If a week in politics is a long time then a year must be an eternity, but it is now almost 12 months since West Midlands council leaders reluctantly offered Whitehall a compromise by agreeing to plan for 362,000 new homes to be built across the region by 2026.
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If taken at face value, the suggestion by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols that Catholics across the West Midlands should pray for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and for the success of the Lambeth conference must be seen as a positive intervention.
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If there is a sense of hopelessness about the Home Secretary's latest pronouncements on knife crime, that is because Jacqui Smith knows she is almost certainly on to a hiding to nothing no matter what she says or does.
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Almost as every week passes the Government appears no longer in charge of its own destiny, stumbling from one disaster to another, hoping against hope to borrow the immortal words of Mr Micawber that something will turn up to save it from defeat at the next General Election.
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The continuing controversy about MPs’ expenses brings with it a number of dangers, not least the risk of treating all of our politicians as potential criminals.
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Schools are not businesses. At least not in the way we normally consider them. You cannot, for example, compare running a school to managing a supermarket.
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Regional development agencies play an important role in supporting businesses and promoting economic development, not least here in the West Midlands.
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The alarm shown by Justice Secretary Jack Straw at the prospect of 40 convicted murders and terrorists walking free from jail because of a loophole in the law is understandable.
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When it comes to emergency planning, any Government must carefully calculate the likelihood of disaster occurring and then proceed to tread a careful path between warning the public and scaring people witless about calamities that are most unlikely to happen. The debate in Britain in the past has centred very much on the extent to which it is affordable or even desirable to plan for dealing with once-in-a-lifetime events.
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Seizing the moment as only a politician can, with breathtaking opportunism, the leader of the opposition Labour group on Birmingham City Council yesterday decided to claim that the West Midlands' refusal to volunteer for road pricing experiments risked the region being left behind when decisions about transport infrastructure spending are made by the Government.
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A commitment to protecting the environment has become as necessary for politicians today as a commitment to kissing babies.The focus on green issues is a response to public concern about the possible effects of climate change in our planet.
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