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Birmingham library must go

There is no doubting the sincerity of campaigners who want to preserve Birmingham's Central Library. Understandably, there is a certain amount of anger and bewilderment that a 34-year-old building has been permitted to deteriorate to the extent that the cost of repairs, modernisation and enlargement is in excess of £100 million. Read

Cash for pupils who achieve may be right incentive

Ever since the Government's cash-for-honours controversy, the practice of offering money as an incentive has come to signify something of the whiff of sleaze about it. Read

An extreme worry

In all the debate about extremism and British identity in recent years, one question has yet to be answered. Read

Not the world's best library for exhibitions

The leader of Birmingham City Council set himself the highest possible standards when launching plans for a £193 million civic library. The completed building, Mike Whitby declared, would not just be a leader in Europe, but the best in the world. Read

Time for the city council to grasp the green issue

Local government in this country is an essentially conservative institution which often wrestles unhappily with radical change. Tackling global warming by adopting sustainability policies is an agenda very much of its time but is also something that many councils regard with suspicion. Read

We need more joined-up answers to create jobs

One of the driving principles behind the inner city regeneration schemes introduced by the new Labour Government in 1997 was the idea that decisions about which projects should be backed would be taken at community level. Councils were encouraged to let the SRB and New Deal for Communities boards, consisting largely of local activists, have a free rein to reflect grass-roots opinion in the way they spent their not inconsiderable budgets. Read

Darling must deliver stability not just tinker

The world appears to agree that cutting pollution must be a top priority for any government. Read

Creating the skills to ensure city's financial success

Go back 10 years or so and there were those who warned that Birmingham and the West Midlands turned its back on manufacturing at its peril. Read

Anti-gun lessons must be learned from young age

The Home Secretary faces a difficult task in finding the right level at which to pitch a warning about gun crime in Birmingham. Read

Seeing red on the Stratford Road

The imposition of red routes in cities is always going to boil down to a trade off between a desire to get traffic moving more quickly and a need to make sure residents can still easily reach local shops and businesses. Read

Maths has a part in staffroom as well as classroom

There was a time when the public recoiled in shock and indignation at horror stories of chronic under-funding in schools. Read

Diesel tax cuts could help out our hauliers

Chancellor Alistair Darling faced yet another piece of awkward news yesterday as he worked on the final version of his first Budget speech. The price of crude oil shot up to yet another record, within a whisker of $106 a barrel. By some calculations, if you allow for inflation that is now a higher than the peak price during the oil shock of 1980, which led to a recession that destroyed swathes of West Midlands industry. Read

Identity crisis for UK

As Britain lurches towards ID card culture, the arguments over whether this is the right way to go are far from won. Read

Clegg's tactics on EU referendum backfires

Will Nick Clegg go down in history as the shortest-serving Liberal Democrat leader so far? Read

Setting right tone on debate about terror

The Chief Constable of the West Midlands faces one of the most difficult tasks in British policing in finding the correct level at which to pitch a warning about terrorism in Birmingham. In a city that will have a majority-ethnic population within the next 10 years, Sir Paul Scott-Lee will be damned if he overstates his case and equally damned if he fails to speak out. Read

The road to nowhere

First, the M6 was going to be widened with the addition of extra lanes in both directions. Read

Time to talk about region's transport

It was understandable that Centro, the West Midlands Public Transport Authority, should hire a national public relations agency when deciding how to sell congestion charging to motorists and businesses. But the decision to appoint spin doctors a couple of years ago, before publication by the region's councils of the Gridlock or Growth report, was never likely to overcome widespread cynicism about the Government's role in attempting to force local authorities to introduce road pricing. Read

Win-win situation over Mayor issue

The campaign for a referendum on whether Birmingham should be governed by a directly elected mayor will come nowhere near obtaining the 36,000 signatures required automatically to trigger such a vote. But the final figure, which looks like being about 12,000 signatures, remains a sizeable achievement which cannot be ignored. Read

Now's the time to get West Midlands on the move

The next few weeks mark a critical stage in the long-running campaign to deliver a step change in the quantity and quality of West Midlands public transport. Read

The people speak

Government ministers will no doubt attempt to rubbish the result yesterday of a national ballot on the question of whether Britain should hold a referendum before signing the Lisbon Treaty. Read