It’s a good thing polling day is nearly upon us; things are getting too meta even for me. I think we’re now onto critcisms of the tone of accusations of lowering the tone of the debate.

Consider for example the difference between their opening video and ours. Theirs focuses on the contribution Britain makes to the EU budget but fails to reference the benefits our membership brings [...]. It’s fundamentally dishonest. [...] Our opening video, by contrast, features a range of people speaking from experience about the benefits of being in Europe. …

Note to those seeking to shift debate through changing language: the time to try to replace a term is not after your own government has sponsored legislation using and defining that term.

...Euroscepticism hardly needs enemies.

What on Earth is Liberal Democrat Artwork?

Normally I’m wary of importing market-esque thinking into non-commercial policy spheres, but in the case of the interminable ‘Why aren’t younger people more inclined to vote?’ debate I wish more thought were given to the simple economic possibility that if you want people to buy, you have to be selling things they want. (Even an ‘entrepreneur’ …

Until now, you might have had the impression that identity politics was one of the leading obsessions of British political life. ‘Community leaders’, ‘ethnic arts’, multiculturalism versus integration... and of course the Saltire-waving crescendo of a nationalist campaign to chop off Scotland.

Commentary on the Scottish bid to tear a country apart – that country, of course, being Scotland – is already settling down to some precriminations about the result, whatever it may turn out to be. Whatever happens, most of the comedy will surely come from Alex Salmond’s task of forging national unity; though if his promise …

It is of course traditional for people to call for the dismantling of the D.C.M.S. even in weeks when the Secretary of State has not been forcibly replaced: on this occasion the Spectator is doing the honours. Yet last June the Telegraph carried suggestions that the Department was too small...

Here’s a hypothesis about the moral psychology involved in deciding priorities in the politics of child safety: it must create a huge sense of responsibility, mustn’t it? The kind where you’d lie awake at night, wondering whether children had been left endangered because you chose a wasteful use of resources? The kind where you’d want to …

When I was in secondary school, I was expected to go on a short work experience placement. Lest I spend too much of this work experience placement unquantifiably experiencing work, however, I was equipped with a booklet demanding that various sections be filled in. These sections were of often dubious but generally discernible relevance to the …

Another rumour that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport may close? Or at least, lose responsibility for media policy, leaving it perhaps fatally weakened. When the Culture Secretary was appointed, despite having no evident suitability for the job, there were rumours (which reached the pages of Private Eye, if memory serves) that her secret mission …

When jumping on a bandwagon in support of what will not work, and especially when exploiting a tragic death to do so, it’s useful to choose one’s words carefully. Alan Johnson could have said that he wanted us under broader surveillance ‘within two years’, say, or ‘by mid-2015’. So, so much less obviously a ploy to …

I don’t recall the Miners’ Strike; I was busy in the womb for most of it. So it’s a strange experience when I see people a decade younger than I commenting on Margaret Thatcher’s passing with as much vigour as if they’d been on the picket lines.

There’s a saying to the effect that leadership consists of working out where the people are heading and then marching in front of them. This is presumably the notion of spiritual, ecclesiastical and indeed political leadership endorsed by the M.P. in whose judgment the ‘Church of England now stands to be left behind by the society …