The march of militant secularism took another great stride in Britain today, aided and abetted by the High Court which has ruled that a Devon town council acted unlawfully by allowing prayers to be said before meetings.

Statistics tell us that violent crime has fallen by four per cent in Shropshire over the past year.

According to a report by a committee of MPs, funding pressures are leading to a reduction in the quality of life for the elderly, and the system of care is fragmented and not, to use the modern parlance, joined up.

She came to the throne unexpectedly as a young woman, at a time of rationing and when Britain was still recovering from the ravages of war.

Ask the man or woman in the street what the council does that is really important to them and they will probably ponder a short while before saying: “The bins.”

Away from the world of banking, there is a pay scandal which may have escaped your notice.

In 2004 Fred Goodwin was a hero of the banking industry, a star of the financial world, and someone the politicians of the Labour government were keen to cosy up to, to demonstrate their credentials as the friends of British business. Arise, Sir Fred.

David Cameron has not achieved everything the eurosceptics in his party wanted amid the desperate salvage operation in the wake of the euro debacle, but at least he has taken a stand on behalf of Britain.

Organ donations have long moved from being an innovation at the boundaries of medical science to a mainstream treatment which saves and improves lives of thousands of patients.

The £963,000 bonus given to RBS boss Stephen Hester is an eye-watering amount for any person in the street but the row about it is a high level piece of misdirection in which cheap shots and cheap politicking are obscuring some inconvenient facts.

The arguments over the value or otherwise of the school performance tables have become all part of the ritual, and it is easy to be cynical about what they appear to show.

The figures from the Taxpayers’ Alliance for the amounts being paid out of the public purse towards councillors’ pensions are striking for two reasons.