Scottish Tories split on devolution

A former Conservative Scottish secretary has called (£) moves by the party north of the border to increase the powers afforded to the Scottish Parliament a “suicide mission”.

Ring-fencing the NHS and schools is no longer viable

The chancellor went on the Today programme this morning to trumpet his success in getting seven government departments to agree on their budgets for 2015-16 as part of the Spending Review that he will announce on 26 June. It is reported that they have all agreed to cuts of between 8 and 10 per cent.

If Miliband continues to dither on Syria, he may go down in history as Labour’s John Major

According to the dictum attributed to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Yet evil will triumph even more easily if good men help the evil-doers. In the Syrian civil war, with more than 80,000 dead and no end in sight, that is what the European Union has been doing, by upholding an arms embargo on the supply of weapons to all sides.

School spending cannot be cut like this without compromising standards

I cannot be the only person with personal experience of managing schools whose jaw dropped at reading the headlines of the Reform report launched last week: Must Do Better: Spending on Schools. Based on lots of number crunching of data tables, it came to the conclusion that school spending could be cut by close to 20 per cent without compromising standards.