“It’s not fair!” The complaint has been made by children for as long as English has been spoken. Before then, kids were doubtless whining “Yt ys nat mete, forsoþe!” (or whatever the Middle English version was). But if the phrase is an old one, its growing popularity among adults, especially Leftist politicians, is recent. The […]
When the BBC makes a mockumentary about the end of the EU, you pretty much know what line it’s going to take. Sure enough, The Great European Disaster Movie, screened last night, painted a picture of total societal breakdown: economic collapse, mass deportations, terrorism, Muslim armies at the gates of Vienna, flesh-eating zombies. Well, OK, […]
It wasn’t a compromise; it was a capitulation. Greece’s new government has accepted the thing it kept insisting it would never accept: a continuation of the bailout-and-borrow racket that has reduced the country to indigence. The only concession that Syriza won in the talks – if it can be called a concession – was to […]
Here are some ways to reduce the amount of tax you pay. Tell me which of them you think constitute sensible tax planning, and which amount to tax avoidance. (The examples I give are British, but most developed countries have equivalent mechanisms.) Buying premium bonds or other tax-free government products Putting your money in a […]
You think the euro crisis is bad? Think how much worse – how monstrously worse – it might have been. Suppose that, at the end of the 1990s, Tony Blair and Nick Clegg and Ken Clarke, and Nissan and Goldman Sachs and Unilever, and the CBI and the TUC and the BBC, and Sir Martin […]
The West never quite knows how to handle Vladimir Putin, and the crisis in Ukraine is, at least in part, a consequence of our prevarication. Faced with a revanchist Russia, we could have taken one of two approaches: guarded accommodation, or resolute deterrence. Instead, we wavered, and Ukrainians are paying the price. Specifically, we could […]
“Elections change nothing,” said Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s tough-minded finance minister. He was talking about Greece, but he could have been talking about the entire EU racket. The Europhile elites have a guarded and contingent attitude towards democracy. It has its place, to be sure, but it must never be allowed to slow the process of […]
That’s all well and good, my Leftie friends often tell me, but what about morality? Let’s accept, they say, that markets are efficient, that they raise living standards, that they encourage people to invent and exchange things. Let’s even allow, for the sake of argument, that they alleviate poverty. Surely – this line is always […]
This will be the last time anti-globalisers protest at the World Economic Forum in Davos. From 2016, the ministers, chief executives, columnists and assorted quangocrats who gather at the Swiss resort won’t see so much as a stray dreadlock: eco-protesters say the meeting is no longer worth picketing. You can see why they might feel […]
France, according to its prime minister, Manuel Valls, is “at war” with Islamism. And not just France. “Europe is under siege,” say American media. The Chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, broadened the geography still further, talking of “a war on Western civilization”. It’s natural, in the aftermath of an atrocity, to cast […]
Progressive journalists around the world were united in their approval. Last month’s OECD report, in the words of Britain’s Guardian, “dismissed the concept of trickle-down economics”. “The OECD report reveals the immensity of the trickle-down scam,” agreed Linda McQuaig on Canada’s Left-wing website, Rabble. Any suggestion that we ought to be appreciative when the rich […]
“The Tory plan is to return spending on public services to a share last seen in the 1930s,” says Ed Miliband. Oh no, we’re supposed to think, not the 1930s! Not the Great Depression and the Jarrow March and the Road to Wigan Pier! Not the long lines of men in cloth caps queuing at […]
Russell Brand describes himself as a “comedian and campaigner”. While we might wonder at the first epithet, we can’t argue with the second. The man has built up a huge following among the angry teenage Lefties who dominate Twitter. His theme is that all politics is corrupt, all MPs are plutocrats’ stooges, and all rich […]
It is a fixed rule of public debate that, when you draw a parallel with another country, however narrow and technical, you are guaranteed – guaranteed – to be told an unrelated fact about that country. You think that we could learn from Singapore’s system of transferable healthcare accounts? “Ah, but Singapore is an autocracy!” […]
Suppose I were to tell you that the world’s super-rich are pulling further away from the mass of humanity. Suppose I were to cite the latest figures, showing that the top one per cent now own half the world’s wealth while the bottom 50 per cent own just one per cent. How does that make […]
If I had to identify the most successful conservative leader of my lifetime, I’d point without hesitation to Australia’s John Howard. Winning four elections (to Reagan’s two and Thatcher’s three), the amiable cricket-lover used his time in office to make transformative changes, giving Australia a growth rate it hadn’t known since the gold rush. Like […]
I love the idea that prosperity can be decreed by a G20 communiqué. World leaders in Brisbane have airily committed themselves to two per cent growth. (Why only two per cent? Why not 20 per cent? Or 200 per cent? Who knew it was so easy?) Meanwhile, in the real world, the divergence between Continental […]
Imagine that the EU had simply stuck Britain with a bill, out of the blue, for £850 million – enough to fund 30,000 nurses and their pensions. There would have been outrage. Why, we would have asked, should Britain be surcharged for prosperity? Why should we be fined for having had the wisdom to keep […]
Politicians are often at their most revealing when they respond to an unexpected question. At a public meeting in Cheshire the other day, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron was asked about interest rates by a woman who was anxious about her mortgage. “It would be lovely to say can we have low interest rates forever,” […]
Do you remember the issue that began the Ukraine crisis? Supporters of President Yanukovych favoured a customs union with Russia; opponents preferred a free trade agreement with the EU. The protesters were right. Never mind the wider issue of whether Ukraine faces East or West. Free trade areas are superior to customs unions, because they […]
