Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 128

The test tube pioneers who gave the world 5 million bundles of joy | Simon Jenkins

Bob Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, who brought happiness to so many, had at first to endure howls of protest

"All he wanted was to help." I cannot think of a finer epitaph than that used yesterday of Robert Edwards by Peter Braude, his fellow embryologist. Edwards, with his partner, Patrick Steptoe, created the first "test-tube" baby in 1978. They must rank high in the league table of donors to happiness. Liberating conception from the womb to the petri dish brought hope to the 10% of couples wh...

How Margaret Thatcher's Falklands gamble paid off

The prime minister's decision to go to war in 1982, with her government on the brink of collapse, changed everything

The Falklands war of April-June 1982 was the turning point in Mrs Thatcher's premiership, indeed in her political career. The previous October, the Tory party conference had been alive with dissent. The so-called "wets" were openly conspiring against her. Bets were being taken against her surviving into the new year. Well behind in the polls and with the new Social Democratic pa...

The Guardian Audio Edition: Is Germany too powerful for Europe? - 9 April 2013

Audio versions of a selection of articles from the Guardian newspaper and website

Reading on a mobile? Click here to listen.

In this week's edition:

• Baroness Thatcher, the first female PM and the most dominant political figure since Churchill, has died aged 87. Michael White considers the impact of her politics on Britain. Click here to read this article.

• George Osborne is fighting back, aware that tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the frail shock even natural conservatives. But thi...

Margaret Thatcher: pro-European 'wet' transformed by a triumphant war | Simon Jenkins

The hypercautious leader who showered money on the unions was about to get the boot: the Falklands changed all that

Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. By 1990 it was transformed. She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers.

Al...

Where's the real threat here – Kim Jong-un or Trident? | Simon Jenkins

What we should be scared of is not the North Korean's belicosity but how it's being used to subvert domestic politics in the west

The enemy is coming. Declare war, dive for Cobra, hide the silver, lock up your daughters. A grateful nation cheers on its leader and saviour, Kim Jong-Cam, as he races north to prepare his war machines for battle. The running dogs of terrorism should quake in their boots.

The politics of fatuous fright know no bounds. This week the calmest response to the...

Unlike most government reforms, the impact of the planning changes is forever | Simon Jenkins

The planning changes are causing pandemonium – damaging democracy and scarring the countryside with thousands of new homes

As of today England comes under a new planning regime. Its purpose is brutally simple: to release for potential building the 60% of England's land area that is unprotected countryside. Nothing like it has been seen since the 1940s. It is clear that only designated national parks will enjoy full safeguarding.

Like most of this government's reforms – from the health service t...

Press regulation: a victory for the rich, the celebrated and the powerful | Simon Jenkins

This new press regulator is all about revenge, not justice. It's hard to imagine a more chilling deterrent to serious investigation

We can agree that the press had it coming. The victims needed revenge. Celebrities wanted redress. A few tabloid moguls got a bloody nose, and Ed Miliband got to meet Hugh Grant. But what happened on Monday in Westminster was a ludicrous way to engineer a more disciplined press. We do not have an independent regulator, but the agency of a political stitch-up. Any...

The Guardian Audio Edition: 19 March 2013 - The budget, if Osborne has no answers, who does?

Audio versions of a selection of articles from the Guardian newspaper and website

Reading on a mobile? Click here to listen.

In this week's edition:

• The budget: if Osborne has no answers, who does? The interesting question is not what the chancellor will say on Wednesday, but whether Ed Balls dares set out his alternative. Click here to read this article.
by John Harris

• The election of a new pope is God's Olympics: global publicity, weeping crowds – and no meaning. The papal election matters...

The election of a new pope is God's Olympics: global publicity, weeping crowds – and no real meaning | Simon Jenkins

The papal election matters only to those made miserable by the church's reactionary leadership

Papal elections are God's Olympics. The splendour, the global publicity, the weeping crowds, the human drama, the race to the finish, all dazzle the senses and beg interpretive meaning. There is none. The conclave is showmanship. Those who believe the pope to be God's minister on Earth must regard his choice as no more than an act of God. Those who believe otherwise see him as leader of a large but d...

Huhne and Pryce fell hard because we wanted them to | Simon Jenkins

The jailing of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce reflects our inability to punish political figures for their public failings

Liars, hypocrites, the louses of parliament, the mighty fallen. Strip-search them in jail. Humiliate their families. Stick a lens up their noses. We know where they live. Let them wallow in their heinous crime. The reaction to the Huhne-Pryce conviction has been sickening. It has nothing to do with speeding or lying about speeding, hardly rare offences. It manifests something...