How can you cut state expenditure without being accused of being “regressive”? Think about it. If you want the government to spend less then, by definition, your changes are going to affect net recipients more negatively than net contributors. Your calculation is that, in freeing up the economy, you are making everyone better off: those […]
The EU evidently means to make an example of Greece. Yesterday, the European Central Bank, far from extending emergency credit to the Greek banks as had been hoped, toughened its conditions further. Thus did Brussels respond to an unwelcome referendum result. Eurocrats, after all, could hardly have been clearer in their instructions to Greek voters. […]
The EU is different from every other international association in one critical regard. Its treaties do not bind their signatories as states; rather, they create a new legal order that is directly applicable to individuals and businesses within the member states, and that has primacy over national jurisdictions. When a national statute comes into conflict […]
Most Britons tell opinion pollsters that they want free trade with the EU rather than political integration. When In/Out is put to voters as a binary choice, they are fairly evenly split. Two years ago, the Outers had a ten-point lead; now they have a ten- or fifteen-point deficit. But add a middle option – […]
On 12 September 1897, perhaps the most heroic engagement in the history of warfare took place. Twenty-one men serving with the Sikh Regiment of the Indian Army defended a signalling post on the Northwest Frontier against 10,000 Afghan tribesmen. Yup, you read that correctly: 21 against 10,000. Never mind Rorke’s Drift; forget Thermopylae; I can’t […]
The emails have been pouring in for weeks: thousands of them, tens of thousands. The British Left – or a goodly chunk of it, at any rate – doesn’t like the proposed EU-US trade deal, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP. It will, say my worried constituents, force governments to contract out […]
What specific benefits accrue to the United Kingdom as a result of our adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights? That question ought to be our starting point, but it is almost never asked. Were there habitual violations of civil freedoms before 1953 when the Convention entered into force? Were we deporting whole populations, […]
Janice Turner, a Times columnist, found delightfully apt words to describe the FIFA officials arrested in Switzerland last week: “The seven men arrested share a familiar look — jowly, hair-dyed, corpulent, self-regarding, bespoke-suited, pinky-ringed — and an expression of outraged entitlement.” Yup, I’d say that sums them up pretty well. I was reminded of Ayn […]
Exactly ten years ago, the people of France voted, by 55 to 45 per cent, to reject the European Constitution. Their “Non” was followed, three days later, by an even more emphatic Dutch “Nee”: 62 to 38 per cent. Across Europe, democrats let out a sigh of relief. It seemed that the federalist project had […]
Look, there’s no way of putting this modestly, so I’m just going to come straight out with it. I’m pretty sure that I was the person who first came up with the renegotiation-then-referendum idea. I proposed it in this piece back in 2011, as a way to unite all sides: “The way out is to […]
Be optimistic Alex Salmond proved it in Scotland: cheerfulness pays. During the independence referendum campaign, he halved a 20-point deficit. (When it comes to the EU poll, the two sides are starting much closer to level pegging: this poll is eminently winnable.) Apparently, SNP leaders were taught to be sanguine by an American political strategist […]
I’ve long had a pet theory that voters get it right. General elections, in Britain at any rate, are won by the party that most deserves to win – or, at least, lost by the party that most deserves to lose. There were moments over the past year, though, when I began seriously to doubt […]
The case for Greece’s withdrawal from the euro is straightforward. Countries in Greece’s situation normally devalue. Devaluation makes their goods cheaper, pricing them into the market and allowing them to export their way to recovery. A devaluation doesn’t solve everything – indeed, in the long-run, it doesn’t solve anything – but, it buys the stricken […]
The horror worsens with every detail that emerges. Migrants are locked below decks, graded by nationality and by the amount they have paid. The people smugglers herd their cargo at gunpoint, as if in some grisly re-enactment of the Atlantic slave trade. One Somali boy even told reporters that some of his friends had been […]
I’ve just come across an utterly brilliant idea for tax reform, one that would elevate and improve our public discourse. It comes from my friend James Hannam, who is standing for election as a councillor in Kent, and for whom I went canvassing over the weekend in the gorgeous village of Sissinghurst. James is an […]
A hundred years ago next week, Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman Interior Minister, ordered the deportation of 250 Armenian intellectuals from Constantinople to the Anatolian interior. The date of their arrest, 24 April, has been marked ever as the beginning of what Armenians call “Medz Yeghern”: the Great Crime. Depending on whose estimate we take, anywhere […]
Tony Blair has given us a preview of how EU supporters intend to fight the referendum campaign. They will avoid awkward data: the fact, for example, that the British exports to the EU are in precipitate decline, that our net budget contribution has quadrupled in five years, that the most successful countries in Europe are […]
“Like slavery and apartheid,” Nelson Mandela told 20,000 people in Trafalgar Square ten years ago, “poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” They were inspiring words, and the crowd duly went wild. But the old man was talking utter, unadulterated bilge. Poverty […]
My elder daughter played Piggy in her school’s production of Lord of the Flies last week. I’m biased, obviously, but I thought she was brilliant, as was the performance overall. Casting some girls in what was originally an all-male story made the audience unusually aware of the difference between the sexes: we all knew that […]
“The rich are richer and the poor are poorer”, says the Left-of-Centre British newspaper, The Independent, on its front page. That phrase is so common, so facile, so glib, that it is almost a truism. Except that it’s not true. The Independent’s story was based on a report by a rather admirable Blairite think tank, […]
