If you are bent on re-making society, first change or undermine long-held norms and values. Under a transforming officialdom, and with the police enlisted to serve as The Guardian's paramilitary auxiliaries,  the very concept of respectability is decried as "middle-class privilege", a stigma in and of itself

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The world is poorer for his passing, but his searing and accurate appraisals of Soviet evil will stand as enduring indictments of those calculating apologists and useful idiots who persist, even now, in making their excuses for Stalin and his murderous tyranny.

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Sensing weakness in the West, the absence of conviction and resolve, illegal migrants of all kinds pour into Europe. More drown. The problem gets bigger. And worse. Nations can only be generous if they feel secure. Australia has absorbed that lesson. The international community ... not so much

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Celebrating Magna Carta’s birthday is inevitably a complex and even disputatious matter. Historical events, especially those that still echo in our current politics, are subject to interpretation. Different ideological movements claim to be their best modern advocates. We read old phrases on old parchment and to our surprise we notice new meanings in them. And […]

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If defending rights becomes the preserve of bureaucracies and international courts, especially those geographically remote and intellectually abstruse, Magna Carta's freedoms will mean for the rest of us what David Cameron's recent inability to explain them implies: not very much at all

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The pollsters didn't foresee a Tory victory, least of all the sweeping triumph that allowed Conservatives to shed their coalition with Liberal Democrats and govern in their own right. For the moment, amid the cheers and grand plans, no one is thinking of UKIP's rise. They should

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Churchill would have recognised in an instant what Russia's mischief in Ukraine portends, most particularly its brazen disregard for national borders and neighbours' sovereignty. His appraisal of the nasty and brutish is lost on those who fail to notice that quoting the law leaves outlaws unimpressed

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It's not as if there aren't enough grim testaments to bad ideas and bad policy, from the growth of ISIS to Europe's many afflictions and the leadership vacuum of Obama's bumbling, without  folly's march reaching our own shores. Alas, that is not the case

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Good manners should deter us from insulting other people over their faiths, but the right to offend and be offended remains an important right. Even if we are reluctant to admit the fact, it frees us from the prison of unconsidered opinion and the prejudices of our own religious-cum-ideological communities

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So some senior Liberals don't like Tony Abbott and aim to do him in with a campaign of leaks, lies and ludicrous pseudo-scoops of the kind that suckered The Australian only last weekend. Perhaps they haven't heard what treachery brought the Tories after Margaret Thatcher's ouster

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