That is one reason why the government, having prematurely triggered Article 50 and recklessly established its ‘red lines’,
